High Court to Mull Whether Charters Can Be Religious
The U.S. Supreme Court will take up a potentially momentous case about religious charter schools, involving issues that could radically alter the character of American education, both in terms of school choice and state funding of public education.
The court last month agreed to review two related appeals stemming from the attempt to establish a state-funded Roman Catholic virtual charter school in Oklahoma. St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School is sponsored and controlled by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and Diocese of Tulsa.
The charter’s Catholic sponsors and their supporters believe that recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions expanding permissible uses of state aid benefiting private religious schools make the time ripe for their concept of a virtual religious charter school. They said the school should be not excluded should not be excluded from the state’s charter program merely because of its religious character.
On the other side of both appeals is Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general, Gentner Drummond, who issued an advisory opinion in 2023 that a religious charter would violate the Oklahoma constitution’s directive that public schools be operated “free from sectarian control,” as well as a state statute requiring that charter schools be “nonsectarian.”
The school was set to start up last July with some 400 to 500 students and receive about $2.5 million in state aid in its first year, but legal challenges prevented that.
Drummond brought the case to Oklahoma’s supreme court, which led to a ruling against St. Isidore on both state and federal constitutional grounds.
“Although a public charter school, St. Isidore is an instrument of the Catholic Church, operated by the Catholic Church, and will further the evangelizing mission of the Catholic Church in its educational programs,” the state supreme court said in a 6-2 ruling.
The state’s highest court said that the religious charter school would be a “state actor” and not a private entity contracting with the state. State funding of the school would violate the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment prohibition on government establishment of religion, the court said.
Oklahoma and Other States Push to Undo Undocumented 69ý’ Rights to Schooling
Parents enrolling students in Oklahoma schools would have to provide their child’s proof of citizenship or legal immigration status under a proposed rule unanimously approved by the state’s board of education last week.
The rule, now in the hands of the state’s Republican-controlled legislature and GOP governor, marks what legal experts and immigration advocates call one of the latest efforts to undermine and overturn the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe that grants undocumented students the constitutional right to a free public education.
Oklahoma isn’t alone. GOP lawmakers in Tennessee have introduced a bill that would require parents of undocumented students to “be charged tuition and fees.” And conservative state lawmakers in Indiana introduced a bill that would deny public school enrollment to undocumented students.
“Any attack on [Plyler], especially in such unprecedented times, is concerning to us,” said Leslie Villegas, a senior policy analyst with the Education Policy program at the liberal New America think tank.
The Oklahoma rule, championed by Ryan Walters, the state’s schools chief, requires districts to collect the number of enrolled undocumented students and then submit those totals to the state education department.
Walters argues that the data collection would not prohibit student enrollment but help districts in allocating resources to serve students, including English-language-acquisition services to students federally entitled to such supports.
He also wants to allow immigration-enforcement agents into schools and compel schools to hand over student information to law-enforcement officials upon request, the latter of which is against federal law.
A 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that schools must provide English-language-acquisition services to students who may not be able to access academic content otherwise.
Student advocacy groups argue that efforts to collect immigration-status data would lead to a chilling effect that would infringe on students’ right to an education.
Despite Reemergence of Life-Threatening Diseases, Anti-Vaccination Legislation Gains Popularity
Once considered saviors for wiping out such deadly diseases as polio and the measles, vaccinations are under increasing fire across the country.
Lawmakers in no fewer than 15 states have introduced measures to resurrect or create new religious or philosophical exemptions from immunization mandates, establish state-level vaccine-injury databases, or dictate what providers must tell patients about the shots.
Childhood vaccination rates continue to fall nationwide, and the number of parents claiming nonmedical exemptions is rising.
In 2024, whooping cough cases reached a decade high, and 16 measles outbreaks put health officials on edge. Most states are below the 95 percent threshold for kindergartners—the level needed to protect communities against measles outbreaks.
