Tag Archives: Topic: School Vouchers

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.

TheTownTalk.com: The Louisiana School Boards Association and 34 school boards have joined the legal battle to undo Gov. Bobby Jindal’s voucher program.

Religion Clause Blog: The New York Times reported earlier this week that the school voucher program for Washington, D.C. school children will be renewed for another year under an agreement that House Speaker John Boehner and Senator Joseph Lieberman have reached with the Department of Education.

American Federation for Children: More than 650 attendees recognize historic case, which opened doors of educational opportunity to hundreds of thousands of children nationwide . . . The American Federation for Children—the nation’s voice for school choice—was among the sponsors of the event, which recognized a June 27, 2002, high court ruling in Zelman vs. Simmons-Harris that affirmed the constitutionality of the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program and proved to be among the catalysts for significant expansion of private school voucher and scholarship tax credit legislation in the decade that followed.

NY Times: Now Mr. Romney is taking his party back to its ideological roots by emphasizing a lesser role for Washington, replacing top-down mandates with a belief in market mechanisms. It is a change driven in part by Tea Party disdain of the federal government. In the Republican presidential nominating fight, candidates competed in calling to shut the Education Department.

Wall Street Journal: It had been years since Principal Kathleen Lowry pulled extra desks from the dusty attic of St. Stanislaus, the only Catholic school left in this port city. But after Indiana began offering parents vouchers in the spring of 2011 to pay for private tuition, she had to bring down 30 spare desks and hire three teachers’ aides.

One News Now: ADF attorney Greg Baylor says it is ironic that those challenging the parental choice program claim religious freedom is on their side, when just the opposite is true. “It would be discrimination against religion to say parents can redeem their vouchers at public schools or secular private schools, but not at private religious schools,” he submits. “We think that our position — that it’s permissible to include the religious schools in the program — is actually far more consistent with the basic principles of religious freedom than the position taken by those challenging the program.”

One News Now: And ADF attorney Matt Sharp asserts it is not a program that is trying to prop up religious schools to the detriment of others. “That’s exactly the correct interpretation of the law in all of this, is that there’s nothing wrong with giving state funds through a voucher program to low-income families to give them options for their kids,” he contends.

An Alliance Defense Fund allied attorney together with ADF attorneys have filed a brief with the Colorado Court of Appeals in defense of a Douglas County voucher program that pays for students who attend “private school partners” rather than government-run schools.

Katherine Stewart at The Guardian: You can learn a lot about a policy idea by seeing who its friends are. Advocates of voucher programs include the activist organizations of the religious right, such as the Alliance Defense Fund, Focus on the Family, and the pro-creationism Discovery Institute.

NCPA Policy Digest: Nineteen states and Washington, D.C., have either voucher systems or “scholarship” programs that provide tax benefits to individuals and businesses for contributions that help pay for students to attend private school.

Louisiana Federation for Children: The Louisiana Federation for Children today praised newly-released results of a recent parental satisfaction survey showing overwhelmingly high satisfaction rates from parents with children participating in the New Orleans voucher program.

Religion Clause: A trial court in Arizona’s Maricopa County yesterday rejected state constitutional challenges to the state’s “empowerment scholarship” program that makes school vouchers available to students with special needs so they can attend private or parochial schools.