GA: Suing For More Religious Entitlement

In Georgia, a lawsuit has been filed that will require the state to admit its voucher program was founded on a fiction and to provide another entitlement to religious schools.

Georgia had some trouble passing a voucher law because rural GOP members correctly concluded that a taxpayer-funded voucher program would drain resources from the schools serving their constituents. Georgia privatizers finally got their bill in 2024, and from the very beginning, it was clearly not the law that was sold.

One piece was a bit of linguistic sleight of hand. While folks had talked about the bill's aim to rescue students from failing schools, the bill actually said that taxpayer-funded vouchers are available to any students who live in the attendance area of a failing school. In other words, if you were a high school student in the attendance area for a failing elementary school, you were entitled to a voucher. When this was revealed, some outlets wrote about this as if someone had "changed" something. Nope. The law said what it had always said; supporters just let the conversation continue as if the bill said something different. See folks? Reading is important. In this case, not reading led to a program the cost of which blew up far beyond predictions.

The new lawsuit goes after another piece of the law. The law says vouchers are only available for students who have previously attended public schools in a failing attendance area. But three Catholic families say that this requirement violates their religious freedom and is "coercive." They should be entitled to have their religious education paid for without any such attendance requirements.

In other words, the taxpayer funded voucher program is not supposed to rescue students from failing schools. It's supposed to require public taxpayer funds to support private religious schools.

As quoted by Sydney Stallworth at WRDW, Jamie Mann, founder of New Horizons New Directions Prep Academy said “I believe parents should decide how their child is educated." Mann left off the part that adds "And all the taxpayers should pay for it, no matter what."

Lead attorney is Nathan Loyd, of the Thomas More Society, one more right-wing Roman Catholic activist law firm funded by Donors Trust, the dark money billionaire laundering operation. They are also running a New Jersey lawsuit for Moms for Liberty against a school district accused of allowing school staff to conceal a student gender transition from parents (because parents have rights and students have none). They have been involved in litigation against the ACA's contraception requirement, helped defend clerks who opposed same-sex marriage, and even went after no-fault divorce law.  As a bonus, also active in supporting the January 6 insurrection. (Thomas More was himself a Catholic martyr and the guy who wrote Utopia) I cannot fault them for going plaintiff shopping to find some good Catholics to bring this lawsuit, because a huge number of important lawsuits are brought because some lawyers went plaintiff shopping for a face to slap on their cause. Not a great way to run a legal system, but that's a complaint for another day.

Extending taxpayer-funded vouchers is a way to make the program even more expensive. When you give taxpayer-funded vouchers to students who were never in public school, you are adding entirely new costs onto your state education expenditure. The money is not following the child because no money had ever followed that child into the public school in the first place.

But if your intent is simply to create a system where religious schools (well, you know, the ones that follow the correct religion) are entitled to taxpayer subsidies, then this lawsuit makes perfect sense. 

Certainly now is the time. The Supremes have made it clear that they are very open to the legal theory that religious folks can only fully exercise religious freedom if A) they get a taxpayer subsidy and B) they get to discriminate against whoever they wish to discriminate against. So I'll pay attention to this lawsuit, but I don't have any illusions about how it will shake out. 

Suing To Eliminate All Public School

This lawsuit popped up on my radar a few days ago and I let it sit, thinking foolishly that maybe I was reading too much into it. But a Washington Post op-ed from Corey DeAngelis confirmed the worst-- privatizers are ready to try to eliminate public schools entirely. 

The New Civil Liberties Alliance has filed a lawsuit arguing that "Nebraska’s Educational Scheme Violates Parents’ Free Speech."  And by "scheme" they mean "public education system." Here's their argument for why public education is a violation of the First Amendment. 

Education is speech. The curriculum taught, the books assigned, and the values reinforced inside (and outside) of the classroom all convey a message. The Constitution has long recognized that parents—not the government—hold the paramount right to direct that message for their own children.

That's part of the argument. The rest is familiar as well.

Parents also have a legal duty to provide or arrange for educational speech.

In other words, I should not have to pay for a system that educates Other Peoples' Children. Their children are their problem.  

