Education Spending

Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation Savings AccountsEducation SpendingFeaturedJonathan ButcherSchool Choice

Ongoing debate over district fraud in Tennessee shines positive light on education savings accounts

Jonathan Butcher
Jonathan Butcher

Between 2015 and early 2016, the U.S. Attorney’s office determined that a national insurance fraud scheme involving prescription drugs included Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Tennessee, the insurance administrator for the Hamilton County Department of Education.

Who knew a prescription cream could be so expensive?

Last fall, officials suspended three Tennessee public school employees while investigators reviewed the individuals’ involvement in an insurance fraud scheme that cost the school district some $800,000. The issue dates to around 2015, when two doctors began writing prescriptions for pain-relieving creams to be bought in bulk. Some of the claims were filled through the Hamilton County School district’s insurance plan.

The fraud in Hamilton County, the school district encompassing Chattanooga, has all the makings of a con: Kickbacks, third party-intermediaries in California, and crooked doctors. The movie script writes itself.

Auditors and other investigative offices regularly uncover such illicit activities in school districts around the country. With some $600 billion in federal, state, and local funds flowing to schools every year, district offices, especially, are vulnerable to a wide range of financial crimes, from embezzlement to common theft.

In the 1990s, large school systems such as Chicago and Los Angeles created offices of inspectors general to deal with the problems. Yet some of these offices say that the number of claims is more than they can investigate.

Chicago’s inspector says that the office cannot open enough cases, which “creates a substantial risk, that waste, fraud, and financial mismanagement, and employee misconduct go undetected.” The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) has written similar warnings in the agency’s regular reports to Congress. Chicago is home to one of the largest examples of theft in recent years, as former CPS Superintendent Barbara Byrd-Bennett was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for her role in manipulating district contracts totaling $23 million.

Periodically, districts without dedicated inspectors general consider adding such offices. For example, in 2016, the Broward County (Florida) School Board considered adding an inspector to the district. When board discussion turned to using the federal inspector general instead of creating a new office in the school district, a federal representative said he must “cherry-pick complaints to investigate because there are only five investigators to cover the entire state of Florida,” according to the Sun-Sentinel—echoing the complaints from Chicago and the federal OIG’s home office.

The boxes of pain-relieving cream in Tennessee and Chicago’s illegal contracts help to put claims of misspending among Tennessee’s education savings accounts (called “Individualized Education Plans”) in perspective. Tennessee’s accounts operate similar to Florida’s Gardiner Scholarships, and families of children with special needs can use the accounts to choose a school or customized set of learning services, including education therapy and personal tutors, for their student.

No amount of graft or misuse of resources meant for a child’s education is acceptable. But recurring claims in the media of “serious problems” with the accounts—most recently coming from the Daily Memphian, but Arizona media have made similar accusations—ignore the size and scope of fraud in school districts and lawmakers’ efforts to limit such problems in the savings accounts.

For example, the financial loss due to fraudulent prescriptions in the Chattanooga district described above is larger than all the money parents are suspected of misspending statewide in Arizona and Tennessee’s education savings accounts combined in 2018. Audits of Arizona’s accounts have found that the total amount of suspected misuse hovers around 1 percent or less of the total amount the account awards annually.

Meanwhile, Arizona policymakers have taken an innovative approach to education savings account oversight and contracted with a private firm to monitor individual transactions. As explained on redefinED last year, North Carolina officials have already outsourced management responsibilities for education savings accounts in their state. The new systems can confirm eligible savings account families and their intended purchases before processing a transaction, helping to limit intentional or unintentional misspending.

Now, Tennessee’s Department of Education is trying to do the same. Tennesseans should applaud state officials for upgrading these accounts at the first sign of trouble, as opposed to letting fraud fester for years as commonly happens in school districts. Remember, the prescription fraud in Chattanooga began in 2015. Parents and taxpayers should not have to wait five years for fraudulent use of a child’s education spending to be resolved.

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Commentary and OpinionEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation SpendingFeaturedSchool Choice

Escape from New York to Florida for more efficient education spending

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

The New York Post recently delivered a rather devastating comparison of New York, California, Florida and Texas on education spending. Since this is a Florida-based education blog and many New Yorkers move to Florida annually, let’s focus on the Sunshine and Empire states.

