[A church-run charter school is on track to open in Oklahoma —
publicly funded but run by the archdiocese. The arrival of religious
charter schools is one more piece of evidence that public charter
schools are not so public after all. ]
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RELIGIOUS CHARTER SCHOOLS UNDERMINE THE FOUNDATIONS OF PUBLIC
EDUCATION  
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Nora De La Cour
October 24, 2023
Jacobin
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_ A church-run charter school is on track to open in Oklahoma —
publicly funded but run by the archdiocese. The arrival of religious
charter schools is one more piece of evidence that public charter
schools are not so public after all. _

Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board voted 3-2 to
approve a plan to create St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual
School., Getty Images

 

In early October, Georgia state senator Elena Parent coauthored an
op-ed
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for the _74 _entreating her fellow Democrats to recall their former
support for charter schools. Decrying the GOP-backed private-school
voucher schemes
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passing in state after state
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Parent warns that these programs’ unfairness
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“does not mean Democrats should abandon discussion around school
choice.” Rather, she argues, they must reenergize their own
_liberal_ vision of school choice, focused on bringing opportunities
to underserved populations.

A decade ago it was easier to make this sort of pro–civil rights,
liberal defense of charter schools (albeit ignoring the gathering
evidence about who is harmed
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by charterization
[[link removed].]
and the attendant defunding
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and closure [[link removed]] of
neighborhood schools). Today though, it’s overwhelmingly clear that
charters, like other forms of school privatization, are among the
Right’s primary tools for advancing a decidedly _illiberal_ vision
of free-market fundamentalism
[[link removed].]
and Christian
[[link removed]]nationalism
[[link removed]].
And recent decisions from our radicalized Supreme Court have suggested
that, legally speaking, charter schools may not be all that different
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voucher-supported private schools.

One of the most glaring examples of this is St Isidore of Seville
[[link removed]], a virtual Oklahoma Catholic
school that, if it opens in 2024 as planned, will be the nation’s
first church-run charter. The archdiocese of Oklahoma City intends to
use this publicly funded statewide school “as a genuine instrument
of the Church, a place of real and specific pastoral ministry,”
complete with religiously motivated discrimination against protected
groups of kids. It’s just one more example of how privatization
makes fertile ground for the desecularization of America’s schools
— and the erosion of students’ rights.

St Isidore of Vanishing Civil Rights

Weeks before the Supreme Court elevated religious free exercise
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over the Establishment Clause
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Maine’s town tuitioning program could not bar private schools from
putting taxpayer money to religious uses, attorney and leading
education policy scholar Kevin Welner
[[link removed]] made a prediction:
such an outcome in_ Carson v. Makin_, he argued, would act as an
invitation for church-run charter schools
[[link removed]].

Sure enough, Oklahoma’s virtual charter board (with two new
right-wing appointees) voted in June to grant a charter for St Isidore
of Seville Catholic Virtual School (SISCVS), which will be operated by
the archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the diocese of Tulsa. This month
the board approved
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the school’s contract, bringing it one step closer to furthering the
“evangelizing mission of the Church
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on Oklahoma taxpayers’ dime. But the board’s chairman is currently
refusing to sign
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the contract — demonstrating the high level of contention
surrounding SISCVS within the conservative Bible Belt
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state.

A religious charter school runs afoul of both the Oklahoma
Constitution and the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act — to say nothing
of the US Constitution’s promise of church/state separation. While
Oklahoma’s Republican governor Kevin Stitt has been among the
school’s most avid cheerleaders (along with the state’s previous
attorney general), current attorney general Gentner Drummond — also
a Republican — has vehemently opposed
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SISCVS, asserting that
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“Christian nationalism is the movement that is giving oxygen to this
attempt to eviscerate the Establishment Clause.”

In the SISCVS charter application, the archdiocese of Oklahoma City
states that the school “will operate in harmony with faith and
morals, including sexual morality, as taught and understood by the
Magisterium of the Catholic Church.” Instruction will assist parents
in “forming and cultivating” children who believe, among other
things, “that God created persons male and female,” and that if we
“reject God’s invitation,” we will “end up in hell.”

In response to Drummond’s charge that the school appears intent on
violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the archdiocese insists it is
“committed to providing a school environment that is free from
_unlawful_ discrimination, harassment, and retaliation” (emphasis
added). But, emboldened
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by Supreme Court
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subordinating antidiscrimination laws to religious free exercise, they
suggest that these practices are lawful when they’re required by
faith.

In July, a nonpartisan nonprofit [[link removed]] and nine
Oklahoma residents
[[link removed]], including
Christian faith leaders and parents, filed a lawsuit
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in state court to stop the school from opening. Represented by
Americans United for Separation of Church and State
[[link removed]], the ACLU
[[link removed]], the Education Law
Center
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and the Freedom From Religion Foundation
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the plaintiffs’ arguments include that the charter is unlawful
because it will discriminate against kids and families based on
religion, LGBTQ identity, disability status
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and other protected characteristics, and indoctrinate students in
Catholic religious dogma. As Rachel Laser
[[link removed]], president and CEO
of Americans United, told _Jacobin_, the case is about standing up to
“religious extremists who want to impose their beliefs on other
people’s children using the power and imprimatur of the state
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The fate of religious charter schools, Kevin Welner explained to
_Jacobin_, will depend on a number of interrelated legal questions:
Are charters “state actors,” meaning that their students have
constitutional rights while in school? (This SCOTUS recently declined
to review the state action question with regard to a North Carolina
[[link removed]]charter
[[link removed]]
school
[[link removed]].)
Relatedly, are charters public or private, and must they remain
secular? If charters can be granted to religious institutions, can
those institutions engage in faith-based discrimination?

