Tag Archives: Topic: School Choice

Concord Monitor: Supporters of New Hampshire’s new education tax credit program got a big boost yesterday when a key senator came out against a repeal bill being considered by the Democratic-controlled House, signaling the legislation could face a deadlock in the Senate.

World Magazine: The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) sent a letter to Georgia lawmakers and to Christian schools this week defending the scholarship program and highlighting SEF “mischaracterizations.” ADF senior counsel David Cortman said, “No one should be ostracized because they don’t share the same sexual agenda as an activist group that opposes school choice. The Constitution protects the right of private, Christian schools to teach and follow biblical principles. Any efforts to prevent these schools from participating in the state’s tax credit scholarship program would violate the First Amendment freedoms of these schools and the students who attend them.”

Cardinal Timothy Dolan at the Wall Street Journal: Since the mid-19th century, the Catholic-school model has been “one parish, one school.” That served us well for many years, but it has become painfully obvious that a new model is needed. Beginning in September, the Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of New York will be broken down into regions, and every parish will be responsible for, contribute to, send children to, and have a voice in Catholic education in the archdiocese.

World Net Daily: “No one should be ostracized because they don’t share the same sexual agenda as an activist group that opposes school choice,” said ADF Senior Counsel David Cortman. “The Constitution protects the right of private, Christian schools to teach and follow biblical principles. Any efforts to prevent these schools from participating in the state’s tax credit scholarship program would violate the First Amendment freedoms of these schools and the students who attend them,” Cortman added.

Greg Baylor at Speak Up Movement: On January 8, 2013, plaintiffs represented by the ACLU,Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and theNew Hampshire Civil Liberties Union launched an assault on educational freedom in New Hampshire.

Alliance Defending Freedom has distributed a letter to Georgia legislators and Christian schools across the state in response to an activist group’s false allegation that Georgia’s school choice scholarship program supports religious schools with “anti-gay” policies simply because the schools adhere to Christian ethics.

Heritage Foundation: The third annual National School Choice Week is officially underway. Once again, school choice advocates—including parents, teachers, schoolchildren and administrators, and many others—will come together to promote educational choice, with more than 3,600 events taking place nationwide.

Education News: Introducing more school choice to parents could save Texas billions of dollars and result in higher pay for public school teachers, a witness testified Tuesday in the lawsuit trial of the state’s school finance system.

HSLDA: The Supreme Court of Nebraska will decide whether homeschoolers Eric and Gail Thacker violated Nebraska law because their homeschool calendar didn’t start until October while the public schools began in August.

Religion Clause Blog: The New York Times reported yesterday that the state of Georgia’s popular tax credit program for contributions to private school scholarship programs has become controversial because more than 115 religiously sponsored schools that benefit from the program have explicit bans on attendance by gay, lesbian and bisexual students.

Mirror of Justice: am not attending the AALS conference this year, but I thought to reproduce (with permission) a message on a constitutional law listserv that I’m on, written by Pepperdine law professor Mark Scarberry. Mark reports his impressions of a presentation by UC Irvine law dean Erwin Chemerinsky . . .

Times Picayune: Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration is taking its fight for private school vouchers to the Louisiana Supreme Court, after a district court judge ruled that the way the state is financing the program is illegal.

WorldNetDaily: An appeals court panel in Sweden has imposed the “death penalty” on a homeschooling family, granting the state full custody of their son, who famously was “state-napped” from a jetliner in 2009 as the family prepared to move to India. The appeals panel reversed a lower court ruling that granted Annie and Christer Johansson custody of their son, Domenic. But if the decision is not reversed again by the nation’ Supreme Court, the Johansson’s will lose their son, according to the Home School Legal Defense Association, which has been working on the case with the Alliance Defending Freedom . . .

Barbara Kay at the National Post: In 2008, however, Quebec introduced a province-wide program called Ethics and Religious Culture (ERC) running throughout elementary school, and all but one high school year. Every Quebec student — even the homeschooled — is obligated to take this state-composed program. And teachers, whatever their beliefs or religious affiliation, must teach it.

AP: One of the nation’s largest teachers unions is proposing a stringent exam teachers would have to pass before entering the profession, much like the bar exam for lawyers.

Religion Clause Blog: In Louisiana Federation of Teachers v. State of Louisiana, (LA 19th Dist. Ct., Nov. 30, 2012), a Louisiana trial court held that the state’s voucher program unconstitutionally diverts to nonpublic schools or entities funds which the state constitution’s Minimum Foundation Program . . .

Wall Street Journal (via Google): Earlier this year, Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana signed into law an expanded school choice program for underprivileged kids. Naturally, the teachers unions are suing to block it. Oral arguments begin tomorrow.