If you are a New Yorker, what can you say in response to this news other than “Ouch!” Despite spending well over twice as much per pupil, Florida has higher NAEP scores in three out of four of the regularly given NAEP exams. Alas, New Yorkers, the outlook is even worse once you look at trends, specifically eighth-grade reading scores by race/ethnicity, as illustrated in this chart.

In 1998, white students in New York were almost a grade level ahead of white students in Florida. Based on the last two NAEP exams, however, Florida held a slight lead. Hispanic students in the two states were tied in 1998, but in 2019, Hispanic students in New York were about a grade level behind their peers in Florida.

The same trends, although not represented in this chart, are evident for black and Asian students. Black students in Florida closed the gap with their New York peers after being a grade level behind in 1998. Asian students in Florida basically were tied with their peers in New York in 1998, but took a significant lead in 2019.

Perhaps you are a New Yorker and you consider teaching students how to read as an important part of K-12 education. You may be feeling a little crushed by the fact that other states are getting that job done better and more efficiently. Perhaps you are among those who would like a wide variety of public and private school options as featured in Step Up For Students’ annual Education Landscape document to help you find the right fit for your child. Our founders wisely created a system of federalism that allows citizens to match their policy and cultural preferences. Perhaps you should consider moving to Florida.

While the large and probably growing number of New Yorkers who want to become Floridians is obvious, the more subtle point from what I gather is that there is a small but vocal number of Floridians who would prefer the New York policy mix. If, for instance, you imagine that states are in a contest to spend the most per pupil and you aren’t overly concerned with results, then New York would be a destination state for you. This seems odd to me, but to each their own.

Given the huge number of moving trucks leaving New York for Florida, it would appear it’s relatively inexpensive to rent one to haul belongings from Florida to New York. After all, they’ve got to get the trucks back to New York for the next escapee, err, person wanting to move to Florida. The marginal cost of putting your stuff in the truck will be low. Once you arrive in New York, you can immediately begin to enjoy the benefits of high-spending and academic stagnation if you’re into that sort of thing.

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AnalysisCharter SchoolsEducation ChoiceEducation SpendingfactcheckEDFeaturedPrivate School ScholarshipsSchool ChoiceTesting and Accountability

FACT-CHECKED: Tallahassee educator’s attack on ‘monstrous’ system is misleading

Jon East
Jon East

Editor’s note: The goal of fact-checkED is to bring clinical precision to complex issues that are easily misunderstood, aiming to counteract incorrect information before it continues to circulate.  

Sally Butzin has a rich and accomplished history in public education, as a classroom teacher, instructional innovator and published author. But her latest column in the Tallahassee Democrat offers an unfortunate brew of bitterness and hyperbole about modern reforms.

Butzin cast Florida today as something of an educational wasteland, reminiscing about the early 1990s when “innovation was encouraged” and contrasting that with the election of Gov. Jeb Bush in 1998 when “the bottom fell out.” She deplored the “emphasis on testing and accountability” but especially blames charter schools and private school vouchers. They constitute a “monstrous parallel system” that “has bled the life out of public education” and “left millions of children behind.”

We’ll leave to others the political defense of Bush, who ushered in a wave of education reform in his eight years in office, and instead focus on three of her more tangible claims.

Claim No. 1: “These new schemes had no accountability to taxpayers.”

The “schemes,” in this context, refer to charter schools and private school scholarships.

First, charter schools are created through a contract with each public school district that involves oversight into educational goals and tax dollars received. Their students are required to take the same state assessment tests as all other district students and the schools receive the same letter grade ratings as public schools. Further, under state law, a charter school can be shut down, and many have been, for receiving two grades of F.

Second, the state’s largest scholarship program, the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship serving 108,570 economically disadvantaged students in 1,836 private schools, is overseen by the state Department of Education. Students are required to take nationally norm-referenced tests approved by the state and those test results are reported publicly each year. Schools that receive more than $250,000 in scholarship dollars are required to submit financial reports by certified public accountants, and scholarship funding organizations are audited each year by the State Auditor General and private accounting firms. The students, schools and scholarship organizations are subject to roughly 17,000 words of statutory and agency regulations.

Third, both charter schools and scholarship schools face a form of accountability that can be more intense than state regulations and audits. Because they are schools of choice and students are free to attend or not, they can go out of business if parents are dissatisfied and choose elsewhere.

These points are brief in part because Butzin’s claim is categorical. She wrote that they have “no accountability,” which is flatly false.

