Voucher programs are expanding, propping up religious schools with tax dollars

The Washington Post found that billions of taxpayer dollars are going to private religious schools

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If you were to ask me what the biggest church/state separation issue is in America right now, the answer wouldn’t be the outrageous comments from various Republican politicians or attempts to shove the Ten Commandments or Christian chaplains into classrooms.

The answer would be far less attention-grabbing… which is partly why it’s such a problem. It’s that a number of states are taking money that should be going to public schools and using them to fund private schools. Those private schools are almost always religious schools. And those religious schools are almost always Christian schools.

In short, they’re using taxpayer dollars to fund religious indoctrination.

Rosary beads on money (image via Shutterstock)

How much money are we talking about here?

The Washington Post’s Laura Meckler and Michelle Boorstein looked into the nationwide crisis and the numbers are truly mind-boggling (gift article): In just five states, more than 700,000 students received taxpayer-funded “vouchers.” Overall, billions of dollars are supporting these programs—up to $16,000 per student per year in some cases.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a non-partisan organization, says “at least one in three states are considering or have enacted school voucher expansions” and those moves are contributing to “under-resourced public schools, worse student outcomes, and, over time, weaker communities.”

In Ohio, for example, vouchers were used by over 150,000 students:

When vouchers for students with autism and other disabilities — who typically seek specific services — are removed from the list, the portion going toward religious education rises to 98 percent.

…

At some Ohio schools, as many as eight in 10 students attend with the help of vouchers. For instance, the boys-only St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati enrolls 1,346 students. Of them, about 1,100 receive taxpayer-funded vouchers, said Gerry Bollman, the school’s chief financial officer.

In Arizona, over 75,000 take advantage of a particular taxpayer-funded scholarship:

In 2022-2023, three-fourths of the money — about $229 million — went to 184 vendors. Most of that money went for tuition, 87 percent of it to religious schools.

Other states follow similar patterns. As vouchers become more popular, Christian schools will benefit while public schools (which are often strapped for cash) flounder.

The argument in favor of them is that “school choice” allows parents to choose the best education for their kids, and if that happens to be a religious school, so be it. But the reality is that many students receiving this money are already attending private schools (and don’t need the cash) and public schools are missing out on funds that they need. That’s especially concerning since public schools, by definition, are for everyone while private schools can choose to reject students with special needs, students who have same-sex parents, students who may need additional help, etc.

That decreased funding disproportionately affects schools in low-income neighborhoods and students of color specifically.

That’s why, in states where Republicans control the legislature, this is quickly becoming a financial problem as well as an ethical one:

In Arizona, for instance, the cost of universal vouchers has exceeded the $624 million budgeted for this year, contributing to a budget hole that lawmakers have not yet said how they will fill. That budget crunch could affect public school spending and certainly makes any increases unlikely at a time when public schools are struggling, said Beth Lewis, director of Save Our Schools Arizona, which opposes vouchers.

“Arizona schools are not able to pay for teacher pay raises or desperately needed resources. You just have teachers begging for copy paper and markers. It’s so bad,” she said. “This is robbing our local public schools and our most vulnerable students.”

Even beyond that, an argument could be made that these vouchers are allowing some parents to send their kids to an overwhelmingly white private school instead of a more integrated public school. The very idea of “school choice,” as students of American history are well aware, has racist origins.

But as far as religion goes, why is this shift happening? As is so often the case, we can blame the Supreme Court.

In 2020, the conservative super-majority decided a case called Espinoza v Montana Department of Revenue in which they decided that taxpayer funding could subsidize private religious education. If states offered funding for private schools at all, the justices said, they may also have to extend that offer to private religious schools. (It depended on the kind of funding program the state offered.)

That leak soon became a firehose after a subsequent case in Maine.

In that state, students are guaranteed free public education until they graduate high school. But in some rural parts of the state, where there are no local schools, students have the option of attending a private school on the state’s dime (assuming they’re accepted into those schools). State law, however, mandated that those schools had to be secular because taxpayer money couldn’t be used to pay tuition at a religious school.

Right-wing groups then sued the state claiming it was illegal for Maine to deny funding to the Christian schools the students wanted to attend… and, in 2022, the Supreme Court sided with them. Writing for the conservatives on the Court, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that Maine had broken the law by not allowing taxpayer dollars to go to schools hellbent on religious indoctrination. Simply put, Roberts said if a state allows taxpayer money to go to private schools, “it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

What used to be a straightforward application of church/state separation has now been twisted into claims of religious discrimination. As some commenters put it, forget separation of church and state; now there’s saturation of church and state. The conservative Christians and Catholics who constantly pretend to be persecuted now have the most powerful people in the country giving them legal justification to take money from public schools in order to enrich themselves and, in many cases, misinform students. At the same time, they’re hurting many of the most vulnerable students—public school students—who, for whatever reason, are excluded from their circles.

Taxpayers in more than half the country are now funding Creationism, homophobia, anti-transgender misinformation, and Sunday School nonsense masquerading as actual history and science.

It won’t stop there either. As the Post notes, Oklahoma is now on the verge of opening a publicly funded religious charter school that’s operated by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa. An attempt to block that school from opening is currently before the courts.

Taxpayer dollars should never be used to prop up religion. But instead of giving that money to churches, conservatives have figured out how to give it to religious schools while destroying legal precedent along the way.

This won’t make life better for students in desperate need of a good education because these laws aren’t meant for them. Vouchers are nothing more than gifts for rich people who don’t need the financial help and religious schools that aren’t popular enough to exist on their own. More than anything, they hurt public schools, and when public schools struggle, it has a ripple effect throughout their communities. (And after making public schools worse, conservatives will then use that to justify even more money going to private schools.)

The people who live in these religious bubbles don’t care about life on the outside. They’re willing to let others suffer in the long-term as long as they can benefit in the short-term.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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