Ed News: Prospective teachers in three southern states paid stand-ins to take their licensing exams, according to a federal investigation that uncovered 15 years of mass fraud in the public school licensing system.

LifeSiteNews: Nova Scotia would become the “worst” jurisdiction in Canada for homeschooling if the government adopts a set of recommendations calling for increased oversight of families, says a homeschooling leader.

WIBC.com: The five justices heard roughly 1 1/2 hours of oral arguments on whether the state constitution allows taxpayer money to fund vouchers that pay for religious or other private schools. Chief Justice Brent Dickson gave no indication on when they would rule. “We will attempt to resolve the matter, and we’ll let you know when we do.”

Religion Clause Blog: Now in Independent School District No. 5 of Tulsa County v. Spry, (OK Sup. Ct., Nov. 20, 2012), in a 7-2 decision, the Oklahoma Supreme Court reversed that decision on standing grounds. It held that the school districts which were plaintiffs in the lawsuit lack standing because they are not taxpayers who have a right to challenge the program . . .

HSLDA: Kenyan homeschoolers are concerned that the proposed education law moving through their parliament will prevent them from exercising their right to homeschool their children.

HSLDA: The Social Welfare Committee responsible for keeping Domenic Johansson separated from his parents for more than three years has appealed the June 2012 court ruling that upheld Christer and Annie Johanssons’ parental rights.

Washington Post: Washington Teachers’ Union President Nathan Saunders said Wednesday that he wants to unionize the city’s charter schools and will push for legislative changes to make it easier to organize their teachers, who educate a growing number of D.C. students.

Q13Fox.com: A day after the charter schools initiative was declared a winner by a small margin, Washington’s superintendent of public instruction went on the offensive.

Religion Clause Blog: In Pocono Mountain Charter School v. Pocono Mountain School District, (MD PA, Nov. 8, 2012), a publicly funded charter school, along with students and parents, claimed that a Pennsylvania school district imposed harsher conditions on the school out of racial and religious animus

The American Federation for Children—the nation’s voice for educational choice—today congratulated a slate of bipartisan legislative candidates across Arizona who were victorious in last night’s elections and have pledged to support and advocate for meaningful education reform, including educational choice.

NCPA Policy Digest: For several decades, support has coalesced in favor of broad school reforms in an effort to increase student achievement scores. Recently, reformers have focused on the role that teacher unions play in K-12 education, say Amber M. Winkler, Janie Scull and Dara Zeehandelaar of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. . . . Source: Amber M. Winkler, Janie Scull and Dara Zeehandelaar, “How Strong Are U.S. Teacher Unions? A State-By-State Comparison,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute, October 29, 2012.

Religion Clause Blog: Florida voters yesterday (official results) defeated Amendment 8, the proposed Religious Freedom Amendment, that would have repealed the state’s Blaine Amendment– the state constitution’s ban on public funds going to religious institutions.

One News Now: Despite the increased demand and bigger budget, the Department of Education and the Obama administration have been working for a year to limit participation in the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program.

World Net Daily: Norbert Blum, a prominent member of Angela Merkel’s German CDU party who served as Helmut Kohl’s minister of labor for 16 years, has said Germany’s modern education system is “usurping” children and ignoring the important role parents must play in education.

Midtown.patch.com: The lawsuit alleges that the preamble and the question on the Nov. 6 ballot is biased in favor of approval of the measure.

AP: An audit of the U.S. Department of Education’s division overseeing hundreds of millions of dollars in charter school funding has criticized the office for failing to properly monitor how states spend the money.

WorldNetDaily: Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan backed homeschool freedom at a recent campaign event in Florida. At the town hall-style event in Ocala, Florida, on Thursday, October 18, the following exchange took place. We encourage you to watch the video clip. Transcript . . .

Education News: Lawyers representing hundreds of school districts challenging the state’s school funding system argued Monday that it’s “hopelessly broken,” but an attorney for the state said the situation isn’t as dire as the districts portray.

Religion Clause Blog: According to Chabad Lubavitch News, an appellate court in Sweden yesterday struck down a law that barred Chabad parents from home schooling their children through Chabad’s International Shluchim Online School and private lessons.

Kay Bailey Hutchison and Barbara Mikulski at Wall Street Journal: Education proponents across the political spectrum were dismayed by recent attempts to eradicate the single-gender options in public schools in Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, Maine and Florida. We were particularly troubled at efforts to thwart education choice for American students and their families because it is a cause we have worked hard to advance.