Claim No. 2: “This parallel system has bled the life out of public education, as billions of dollars flowing to it have left millions of children behind.”

This claim seems to have a life of its own, despite the fact that it is refuted by extensive independent research. At its core, it assumes that public schools should be paid tax dollars without regard to how many students attend them, even though Florida has always funded education on a per-student basis. And it ignores the fact that students choosing these two alternative options receive fewer dollars than they would if they remained in a traditional public school.

This is the third time in the short history of fact-checkED that we have analyzed this financial cost claim, and for more detail we invite you to read our first effort. Once again, we rate this claim as false.

Claim No. 3: “Now, it would be one thing if this parallel system was improving outcomes for all our children. But this is simply not the case.”

Butzin did not share her data on outcomes, but the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is generally regarded as one of the most reliable indicators of academic achievement in elementary and secondary schools. NAEP, often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” paints an entirely different picture.

By every measure, the NAEP reading and math test scores of fourth- and eighth-graders have increased over the past two decades – the period after which Butzin says “the bottom fell out.” The percentage of fourth-graders who meet basic standards in math is up by nearly two-thirds, and the percentage rated proficient or above has tripled. The percentage of fourth-graders who meet basic standards in reading is up by a third, and the proficient and above is up by two-thirds. Similarly, the percentage of eighth-graders who meet basic in math is up by a fifth, and proficient is up by four-fifths. The percentage of eighth-graders at basic in reading is up by a tenth, and the percentage above proficient up by half.

And, according to the Urban Institute’s adjustment of rankings for race, income and English language learner status, Florida ranks first in fourth-grade reading, first in fourth-grade math, third in eighth-grade reading and eighth in eighth-grade math.

A few other measures are worth mentioning. The most recent Education Week Quality Counts report ranked Florida fourth in the nation in terms of K-12 academic achievement. The College Board ranked Florida third in percentage of graduating high school seniors who have passed college-caliber Advanced Placement exams. The high school graduation rate has jumped from 60.1 percent to 86.9 percent in the past two decades.

We don’t know the data Butzin used, but we rate her claim as highly misleading.

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2020 Presidential ElectionAnalysisEducation ChoiceEducation PoliticsEducation SpendingfactcheckEDFeaturedSchool ChoiceTax Credit ScholarshipsTesting and Accountability

fact-checkED: Sanders’ education choice claims in Florida op-ed misleading

Jon East
Jon East

With the presidential primary election in delegate-rich Florida just two months away, Democratic candidates are beginning to knock on the door.

In a Monday column in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders found little to like about Florida’s public education system. But our focus is on educational choice and three assertions he made while insisting that “Florida is ground zero of a school privatization movement intent on destroying public education.”

“Each year almost $1 billion in state money goes to private schools instead of public schools.”

“These private schools operate with little to no accountability.”

“In many cases, their students’ math and reading skills have declined.”

These claims are misleading, at best.

Claim No. 1: The $1 billion citation draws attention but does not prove Sanders’ point. He implies that private school voucher and scholarship programs harm public schools financially, which is a longstanding and erroneous argument advanced by the Florida Education Association (FEA) that we have dealt with previously in this space. There is simply no evidence to support it.

Eight different independent financial studies all have concluded the scholarships, which cost less per student than the total amount spent in a traditional public school, save tax money that can be used to enhance public schools. Florida TaxWatch weighed in last year, finding existing scholarships cost 60 cents on the public school dollar. And the FEA lost its legal challenge to the 19-year-old Tax Credit Scholarship program in part because the trial and appellate courts summarily rejected its argument that public schools “have been and will continue to be injured by the scholarship program’s diversion of resources from the public schools.”

Claim No. 2: The qualifier in this assertion – that private schools operate with “little to no” accountability – gives Sanders some wiggle room in part because accountability is hard to objectively measure. But Sanders seems to dismiss entirely the accountability that is inherent with any school that survives only if parents choose it for their children.

That market concept may not appeal to a self-professed socialist but does have real-world consequences and, in the case of the state’s two scholarships for underprivileged students, gives genuine educational power to parents who typically have little.

As to the regulatory oversight, Florida’s largest program, the Tax Credit Scholarship serving 108,570 economically disadvantaged students this year, is ranked among the nation’s most aggressive. The students, schools and scholarship organizations are subject to roughly 17,000 words of statutory and agency regulations.

