Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In August, I wrote a post about Louisiana’s new school voucher program (Stateside Louisiana: School Vouchers and the Privatization of Public Education) that would use tax dollars earmarked for public education to pay for students’ tuitions to private and religious schools. Last week, State District Judge Tim Kelley “declared the diversion of funds from the Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) — the formula under which per pupil public education funds are calculated — to private entities was unconstitutional.” The voucher program is funded by a block-grant program that “Judge Kelley ruled is restricted by the constitution to funding only public schools.”
“Nowhere was it mandated that funds from [the block-grant program]…be provided for an alternative education beyond what the Louisiana education system was set up for,” he [Judge Kelley] wrote. The state can legally fund vouchers, but the funding “must come from some other portion of the general budget,” Judge Kelley said.
The judge, however, did not issue an immediate injunction to stop the voucher program. “The 5,000 students currently receiving vouchers will be able to continue attending their private schools pending an appeal, state officials said.”
Governor Bobby Jindal, a champion of the voucher program, called the ruling “wrong-headed” and “a travesty for parents across Louisiana who want nothing more than for their children to have an equal opportunity at receiving a great education.” He promised to appeal the judge’s ruling. John White, the state superintendent of education, said, “We are optimistic this decision will be reversed.”
According to reports, Judge Kelley’s ruling is not the only challenge Louisiana’s new school voucher program faces. Last week, a federal judge in New Orleans “ruled that the program had the potential to disrupt the region’s court-ordered efforts to desegregate public schools. The federal judge issued a temporary injunction halting the use of vouchers in Tangipahoa Parish over concern that the program was siphoning off state dollars needed to implement the desegregation plan.” There are at least thirty more school districts in the state that are also under desegregation orders. Voucher opponents said they plan to “bring similar federal court cases in those districts.”
The Times-Picayune reported that the voucher “suit was brought by Louisiana Federation of Teachers (LFT), Louisiana Association of Educators (LAE), Louisiana School Boards Association and 43 local school boards.” In addition to the teachers’ unions and school boards, others have also criticized the program because some of the private and religious schools that receive voucher money “focus on so-called Young Earth Creationism over evolution.”
(Note: The Unites States Supreme Court has “affirmed the right of religious institutions to receive taxpayer funds through vouchers, as long as the state itself isn’t advocating a particular faith.”)
Another criticism of the program is that voucher students who attend many of the private and religious schools will not be subjected to the same standardized testing that students in Louisiana’s public schools are.
From my earlier post on the Louisiana school voucher program:
Casey Michel (TPMMuckraker) reported in July that students in every public school in Louisiana are subjected to standardized testing, but “voucher students — who will bring an average of $8,000 in tuition from ‘failing’ public schools to many that are affiliated with religious denominations — will only need to face testing if their new school has taken an average of 10 students per grade, or if the schools have accepted at least 40 voucher students into the grades testing.”
According to Simon[Stephanie Simon, Reuters], there are private schools in Louisiana that have been approved to receive state funds that “use social studies texts warning that liberals threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don’t cover modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around refuting evolution.” Many of the schools “rely on Pensacola-based A Beka Book curriculum or Bob Jones University Press textbooks to teach their pupils Bible-based ‘facts,’ such as the existence of Nessie the Loch Ness Monster and all sorts of pseudoscience…”
Note: The Louisiana school voucher program not only siphons money away from the state’s public schools to private and religious schools—but also to private businesses and private tutors.
Creationist Textbooks: Darwin Is Wrong Because Loch Ness Monster Is Real
Louisiana Voucher Program Funds Horrible Private Religious Schools With Tax Payer Money
SOURCES
Jindal voucher overhaul unconstitutionally diverts public funds to private schools, judge rules (Times-Picayune)
Louisiana Voucher Program Ruled Unconstitutional (Huffington Post)
Blow Dealt to School Voucher Program (Wall Street Journal)
Bobby Jindal’s school voucher program ruled unconstitutional (Washington Post)
Judge blocks Gov. Bobby Jindal’s signature school voucher program (Christian Science Monitor)
Stateside Louisiana: School Vouchers and the Privatization of Public Education (Jonathan Turley)
Notice bettykath, both these states are ‘Red’ states, pushing massive authoritarianism on school children. Training them to obey OR ELSE.
