Month: August 2023

U.S. House Republicans may hurt D.C. voucher program in trying to help it.

mlerner10 OSP, School Choice Leave a comment

An article yesterday by the Washington Post’s Lauren Lumpkin stated that Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are trying to unbalance the three-sector approach to federal school funding in the District of Columbia to steer more money to private school vouchers. Remember that the three-sector approach has been in place since 2004, and was championed by Joseph E. Robert, Jr. , the Washington D.C. area philanthropist who passed away in 2011. It provides an equal amount of dollars to traditional and charter schools in addition to the scholarship plan. According to Ms. Lumpkin’s piece,

“Now, however, Republicans want to increase the voucher program’s share from $17.5 million to $26.25 million and cut D.C. public schools’ piece to one-sixth of the $52.5 million pot of funding — posing a funding crunch for the 50,000-student district.”

The justification for changing the formula is that costs to educate children have gone up dramatically in recent years. According to John Schilling, an educational consultant who for years worked at the American Federation for Children, “The Opportunity Scholarship Program desperately needs more funds. . . There’s tremendous demand for the program, and the reason the program needs more money is because it’s been flat-funded.” Mr. Schilling goes on to explain that due to inflation each scholarship is larger in size, which has translated into a lower number of children who can take advantage of them.

However, this move is fraught with risk. In the District, Mayor Muriel Bowser has been a consistent supporter of the Opportunity Scholarship Program. This makes logical sense in that it brings thousands of dollars each year to the regular schools and charters. But if DCPS loses this revenue I could see the chief executive changing her mind. In 2017, when the SOAR Act that funds the OSP was up for Congressional renewal, a majority of the D.C. Council wrote Congress opposing the voucher program and arguing that it should be shut down. President Biden has stated that he wants to end the program in fiscal year 2023.

My view is that if Republicans want to increase the dollar amount of the scholarships, they should also provide an equal amount to charters and DCPS to maintain the three-sector approach.

Groups sue to stop Catholic charter school from opening. This is a mistake.

mlerner10 Charter Schools Leave a comment

I remember when six Catholic schools in the District of Columbia converted to charter schools to become Center City PCS. At the time there was uniform agreement among education policy makers that these facilities, being public schools, would have to cease religious instruction. I took the opposite view.

We now have a consistent legal precedent at the level of the U.S. Supreme Court of allowing public money to flow to parochial schools, the most recent case being decided last year in Carson v. Makin. The particulars of this decision, as is equally true of the details of the other cases on this issue, are not particularly relevant to my argument as I know full well that the public will just rationalize the rulings as those coming from a conservative dominated bench. So let’s try another line of reasoning.

For a year and a half I worked Holy Cross Hospital, located in Silver Spring, Maryland. Holy Cross is a Catholic Hospital whose mission is, “We, Trinity Health, serve together in the spirit of the Gospel as a compassionate and transforming healing presence within our communities. We carry out this mission in our communities through our commitment to be the most trusted provider of health care services.” It is common to see the cross mounted in the building’s hallways and patient rooms, and many meetings began with a prayer to Jesus Christ.

The hospital accepts Medicare and Medicaid patients whose healthcare is paid for with government funding. During the height of the Covid Pandemic, it received the same federal financial assistance as did hospitals throughout the country. Is any of this revenue unconstitutional because these transfer of taxpayer dollars runs afoul of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which prohibits an establishment of religion? Of course not. In no way does this government funding promote Catholicism as the dominant religion in the United States.

The same is true when it comes to education. Tuition may go to Catholic schools through private school vouchers, charter enrollment, or through education savings accounts, for but there is no correlation of this activity to the role that the Anglican Church played in English society around the period of the American Revolution.

About 30 years ago the private school voucher plan was passed in Milwaukee and the arguments for and against the program were going strong. David Boaz was speaking at the CATO Institute and he explained his support for school choice this way: He said that criticism of government money going to parochial schools as an establishment of religion is the same as saying that people who use food stamps at Safeway are singling out this corporation as the dominate grocery store in this country. This line of thought makes little sense.

The lawsuit challenging the opening of the online St. Isidore Charter School by the Oklahoma City Archdiocese is a wasted effort. In this instance, as in others involving religious educational institutions, the money is being used to support the children.