Among those requirements: scholarship students must take state-approved standardized tests; those test results are reported publicly every year; schools must submit annual financial reports by certified public accountants; and scholarship organizations must be audited each year by the state Auditor General and independent accounting firms.

Sanders is entitled to believe the program is not subject to sufficient regulation, but we rate his claim of “little to no” accountability as misleading.

Claim No. 3:  Once again, Sanders uses an interesting qualifier – “in many cases” – in his assertion that scholarship students’ “math and reading skills have declined.” Eleven years’ worth of standardized test reports refute his claim.

Students who receive the Tax Credit Scholarship must take a nationally norm-referenced test each year approved by the state, and most take the Stanford Achievement. The test scores are sent to Florida State University’s Learning Systems Institute, which is paid to aggregate and report them publicly.

For the most recent year, 2017-18, scholarship students scored on average at the 47.4 percentile in reading and 45.2 percentile in math. That’s basically average, which is encouraging given that these scholarships students are among the poorest in the state and were among the lowest-performing students in the public schools they left behind.

More to the point, their annual gains have been remarkably consistent. The scores reflect that these low-income students have achieved the same annual gains as students of all income levels nationally.

In other words, they have increased, not declined.

Certainly the average doesn’t reflect every student. In the most recent report, about as many students – 0.6 percent – achieved extraordinary gains of more than 40 percentile points as those who dropped an equivalent amount. But Sanders’ qualifier that “many” students declined seems intended to distort the overall test findings. We rate it mostly false.

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Education and Public PolicyEducation PoliticsEducation SpendingFamily Empowerment ScholarshipFeaturedSchool ChoiceVouchers

redefinED’s 2019 Myth of the Year

Jon East
Jon East

The Gardiner Scholarship for students with specifically named special needs, which served 11,917 students last year at a cost of $124.1 million, is funded by a direct line-item appropriation.

Editor’s note: While education choice misstatements flourished this year, one was especially egregious: the claim that Florida’s new family empowerment voucher was “unprecedented.” Step Up For Students’ special projects director Jon East revisits this claim and explains why it ranked as the redefinED team’s Myth of the Year. 

As Florida lawmakers debated a new private school voucher for students from low-income and working-class families earlier this year, opponents depicted the program in stark, even apocalyptic, terms.

Ron Meyer, attorney for the Florida Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, said “this could lead to the dismantling of the public school system as we’ve known it.”

Sen. Gary Farmer, a Broward Democrat, called it “the beginning of the final stage of a decades-long plan to privatize public education in Florida.”

Sen. Perry Thurston, a Broward Democrat, wrote that “Florida seems hellbent on sending its public schools into K-12 purgatory.”

At the root of the rhetoric was the claim that the Family Empowerment Scholarship (FES), which was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis in May, was without precedent in Florida education. The scholarship was intended in large part to serve lower-income students who are being squeezed out of the 18-year-old Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, which has enrolled 108,570 schoolchildren this year, because corporate tax-credited contributions aren’t keeping up with student demand. But opponents argued that serving those students with direct-taxpayer-funded vouchers would push the state into entirely new education policy.

During floor debate, Sen. Daryl Rouson, a St. Petersburg Democrat, called FES a fundamental shift: “That fundamental shift is we’re moving away from a Constitutionally approved method of funding tax credit scholarships to using FEFP (the formula used to fund public schools) dollars and general revenue for private institutions.”

Those charges picked up steam as the scholarship bill moved through each legislative chamber, was signed into law and then began serving roughly 18,000 students this fall. Reporters and opinion writers occasionally mistook the assertions as fact, including an esteemed editorialist who wrote in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in October that the scholarship is “the first time” that a school voucher will be paid “straight from the state treasury.”

But this is patently false.

The Family Empowerment Scholarship is neither the first nor the only direct-state-funded education voucher in the PreK-12 arena in Florida. It’s not even the only voucher funded directly through the Florida Education Finance Program (FEFP), which is the main operational fund for district public schools. As we described in a recent fact-checkED post, here are the others:

  • The McKay Scholarship for students with learning disabilities. It was created two decades ago and last year served 30,695 students at a cost of $219.7 million. The students are tracked inside the FEFP from each school district in which they live, as is exhibited in this FEFP calculation sheet from 2018-19 (note the second column, which subtracts McKay dollars from each district).

