By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Judging by some of the correspondence I receive, I don’t always succeed at keeping partisan politics out of First Teachers. But I try. This column is meant to be a forum on educational issues for Catholic parents, not to be an arm of any political party.
But dishonesty is dishonesty. And I submit that the Obama administration’s tactics toward vouchers and tax credits for parents of parochial school students reek of dishonesty. They deserve to be criticized. Consider the latest ploy the administration is using to destroy school-choice programs in Wisconsin. I can’t imagine even a teacher union activist who would not admit — at least in private — that the Obama team is stretching the truth in order to achieve its ends.
As George Will reported in a column in late November, Wisconsin’s school choice program has been successful for many years now in “offering education choices to low-income parents” through a system of vouchers that provides the parents of parochial school children government assistance with their tuition payments. The challenge Wisconsin faces from the Obama administration is one which, writes Will, employs “tortured legal reasoning in an attempt to bankrupt private schools that enlarge the education options of disadvantaged children.”
In Wisconsin, these children “are accepted for the choice schools randomly, and no child accepted by the lottery can be rejected by a school until its capacity is filled.”
Here’s where the Obama administration found its opening. The parents of children admitted to Wisconsin’s private schools — 85 percent of which are religious — are informed specifically that these schools “cannot afford to offer to those with disabilities as rich a menu of services for the disabled as government schools offer.” The parents are then free to weigh the implications. If they feel the programs for disabled students that the public schools offer are necessary for their children, they are free to return to the public school system. If they feel the discipline, emphasis on morality, and level of instruction provided by the private, religious school are more important to them than the programs for the disabled they will forgo, they can stay at the private school. It is the parents’ choice.
Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction superintendent, told reporters in 2011 that he had never received a complaint from parents who opted for a private school, alleging discrimination against their children because of the programs for the disabled not available to them. That did not matter to the Obama administration. The Department of Justice is charging these private schools with discrimination against the disabled, because, writes Will, “they do not do something they do not have the resources to do. That is, they do not offer the panoply of services that public schools, with ample state and federal funding, offer to children with special needs.”
It gets worse. The Department of Justice is accusing Wisconsin with running a “dual school system,” borrowing language from the era of Brown v. Board of Education. The Department of Justice is requiring, Will continues, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction “to require the choice schools to choose between the impossible and the fatal — between offering services they cannot afford, or leaving the voucher program.”
It must be stressed that schools run by religious groups are exempt from certain requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act. The requirement that the Department of Justice is demanding of Wisconsin’s parochial schools applies only to “public entities.” Here comes the Obama administration’s sleight of hand. The administration argues that, because vouchers are given to the children who attend these private schools, they become “public entities” and bound by the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Will observes that by this logic “when food stamps are used for purchases at Walmart, America’s largest private employer ceases to be private,” but becomes instead “an extension of the government.” Will is confident that the Department of Justice’s logic will be rejected by the courts, that it is a “legal theory too cynical to succeed.”
We’ll see. The important point is that the Obama administration’s maneuvering on this issue reveals its hostility toward Catholic schools and its obeisance to the teacher unions. As Will notes, it is clear that the Obama Department of Justice is “feigning concern about access for handicapped children,” when its real “aim is to handicap all disadvantaged children by denying their parents access to school choices of the sort enjoyed by affluent DOJ lawyers.”
Some more news about Common Core: The battle over its implementation continues. The website Education News (educationnews.org) reported on November 11 that new legislation has been introduced in Tennessee that would bring an end to the use of Common Core’s academic standards in the state: The bill was introduced by Chairman of the Senate Government Operation Committee Mike Bell and Chairman of the Senate Education Committee Dolores Gresham in an effort, they told reporters, “to continue the improvement of all students in the state through the highest standards possible while still promoting state control of the education system. It is the next logical step that will take us into the future and ensure that we as Tennesseans have control over our education system.”
If Tennessee succeeds in this effort it will join Indiana, Oklahoma, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Missouri in a formal effort to end Common Core. Tennessee’s Senate Bill 4, according to Education News, “will create a Tennessee Standards Commission and put an end to the Common Core Standards for English and math in place in the state.” The commission proposes to “suggest standards to be used in K-12 public schools across the state in place of the federal standards, ready to be used by the 2016-2017 school year.”
A commission spokesperson told reporters that Tennessee wants “to continue to be the fastest improving state in the nation, providing a model for education improvement. As such, we need to be a leader and take the next logical step which is to use the knowledge we have learned and tailor it to Tennessee students, exerting state responsibility over education.”
Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has responded to the bill by asking for a public review of the Common Core, in the hope of salvaging from it those standards which have proven to be beneficial and are “already in use by teachers and students across Tennessee. To change any standards is not an automatic process…that’s going to take some time,” said Haslam.
Education News continues, “A separate House bill was also introduced by Rep. John Forgety that would require a new set of Tennessee-developed standards to be adopted by the state board of education by July 1, 2016. The expansion of Common Core standards would not progress beyond this school year, while a team of educators reviewed a new set of standards to be referred to as ‘Volunteer State Standards’.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
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