Education News: Charter school “caps” are state-imposed limits on the size or growth of charter sectors. Currently, around 25 states set caps on schools or enrollment, with wide variation in terms of specifics: Some states simply set a cap on the number of schools (or charters in force); others limit annual growth; and still others specify caps on both growth and size (there are also a few places that cap proportional spending, coverage by individual operators and other dimensions).

Atlanta J. Constitution: Proponents of the November charter school amendment have protested state School Superintendent John Barge’s public stand against the amendment on the DOE web site, which led the state Department of Education to take down a 29-point position paper highlighting the reasons. A link to that paper was on the Georgia Department of Education’s home page.
Today, Attorney General Sam Olens notified Barge to alert local school boards that they “do not have the legal authority to expend funds or other resources to advocate or oppose the ratification of a constitutional amendment by the voters.

HSLDA: Arguing that homeschooling damages children and is an abuse of parental authority, a German district court in Darmstadt transferred the custody rights of Dirk and Petra Wunderlich’s four children to the Jugendamt, Germany’s child protective agency.

Washington Post: Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said Tuesday that he believes teachers’ unions should be banned from making political contributions because union leaders often negotiate contracts with Democratic politicians they’ve helped elect, a situation he called “an extraordinary conflict of interest.”

Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation at the Huffington Post: Teachers that retired last year, after 30 years in the system, get an annual payment of $77,400, for life, courtesy of the Illinois taxpayer.

Joel Klein at the Wall Street Journal (via Google): Mayor Emanuel is not known for his soft-spoken manner. Even if he has to make some compromises in the strike settlement, the fact that he engaged in a standoff with the teachers union sounded a loud and encouraging note: School reform is increasingly and unashamedly becoming less of a partisan issue.

NY Times: But the specter of those plans — an oft-cited goal of Mayor Rahm Emanuel — hangs heavily over the teachers’ strike. “Even if it’s not explicitly something that we’re bargaining over,” said Jackson Potter, staff coordinator for the Chicago Teachers Union, “everyone knows it’s the elephant in the room.”

CNSNews: Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s kids are attending a private school that charges $26,520 a year and the children of his former boss, President Barack Obama, are attending a private school in the nation’s capital that charges $34,268 a year, which includes a “hot lunch.”

CNSNews: American taxpayers everywhere have literally billions at stake in what goes on in this one city’s public school system. Over the past four years, the Chicago public schools have churned through total revenues of approximately $20.27 billion and about $4.26 billion of that revenue—or almost 21 percent of it—has come from the federal government.

American Federation for Children: A new national polling report released today by the American Federation for Children, the nation’s voice for school choice, demonstrates strong support for school choice among the public, the latest indication of the strong momentum for expanding parental options across the nation.

Chicago Sun: “The issues that remain are minor,” Emanuel said. “This is totally unnecessary. It’s avoidable and our kids don’t deserve this. … This is a strike of choice.

NCPA Policy Digest: Parents are beginning to step outside their traditional role in school affairs and are actively promoting reforms to education, say Frederick M. Hess and Daniel K. Lautzenheiser of the American Enterprise Institute.

Mike Shedlock at Townhall: Three members of the Douglas County School Board have floated proposals to terminate dealings with teacher’s unions.

American Federation for Children: A new study released today by researchers at the Brookings Institution and Harvard University shows that African American participants in a private school choice program were 24 percent more likely to enroll in college as a result of receiving a voucher, reinforcing previously-released data showing improved graduation rates, parental satisfaction, and academic achievement among voucher students . . . Full findings of the study can be downloaded here.

Mike Shedlock at Townhall: Indiana has the nation’s largest school voucher system and it is about to double in size. In response, Indiana public schools wage unusual ad campaign.

Mercury News: A parents’ organization plans to return to court to force a Mojave Desert school district to accept a charter conversion proposal for a failing elementary school.

Teachers’ union tries to block new La. voucher program designed to help low-income students

American Federation for Children: The American Federation for Children—the nation’s voice for school choice—today condemned a recent blog post published by Diane Ravitch, an outspoken opponent of education reform, after the post featured comments she attributed to an anonymous Louisiana teacher that referred to some parents as abusers and rapists while questioning the ability of all parents to choose the best educational environments for their children. In response to the post, the Federation has launched the next phase of a campaign titled “Parents Know Best” . . .

Baptist Press: As Indiana’s path-breaking voucher program charts its second year, the Griffin children are among thousands of Hoosier students using state dollars to attend private schools. About 300 private, largely Christian schools in the state are accepting voucher students — and gaining a financial boost as they arrive. The boost once was rare, but the school choice movement is surging, thanks to Republican statehouse efforts with occasional Democratic support. The impact in Indiana could predict how Christian schools will benefit from new school choice programs in states such as Louisiana.