The reason this claim is worthy of redefinED’s Myth of the Year is not just that it persists but also that it is intended to disguise the degree to which the state’s public education landscape has shifted in just over a generation.

In 2017-18, 1.6 million – or 47 percent – of all preK-12 students in Florida chose something other than their assigned district public school. That included 292,001 in privately operated and publicly contracted charter schools, 133,870 in privately operated prekindergarten centers, and 149,400 in private schools with state scholarships.

Those programs exist only if parents choose them for their children, and both school districts and state legislators are responding to the explosive enrollment growth with more and varied options. The claim that FES is some type of legislative abnormality is designed to be misleading.

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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionEducation SpendingFeaturedJonathan ButcherSchool Choice

Guest commentary: Setting the record straight on K-12 funding

Jonathan Butcher
Jonathan Butcher

A recent Education Next poll found the general public, parents, teachers, Republicans and Democrats underestimate per-student spending by approximately $6,000.

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Viola asks to see the face of Olivia, a grieving countess who wears a veil.

“Is’t not well done?” asks Olivia. “Excellently done, if God did all,” Viola replies, slyly suggesting Olivia’s good looks would be impressive if they were natural and not due to the generous application of makeup.

Last week in the Washington Post, the University of Virginia’s Robert C. Pianta got his facts wrong, and he could not add enough color to the supposed benefits of socioemotional learning or the shortcomings of No Child Left Behind to obscure this simple truth: K-12 spending has not decreased over time.

And whether due to pressure exerted through social media (more on that below) or otherwise, the Post issued a correction to the spending claims this week. But Pianta’s position that increased spending should drive policy choices still drives his column and weakens some of his otherwise sensible proposals.

Pianta’s argument begins naturally enough. He points to the same examples of low test scores and uninspiring examples of student performance on the Nation’s Report Card and international tests that are cited by nearly every commentator on K-12 district schools in the U.S. (“ever-growing achievement gap,” “public schools in a state of crisis,” etc.).

Then come the cosmetics, poorly applied.

“This issue has been recognized for decades,” he says, but “politicians neglected to consider the thing that might improve education the most but never emerged as part of a far-reaching solution set: investing more public money in our teachers and children.”

“The biggest problem plaguing U.S. public schools,” he says, is “a lack of resources.” Funding has decreased since the late 1980s, Pianta said in the original column and cited a study by Rutgers Professor Bruce D. Baker—who proceeded to refute Pianta’s contention via twitter:

Baker’s comment is notable because he has argued that spending does matter in order to improve student outcomes, but even he took issue with this part of Pianta’s analysis.

In fact, Baker’s figures are too tame. After adjusting for inflation, K-12 spending per student has nearly doubled since 1980 and is nearly four times greater than 1960. Spending has increased in every category, from administration to instruction to plant operations. The financial crisis more than a decade ago temporarily stalled annual increases, but the downturn did not erase years of increases, and spending graphs are pointing up again (in May, the U.S. Census announced “U.S. Spending Per Pupil Increased for Fifth Consecutive Year”).

Even with the Post’s correction, Pianta’s column still says schools “have been starved for funds.”

Still, Pianta is not alone in his error. A nationally representative poll finds the general public, parents, teachers, Republicans, and Democrats underestimate per student spending by approximately $6,000. Borrowing from the Bard again: In Pianta’s hit, he misses. Once actual spending numbers are provided, fewer survey respondents say that we need more money in education.

Despite his creative accounting, Pianta closes with a welcome call for teacher unions “to become more responsive toward performance evaluations.” If policymakers want to increase teacher pay and benefits—which make up some 80 percent of school budgets—then taxpayers and parents should have better ways to measure teacher effectiveness. Across-the-board pay raises, as awarded recently in San Diego and in states where teachers went on strike earlier this year and last, are sloppy ideas that reward poorly-performing teachers as much as effective teachers. District officials should treat educators like professionals and compensate them accordingly.

And we should put this debate to rest. Pianta’s inaccurate claims of K-12 spending cuts cannot support his sensible plea for compromise over teacher evaluations and some of his other ideas, such as “inspiring talented people to enter the teacher workforce.”

The countess Olivia assures Viola that her good looks are natural and says, “’Tis in grain, sir, ‘twill endure wind and weather.” Pianta’s claims that K-12 spending has decreased were clearly less robust. Spending has increased over time, and the ways in which school leaders and lawmakers use these resources still matters more for student success than how much is spent.