‘Conservatives’ talk on and on about ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ while they impose draconian restrictions on the powerless. Even the youngest children. It is horrific.
nick, so you would like to see kids taught about Jesus riding dinosaurs with a saddle and bridle?
shano, your comments about gmo foods is right on. Eugenics is not dead. It is doing quite well and Monsanto racks up the profits. This will continue as Obama picked a Monsanto VP and lobbyist, Michael Taylor, as a senior adviser to the FDA. As the Czar of food safety division, Taylor is in charge of all food and farms in the US.
Taxpayers money have gone to religious schools for over a gereration. Pell grants, VA, etc. have ALWAYS allowed a student to be in charge of their education and as we all know, their is no freedom w/o choice. This “taxpayer money” has NEVER been issue until it started making K-12 schools accountable for their horrible record. I know the response. Elaine, we’ve had this dance before. We just fundamentally disagree on this topic. C’est la vie.
While my previous two postings are not about vouchers, they are about the school systems in Arizona and Mississippi. It’s a more blatant assault on the education of school children who are being taught first hand about the police state and how they are to behave in it.
Here’s another school to juvie pipeline
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/340-187/14760-in-mississippi-kids-go-to-jail-for-being-late
excerpt:
In Mississippi Kids Go To Jail For Being Late?
By Julianne Hing, Color Lines
28 November 12
Green can’t exactly remember how many times he went back and forth to juvenile. When asked to venture a guess he says, “Maybe 30.” He was put on probation by a youth court judge for getting into a fight when he was in eighth grade. Thereafter, any of Green’s school-based infractions, from being a few minutes late for class to breaking the school dress code by wearing the wrong color socks, counted as violations of his probation and led to his immediate suspension and incarceration in the local juvenile detention center.
But Green wasn’t alone. A bracing Department of Justice lawsuit filed last month against Meridian, Miss., where Green lives and is set to graduate from high school this coming year, argues that the city’s juvenile justice system has operated a school to prison pipeline that shoves students out of school and into the criminal justice system, and violates young people’s due process rights along the way.
In Meridian, when schools want to discipline children, they do much more than just send them to the principal’s office. They call the police, who show up to arrest children who are as young as 10 years old. Arrests, the Department of Justice says, happen automatically, regardless of whether the police officer knows exactly what kind of offense the child has committed or whether that offense is even worthy of an arrest. The police department’s policy is to arrest all children referred to the agency.
Once those children are in the juvenile justice system, they are denied basic constitutional rights. They are handcuffed and incarcerated for days without any hearing and subsequently warehoused without understanding their alleged probation violations.
“[D]efendants engage in a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct through which they routinely and systematically arrest and incarcerate children, including for minor school rule infractions, without even the most basic procedural safeguards, and in violation of these children’s constitutional rights,” the DOJ’s 37-page complaint reads. Meridian’s years of systemic abuse punish youth “so arbitrarily and severely as to shock the conscience,” the complaint reads.
The federal lawsuit casts a wide net in indicting the systems that worked to deny Meridian children their constitutional rights. It names as defendants the state of Mississippi; the city of Meridian; Lauderdale County, which runs the Lauderdale County Youth Court; and the local Defendant Youth Court Judges Frank Coleman and Veldore Young for violating Meridian students’ rights up and down the chain.
The DOJ’s complaint also charges that in the course of its eight-month investigation the city blocked the inquiry by refusing to hand over youth court records. Attorneys for city officials deny that claim, and say they are bound by law to protect the confidentiality of youth who’ve been through the system and so cannot share their records with the federal government.
‘Judge, Jury and Executioner’
The DOJ’s lawsuit, despite its bombshell revelations for the rest of the country, has been a long time coming. Groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP have been concerned about Meridian for years.