About half of Americans are “very” or “extremely” concerned about those declining rates, according to a new poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Yet, only about 4 in 10 Americans oppose reconsidering the government’s recommendations for widely used vaccines.
Scott Burris, the director of Temple University’s Center for Public Health Law Research, has watched backlash against COVID19 vaccines grow to include more routine vaccines as anti-vaccine activists take hold of powerful political pulpits. “I think COVID and the politics gave standard vaccine denialists a lot of wind in their sails,” he said.
Religious exemptions for school vaccine requirements are among the most popular proposals so far, with four states introducing bills that would allow more people to waive routine shots. Other vaccine-related bills touch on some of the opposition that’s been growing since the pandemic. Alabama and Oklahoma have proposals that would require parental consent for any vaccine given to minors. New York and Oklahoma have bills that would require providers to give people getting shots a full ingredient list. And bills in Indiana and North Dakota propose creating databases where anyone can file a report about a potential issue after a vaccine.
Still, there is one outlier. In Hawaii, legislators are looking to eliminate all nonmedical waivers after struggling for years with high exemption rates.
Parents Blind to How Much Their Kids Are Learning
That children and their parents see things differently comes as no surprise. The real question is how big a difference. When it comes to schools, it’s a lot.
A new study finds that parents overestimate how much students “love” school, how much kids think they learn, and how much interest their children have in what they learn at school. That size gap in understanding signals that parents and schools alike are missing an opportunity to keep kids invested in their academics, according to the research released this month by the Brookings Institution.
Parents across all demographic categories appear to overestimate students’ enjoyment of school and how engaged they are there, according to the survey of more than 60,000 students in grades 3-12.
Overall, 60 percent of students say they learn a lot in school while 78 percent of parents say the same about their children. Meanwhile, 41 percent of students say they love school, and 71 percent of parents believe their kids do—a gap of 30 percentage points.
The gaps tend to be smaller when students are younger, with only a 2 percentage-point gap for 3rd graders and their parents to a 31 percentage-point gap at the 12th grade level.
Parents, though, aren’t to be blamed if they don’t fully understand the reality of their children’s school experience, said Rebecca Winthrop, one of the report’s authors.
Families often receive limited information from schools about students’ performance and engagement. The most common benchmark of students’ progress is periodic report cards. But they can be misleading and lull parents into a false sense of security, she said.
Grades, for instance, are only one indicator of success.
Absent a more holistic view of students’ performance, parents aren’t likely to worry about their children’s progress, and they could miss critical opportunities to support or advocate for them as a result, she said.
Who Pays for Repairing School-Issued Devices?
Maintaining 1-to-1 computing environments in schools comes with a big hurdle: figuring out who is responsible for paying when devices need to be repaired or replaced, especially as district leaders report that one of the biggest challenges is students damaging or destroying devices.
Half of district and school administrators say the district or school is responsible for the cost of repairs or replacements, unless it’s the student’s fault, according to an EdWeek Research Center survey.
“A lot of that has to do with the fact that we are requiring students to have these [devices] in order to access their educational materials,” said Sarah Radcliffe, the director of future-ready learning for the Altoona district in Wisconsin. “So we have to take on some of the burden in keeping them in good working order.”
In Altoona, if there’s intentional damage, such as if a student pokes the screen with a pen, then the district charges the student for the materials to repair the screen, Radcliffe said. The district repairs accidental damage at no cost to families, but repeated accidental damage could lead to the family paying for some repairs.
Even if families don’t pay, the students don’t lose access to their device because it’s necessary for learning, Radcliffe said. That means districts like Altoona have to take into account those unrecovered costs when planning their technology budgets.
In fact, more than a quarter of district and school administrators say their district or school always pays regardless of the nature of the damage, according to the survey.
The challenge of maintaining 1-to-1 programs and paying for repairs is now exacerbated by lack of funding, experts say. Pandemic-relief funds that helped districts make huge investments in technology have expired, and districts that relied on those funds now have to find other ways to repair or replace school-issued student devices.