How courts answer these questions will have serious implications for
K-12 education in the United States. As Welner noted following
[[link removed]]_Carson v.
Makin_ [[link removed]]:

If courts side with a church-run charter school, finding that state
attempts to restrict religiously infused teachings and practices at
the school are an infringement on the church’s free-exercise rights,
then the circle is complete: Charter school laws have become voucher
laws.

Privatization Undermines Democracy

The prospect of a state-sponsored Sunday school is alarming. And
Welner, who directs the National Education Policy Center
[[link removed]] at the University of Colorado, Boulder,
told _Jacobin_ he expects there are already parallel efforts underway
in other states.

But church-run charter schools are just one front in the war against
secular public education. Private-school vouchers and education
savings accounts allow public education dollars to flow
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private schools that evangelize, discriminate, and create hostile
environments for kids whose identities don’t align to a narrow
definition of Christian morality. And various networks and right-wing
institutions manage “faith-friendly” classical
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or “back-to-basics” charter schools that market themselves to
conservative white families, cloaking their Christian nationalist
curriculum
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in an oh-so-thin veil of secularity.

The Network for Public Education (NPE
[[link removed]]) recently published an
extensive investigation
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into this rapidly growing branch of the charter sector, which is
disproportionately operated by for-profit entities. NPE’s executive
director and the report’s coauthor, Carol Burris, told _Jacobin_:
“We already have quasi-religious charter schools. . . . If there
once was a line in the sand, clearly winds from the Right have blown
it away.”

Arguably though, there never was such a clear line
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defining the publicness of charter schools
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protecting our kids from discrimination in an increasingly privatized
education landscape. Writing about _Carson v. Makin_, law and
political economy scholar Kate Redburn explains
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how the libertarian and Christian wings of the conservative legal
movement

have orchestrated a two-step process to shift the democratic
articulation of public values and the allocation of public resources
to private religious power
[[link removed]]. The
first step . . . is to privatize public goods and services. The second
step is to eliminate the distinction between religious and secular in
the newly empowered private sphere.

When educational institutions are publicly operated, it’s possible
for states to attach strings to funding, ensuring that schools are
meeting the needs of all students. But when governments turn public
education dollars over to private hands, they lose their ability to
regulate those dollars’ use for the common good.

In the revised application for SISCVS, the archdiocese of Oklahoma
City argues that, regardless of their “public” label, “Oklahoma
charter schools are not operated in any meaningful way by the state
but are subject only to broad oversight, with private — _even
for-profit_ — organizations given control over their day-to-day
operations.” In other words: How, in this Wild West of unregulated
private operators, can the state expect to safeguard the secularity of
its charter schools?

Public Schools Are the Only Public Schools

School-choice Democrats like Cory Booker, Barack Obama, and Arne
Duncan mastered the contortionist art of pitching school privatization
— which strips families of their right
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to democratically elected school boards — as “the civil rights
issue of our time
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Publicly funded, privately managed charter schools, they argued, would
increase opportunities for marginalized students, leveling an unfair
playing field.

It was never true, and decades of research have shown us that charter
schools don’t outperform
[[link removed]]their
publicly managed counterparts — but they do drain funding from
neighborhood schools attended by poor kids. Nevertheless, a sheen of
“equity” and “opportunity” sparkled around bipartisan charter
school initiatives in the Bush and Obama days of education reform.

But in the Trump era, Besty DeVos, a privatizer laser-focused on
state-funded Christian education, made the school-choice brand feel
icky to its D-column champions. While DeVos treated the federal
Charter Schools Program (CSP) as “a slush fund for large charter
chains
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Carol Burris and her team launched a series
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documenting
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the rampant waste, fraud, and abuse the program was enabling. By the
2020 presidential primary it was clear that Democrats were looking to
distance themselves
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charter movement, taking their cues from organizations like the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP),
which called for a moratorium
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on new charters in 2016.

Biden’s education department attempted to make good on a campaign
promise
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to eliminate federal funding for for-profit charter schools (thanks in
no small part to the work of Burris and NPE, who marshaled a
grassroots network of public education advocates willing to take on
the charter sector’s powerful Washington guardians). And while the
department’s new CSP rules
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don’t go quite that far, they do make it much harder for profit
seekers to cash in on the program. They also increase transparency and
accountability for grantees, and set up requirements aimed at
combating resegregation and federally financed “white-flight
charters
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In Congress, the 2023 House Appropriations Bill
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supported these tighter rules and reduced CSP funding by $40 million,
seemingly in recognition
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federal government caused grave harm by promoting reckless charter
expansion.

But the CSP overhaul drew pushback from Democrats like Colorado
governor Jared Polis
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a libertarian with ties to Democrats for Education Reform — the
hedge fund–powered PAC
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pro-charter legislators. Burris explained to _Jacobin_ that while most
of the party has distanced itself from the charter movement, “there
are very few indications
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that Democrats are ready to stand up to the charter lobby.”
Illustrating this, she points to the Democratic-controlled Michigan
legislature, which presides over a state with “one of the most
corrupt
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for-profit charter sectors in the nation.”

The big picture is that Democrats have changed their tune on charters,
and that’s a good thing. Now they need to back up their pro–public
school rhetoric with stronger efforts to halt charter growth, as well
as reforms shoring up the publicness
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existing charters (since charter schools are a statutory creation,
state legislatures have the power to redefine them). And remaining
Democratic charter boosters like Jared Polis and Elena Parent? They
need to get on board and recognize that the bipartisan “equity and
opportunity” charter movement was always a trojan horse
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for school vouchers and rightwing ideology.

Fighting the rising tide of illiberalism means fighting all the forms
of privatization that eat away at democracy. We simply cannot have it
both ways.

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* Religious Charter Schools; St Isidore of Seville
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* Oklahoma; Publically Funded Charter Schools:
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