The SPLC’s inquiry into Meridian began in 2008, when attorneys started hearing reports of “horrific abuse” of youth housed in juvenile detention centers, said Jody Owens, managing attorney of the SPLC’s juvenile justice initiative in Mississippi. Advocates learned that 67 percent of youth in detention centers arrived there from the Meridian school system, Owens said. In between school and detention, students were denied access to counsel and due process, and many were never made aware of what they were even being arrested for. “The administrators were the judge, jury and executioner,” Owens said.
This practice has also appeared to target black students. Meridian, a city of 40,000 people, is 61 percent African-American. But over a five-year period, Owens said, “There was never once a white kid that was expelled or suspended for the same offense that kids of color were suspended for.”
Among the infractions that landed Green, who is black, in juvenile detention were talking back to a teacher, wearing long socks and coming to school without wearing a belt. He was behind bars for stretches of time as long as two weeks, and the real rub, his mother Gloria said, is that weekends didn’t count as days served. A 10-day suspension stretched to 14 actual days; time for Meridian juvenile justice officials apparently stopped on weekends. All that back and forth out of school and in juvenile took a real toll on Green’s education, and he was held back from the eighth grade.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/12993-corrections-corporation-of-america-used-in-drug-sweeps-of-public-school-students
excerpt:
Corrections Corporation of America Used in Drug Sweeps of Public School Students
Tuesday, 27 November 2012 13:35 By Beau Hodai, PRWatch | Report
In Arizona an unsettling trend appears to be underway: the use of private prison employees in law enforcement operations.
The state has graced national headlines in recent years as the result of its cozy relationship with the for-profit prison industry. Such controversies have included the role of private prison corporations in SB 1070 and similar anti-immigrant legislation disseminated in other states; a 2010 private prison escape that resulted in two murders and a nationwide manhunt; and a failed bid to privatize nearly the entire Arizona prison system.
And now, recent events in the central Arizona town of Casa Grande show the hand of private corrections corporations reaching into the classroom, assisting local law enforcement agencies in drug raids at public schools.
Trick or Treat
At 9 a.m. on the morning of October 31, 2012, students at Vista Grande High School in Casa Grande were settling in to their daily routine when something unusual occurred.
Vista Grande High School Principal Tim Hamilton ordered the school — with a student population of 1,776 — on “lock down,” kicking off the first “drug sweep” in the school’s four-year history. According to Hamilton, “lock down” is a state in which, “everybody is locked in the room they are in, and nobody leaves — nobody leaves the school, nobody comes into the school.”
”Everybody is locked in, and then they bring the dogs in, and they are teamed with an administrator and go in and out of classrooms. They go to a classroom and they have the kids come out and line up against a wall. The dog goes in and they close the door behind, and then the dog does its thing, and if it gets a hit, it sits on a bag and won’t move.”
While such “drug sweeps” have become a routine matter in many of the nation’s schools, along with the use of metal detectors and zero-tolerance policies, one feature of this raid was unusual. According to Casa Grande Police Department (CGPD) Public Information Officer Thomas Anderson, four “law enforcement agencies” took part in the operation: CGPD (which served as the lead agency and operation coordinator), the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Gila River Indian Community Police Department, and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).
It is the involvement of CCA — the nation’s largest private, for-profit prison corporation — that causes this high school “drug sweep” to stand out as unusual; CCA is not, despite CGPD’s evident opinion to the contrary, a law enforcement agency.
Most will not think this is a factor in the abysmal education levels – but my opinion is that GMO foods have harmed all children. HFCS from GMO corn is a daily staple in the vast majority of all kids diets now.
Say what you will, but the ‘junk’ food we ate growing up in the 1940’s to the mid 1980’s did not contain these genetically modified substances. We see huge increases in all sorts of physical problems that affect learning in kids today. Problems with their endocrine systems, with physical development.
