How School Voucher Laws Protect Discrimination.
At Forbes.com, I take a moment to zero in one feature of most new voucher bills—a section declaring that no matter how much taxpayer money they rake in, charters are not state actors and the government may exercise no authority over them whatsoever.
The intent is clear enough—to provide education service providers (private schools, tutors, education materials publishers, etc) with the ability to use taxpayer dollars however they see fit. They don’t have to alter their “creed, practices, admission policy, hiring policy or curriculum,” meaning that a private school could be free to discriminate as it wishes, even as it uses taxpayer dollars to deliver religious instruction.
This allows states to operate—and require taxpayers to fund—a school system that exists in parallel dimension where the United States Constitution is forbidden to reach. Private schools and other education service providers will be free to discriminate against students and staff on the taxpayer’s dime. The voucher non-interference language further insures that the system will be one in which it is the school, not the family, that has choice—”admission policy” is one of the protected areas.
We’ve already seen vouchers used to send millions of taxpayer dollars to anti-LGBTQ schools and schools with anti-science curricula. We’ve seen plenty of research indicating that voucher programs hurt result in sub-par education for students. But with laws written to protect such actions, it’s hard to know how far such taxpayer-funded miseducation could go.
Consider the recent discovery in Ohio of Dissident Homeschool, a national network of Nazi homeschoolers whose leaders are “so deeply invested into making sure that that child becomes a wonderful Nazi” and “secure a future for white children.”
Ohio’s state school board president can “emphatically and categorically denounce” such materials being used to teach children, but in states that adopt the string-cutting language in education savings account bills, taxpayers would pay for Nazi homeschooling, even as the state promises not to require anyone to alter their “creed or practices.”