Nor is the suit merely about eliminating the public system. 

Nebraska’s scheme flips free speech on its head, mandating educational speech then penalizing viewpoints other than the government’s: parents who wish to exercise their right, whether by homeschooling or by choosing a private school, must forgo tens of thousands of dollars of educational benefits available to other families who acquiesce to the government’s viewpoints.

In other words, I should not have to pay for Other Peoples' Children to get an education, but taxpayers should absolutely help me subsidize the education of my own children.

I didn't read the DeAngelis op-ed because the presence of his op-ed in the Washington Post is precisely why I don't have a subscription to the Post any more. But I'm sure it's plenty incendiary and rage-baity. The very idea that public education violates the First Amendment is so destructive and counter-intelligent, but that appears to be where they want to go. The whole system is unconstitutional. 

Update: Okay, someone shared it with me. He used his big boy voice for the Post, but it's still an astonishing reach. "Universal school choice resolves the constitutional problem while preserving public support for education," he writes. Tear down public schools, end the promise to all students, and open up the unregulated free market. In many ways, I suppose this whole business is just the quiet part out loud-- this has always been the goal for some of these folks all the way back to Milton Friedman. 

The New Civil Liberties Alliance is one more dark money group from the usual gang of reactionary billionaires like Charles Koch and Leonard Leo. They are not bush league-- they helped take Chevron to court.

The libertarian Reason magazine is taking this seriously, which is not surprising. NCLA says that "Plaintiffs do not seek to end, defund, or influence public schools," and that's pretty clearly bullshit. What other effect can we expect from ruling the entire system unconstitutional? Maybe the idea is simple extortion-- give us a pile of money or we'll tear down your schools-- but the effect would be the same. Who knows how Nebraska's court will jump on this, and there's a whole counter-argument to be made that education (as folks on the right love to point out) is no business of the federal government; public education is a feature of state constitutions.

So it's easy to look at this suit and argue that it will likely fail. That's not really the point; folks on the far right have always been willing to play a long game and make legal and policy moves that slowly inch the Overton window over and move into courts until, voila! We get Dobbs.

So I'm watching this as the next front of the ongoing attack on public schools, the new argument that will be repeated ad nauseum. Pay attention, folks.

PA: Cyber Charter Sues State To Maintain Truancy Loophole

Late last year, Pennsylvania's lawmakers finally passed some much-needed cyber charter reform. Commonwealth Charter Academy, the 800-pound gorilla of PA cybers, has sued to try to escape some of the consequences of those new rules. 

One of the long-time dodges of cyberschool in PA has been as a dodge for chronically truant students. Is your kid skipping so much school that truancy officials and the court have gotten involved? Just sign him up for a cyber charter, where the attendance rules were loose (students didn't even have to appear on screen) and requirements for enrollment were frictionless. Just sign up and voila!-- that nasty truancy problem magically vanished.

Anecdotally, I can tell you this was a regular occurrence-- a student who was frequently absent with parents getting annoyed at phone calls from school would disappear entirely, until word would come that they were now doing cyber. That rarely ended well for the student, which was not a surprise-- take a student who can't muster the motivation and discipline to handle traditional school shifts to a model that depends entirely on the student's discipline and motivation to succeed? The vast majority of my cyber-departures either returned a year later, woefully behind, or simply never finished school at all. There are many problems that can contribute to chronic truancy, and cyber charters solve almost none of them.

The new rules add friction. Now a student with chronic truancy issues may not enroll in cyber school unless a court rules that such enrollment is in their best interests.

CCA went looking for this fight. In March their board voted to go ahead and enroll over 600 students marked "habitually truant" by their districts and two weeks later filed the suit, claiming that the law is unconstitutional. But now they get to generate press releases about how 600 students are "in limbo" while waiting for a decision even when the actual story is that CCA violated the law by admitting those students in the first place. 

As reported at PennLive by Oliver Morrison, other cybers are more heavily affected than CCA. But CCA is the big gun and has the financial weight and advocacy staff to take the state to court. So now the court will get to decide whether or not to reinstate the cyber charter truancy dodge.