The military cannot even enlist most of these young people- their bodies are so damaged. I believe this affects the brain in all sorts of ways as well.
Damn unions. They did it again. the 8 hour work day, 40 hour work week. child labor laws, workers’ comp, sick pay, maternity leave, safety programs, company paid health insurance, paid vacations, and now, dumbing down education. [sarcasm]
Hope they make a huge comeback.
Bruce,
The Louisiana voucher program would siphon money away from public schools to private and religious schools–most of which wouldn’t be held accountable in the same way that the public schools are. Why should tax payers’ money go to schools that teach creationism instead of real science? How do you suppose those private and religious schools would improve education in the state of Louisiana?
There was never a problem until the public schools started putting out a second rate product. Most parents want their children to receive a good education. The teacher unions have put a stop to any chance of that.
I sent my daughter to catholic school for the religious aspect. Taxes should never be spent on a private education. Signed, someone who scrimped and saved for what I wanted.
So much trouble with these schools in Az. Many have closed with great scandals, funds stolen, kids neglected. I am sure there may be some good charter schools, but the resulting degradation of public schools is not worth it. If parents do not like public schools they can pay out of pocket for something they consider to be ‘better’.
I am with bettykath here, I want my tax dollars to fund local schools, not some religious curriculum that should only be taught in Sunday school at church!
I pay school taxes. I want ALL of my school tax money supporting the local public school. If you want your kids going to a private school, you come up with the money.
Charter schools and vouchers are all about privatizing education where the only thing that counts is the $$ bottom line. Kids of the elites will get the smaller classes and the greater teacher to student ratio and the well equipped labs and tech centers. The poor kids will get prepared for menial low paying jobs, the military, and jail.
Mike S.,
I agree with your comment. It’s about the privatization of public services and programs. Bush didn’t get a lot of public support when he tried to privatize Social Security.
State Funded Religious Schools Are Ok (If They’re Not Islamic)
Justice Holmes,
Valarie Hodges, Louisiana Lawmaker, Retracts Support For Voucher Program Because Of Muslim School Inclusion
The Huffington Post
By Laura Hibbard
Posted: 07/06/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/06/valarie-hodges-lawmaker-retracts-support-for-bill_n_1655249.html
Excerpt:
Louisiana Rep. Valarie Hodges, R-Watson, is retracting her support for Gov. Bobby Jindal’s voucher program, after realizing the money could be applied to Muslim schools, Livingston Parish News reports.
Hodges initially supported the governor’s program because she mistakenly equated “religious” with “Christian,” according to the report. Jindal’s reform package allows state education funds to be used to send students to religious schools.
“Unfortunately it will not be limited to the Founders’ religion… We need to insure [sic] that it does not open the door to fund radical Islam schools. There are a thousand Muslim schools that have sprung up recently. I do not support using public funds for teaching Islam anywhere here in Louisiana,” Hodges was quoted as saying in the Livingston Parish News.
Hodges’ outrage comes after Louisiana lawmakers carried out a similar debate when the vouchers were being discussed last month.
Don’t get excited. First, what does he mean another part of the budget? What he means is that public fund CAN be used to fund religious education as long as they are state funds. That is nuts as I understand the Constitution but the Hosanna Court might not see it my way. Wait until a bunch of state vouchers are used at a muslin schools we will see where the Constituion crumbles then!
Elaine,
Very important piece. Let me be categorical in my opposition to the idea of “Voucher Programs”, Charter Schools, etc. They are all a ruse under the guise of improving educational opportunities. Religious based schools from both Christian and Jewish faiths have been pushing for many years to receive funds from government to support themselves. Then too, one of the immediate reactions in the South and North, to the SCOTUS desegregation ruling was to set up “private schools” to siphon State education funds. The Charter Schools are the result of Corporations trying to get their share of the pie of public education funds. The whole project including “No Child Left Behind” are “Trojan horses” used to deprive public education in this country.
Quite informative Elaine.
Jindal’s reaction was disrespectful it seems to me.
The judge is courageous.