PNJ.com: The American Civil Liberties Union is accusing teachers and administrators at an Escambia County charter school of promoting their religious beliefs to students and demanding that they stop.

World Net Daily: Now, Sen. Jim DeMint,R-S.C., says another U.N. treaty that threatens American sovereignty has been put back on the table by foreign diplomats and their internationalist allies in the federal government. It’s called the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Disabled, which calls for government agents to supersede the authority of parents of disabled children and even covers abortion.

Washington Post: Opposition is coming from the Interfaith Alliance, a national, nonpartisan grassroots and educational organization based in Washington that has 185,000 members nationwide made up of 75 faith traditions as well as those of no faith tradition.

Fox News: A Louisiana teachers union is threatening private schools with legal action if they accept money from a new voucher program – and the threat has already forced at least one school to put its participation in the program on hold.

Christian Institute: Evangelical Christians have been labelled extremist, and likened to “totalitarian Muslims” by a senior government advisor. Alan Judd, an advisor to the Secretary of State for Education, was commenting on recent free school applications by Evangelical Christians.

Acton Institute: It is no wonder that school choice is often referred to as the “civil rights issue of our time.” However, it is also an important religious issue. Educational reform allows for parents to play a greater role in their child’s education, but it will also help strengthen the moral formation of a society in disarray.

One News Now: Gene Mills of the Louisiana Family Forum says there is no basis for legal action. “Any school that functions as a private or parochial school and accepts voucher students is acting in accordance with the law and current court precedent,” he tells OneNewsNow.

The Hill: Three Republicans helped pass the United Nations treaty on people with disabilities out of committee on Thursday despite concerns over abortion. Sens. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) and Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) joined the 10 Democrats . . .

NY Times: Enrollment in the New York City schools, the largest district in the country, was flat from 2005 to 2010, but both Chicago and Los Angeles lost students, with declining birthrates and competition from charter schools cited as among the reasons . . . Legal crackdowns have also prompted many families to return to their home countries.

Wall Street Journal (via Google): California enacted this reform as an unprecedented accountability measure in 2010. It allows parents of children in persistently failing schools to force dramatic change through petition drives. If a majority of parents at a school sign a petition, they can close that school, shake up its staff, or convert it to a charter.

Ed News: A coalition of homeschoolers and supporters arrived in the Swedish capital of Stockholm after a six-day, 120-mile “Walk to Freedom” that was staged to raise awareness about a controversial ban on home education.

HSLDA (embeds testimony by Mike Farris): Home School Legal Defense Association has been urging supporters to call their U.S. senators and ask them to oppose the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). And on Tuesday we reported that Patriot Voices chairman and former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum had joined the fight. Your calls are working! This morning a prominent D.C. publication, The Hill, reported that the treaty has been temporarily derailed from the fast track . . .

Michael Barone at National Review: But there it is, on the home page of the United Kingdom’s Department of Education: “As of 1 April 2012, there are 1776 academies open in England.” “Academies,” as you might expect, means something different in Britain than in the United States. They are, approximately, what we would call charter schools. And there are 1,776 of them largely because of the energy and determination of British education secretary Michael Gove.

Louisiana Federation for Children: The Louisiana Department of Education today announced that the state’s newly-expanded voucher program received more than 10,300 applications during the month-long application period for the statewide program, marking one of the largest single-year application increases ever for a voucher program.

LA Times: Los Angeles school officials are fighting a court order, which took effect Wednesday, that would set aside more classroom seats for charter schools — even if that means traditional schools will lose space for parent centers, computer labs, academic intervention and other services.

HSLDA on the Christian Newswire: Parental rights will be eviscerated by the mandatory application of the ‘best interest of the child’ standard,” said Farris. “If parents think that private education is best for their child, the CRPD gives the government the authority and the legal duty to override that judgment and keep the child in the government-approved program that the officials think is best for the child.”

Pittsburgh Post Gazette: This fall, students will be able to choose from four new cyber charter schools, bringing the statewide total to 16, thanks to approvals by the state Department of Education.

USA Today: The National Education Association (NEA) has lost more than 100,000 members since 2010. By 2014, union projections show, it could lose a cumulative total of about 308,000 full-time teachers and other workers, a 16% drop from 2010. Lost dues will shrink NEA’s budget an estimated $65 million, or 18%.

Findlaw: Green Dot Public Schools filed a charter petition with the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education in 2007 to convert Alain Leroy Locke High School (Locke High School) to a charter school. The board granted the charter school petition. In 2008, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) challenged the charter by filing a petition to compel arbitration pursuant to a collective bargaining agreement between the District and UTLA.