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Achievement GapAnalysisCommentary and OpinionEducation SpendingFeaturedTesting and Accountability

USA K-12 achievement stalled on international exams

Matthew Ladner
Matthew Ladner

PISA, the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment, measures 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges.

The performance of American 15-year-olds in reading and math has remained stagnant for the past two decades according to results released this past week from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Meanwhile, the achievement gap in reading between high- and low-performing students has grown wider.

The less-than-stellar results from the exam, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), mirror recently released scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which I described in an earlier post as an Agincourt-level disaster.

Chile is the country most closely resembling the math and reading scores of American black students; Turkey most closely matches the combined achievement of American Hispanic students. Yet the United States spends more than twice as much per pupil as either Chile or Turkey.

Even the scores for American white students, while internationally competitive, appear less than impressive.

Estonia scores a bit higher while spending half as much per pupil as the United States. Moreover, scholars have made us aware that higher-income American families spend lavishly on enrichment options for their K-12 students (tutoring, club sports, etc.), and that this spending has increased steadily over time.

How many Estonian families do you reckon spend $8,872 per child per year on enrichment spending? Since the average American income is more than $26,000 per person higher than that in Estonia after adjusting for purchasing power, I’m going to walk out on a limb and dare a guess: Not many.

And, while enrichment spending apparently has little to do with improvement among low-income students (the trend in such spending is flat since the early 1980s), that isn’t the case among advantaged students. Richer in schools twice as well funded but underperforming is not a great place for America’s highest-performing subgroup to find itself vis-à-vis Estonia.

Even without these latest PISA results, but reinforced in light of them, it’s clear that without the benefit of lavish enrichment spending and other related advantages, the high levels of spending in American schools appears broadly ineffectual for students of color.

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Education EquityEducation PoliticsEducation SpendingFeaturedSchool Choice

Thankful for more educational freedom (hopefully) on its way

Special to redefinED
Special to redefinED

“The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth” by Jennie A. Brownscombe (1914) presents a typical mythologized scene showing Plymouth settlers celebrating Thanksgiving with Wampanoags, dressed in the garb of Plains Indians.

Editor’s note: redefinED is offering this Thanksgiving Day commentary from Neal McCluskey, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, via a Creative Commons republication agreement.

If you know your United States history, you know that the Pilgrims came to North America seeking to practice their religion free from the constraints of the Church of England. If you know your U.S. history well, you know that what many call the beginning of public schooling was the Massachusetts Bay colony’s law of 1647 requiring towns to supply some form of education, lest children fall victim to “that old deluder, Satan.” And if you know your history really well, you know that as public schooling developed it was repeatedly beset by religious conflicts, first as the schools were de facto Protestant, then as they became de facto agnostic.

What am I thankful for this Thanksgiving? That we may be on the verge of tearing down barriers to people directing education funds to schools sharing their religious values, barriers that do not just hurt religious families, but by forcing all to support one system of schools also keep non-religious families from getting what they want. Where religious people are sufficiently numerous, they can sometimes create de facto religious public schools, and where they are not sufficiently numerous to exert outright control educators will often avoid things that upset them.

The barriers I’m speaking of are Blaine Amendments, named after 19th century U.S. Senator James G. Blaine but found in 37 state constitutions. They are being challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. The case involves a scholarship tax credit program that was struck down by Montana’s supreme court because it would have allowed scholarships to be used at religious schools. Oral arguments are scheduled for January 22, 2020.

These amendments, originally created to keep money in de facto Protestant public schools and out of Catholic institutions, are often interpreted to mean that no government money may go to religious schools even if directed by the free choice of parents. Basically—and as these Cato amicus briefs lay out in greater depth—they force religious people to pay for government schools that legally cannot teach religious beliefs as true, or make policies based on religious convictions. Indeed, the schools often teach things and institute policies that contradict people’s religious beliefs. That violates religious freedom and renders religious people unequal under the law.

The prospects for these amendments being struck down, or at least sufficiently curbed that people can get tax credits for funding religious school scholarships, are good. From Zelman v. Simmons Harris, in which the U.S. Supreme Court established that parents can take state vouchers to religious schools without violating the U.S. Constitution, to the Trinity Lutheran decision that states cannot bar institutions from participating in funding programs simply because they are religious, precedent is on freedom’s side.

For this we should all be thankful. Because more freedom is what America is supposed to be about.

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