Supreme Court school voucher ruling threatens American unity and public education

https://news.yahoo.com/supreme-court-voucher-ruling-threatens-080001795.html


Derek W. Black, Opinion contributor
,USA TODAY Opinion•July 3, 2020


The Supreme Court’s decision in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue could drive a value shift far more important and troubling than its narrow practical effect. The ruling demands that Montana allow private religious schools to participate in its school voucher program. But for most states, the decision is currently irrelevant. About half of the states do not fund private school tuition. Many of those that do already fund private religious education. Espinoza’s primary impact is to hand an enormous symbolic victory to those with a goal beyond religious education — a goal of shrinking public education and replacing it with government-funded private school choice.

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The second problem is what vouchers validate. They bless a retreat into isolated political, religious, socioeconomic, and racial corners. Private schools enroll a predominantly white, wealthy, and Christian student population. In most states, private schools enroll students whose families are 50% to 90% richer than their public school counterparts. Private schools also enroll only half as many students of color. And 78% of these private schools are religious.

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Voucher programs do little to challenge these trends. Less than one in three voucher programs protects students from religious, disability, gender, or sexual orientation discrimination. Only half protect students from race discrimination.

To be sure, public schools suffer their own failings, but the law expects better of them, prohibiting these forms of discrimination and more. Public schools are the one institution designed to bring us together, making one out of many. As my forthcoming book "Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy" details, public schools have been a central component of the American promise to transform government from one dominated by elite white males to one shared by all.

Before the U.S. Constitution was even drafted, our founding fathers were calling for public education to ensure that our radical new form of government — one that gave power to the common man — would not self-implode. John Adams, for instance, called for publicly funded public schools that would educate “every rank and class of people, down to the lowest and the poorest,” something so grand “that [it] never yet has been practiced in any age or nation.” He even put that promise in the Massachusetts Constitution — a forerunner to the national one.

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