By Rob Roper
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court case Carson v. Makin, which ruled states such as Vermont that have publicly funded school choice programs cannot discriminate against religious schools, the conglomeration of public school special interests made up of the teachers’ unions, superintendents, school boards, etc. — collectively known as The Blob — finally sees its chance to snuff out all its independent school choice competition. The Blob is banking on the idea that Vermonters would rather eliminate all school choice in Vermont than allow some — any — parents to choose to send their kids to a religious school with taxpayer dollars.
WCAX did a story this week (June 15, 2023) discussing the issue, noting that the Education Equity Alliance (what The Blob understandably prefers to call itself), “supported legislation that would have met the Supreme Court standard by eliminating private school choice, except at the four historic academies — St. Johnsbury, Lyndon, Burr and Burton, and Thetford — which operate as defacto public schools.” (That last point is not exactly accurate, but we’ll let it go for now.)
The WCAX piece stated in apparent support of The Blob’s position that, “Through a public records request, we learned that at least 53 students enrolled in these religious high schools [now] have their tuition paid with public dollars, at a total cost of almost $600,000,” adding here a rather snarky “cha-ching” sound effect over the video, presumably to underscore the notion that this is an expensive policy.
But let’s look at those numbers for just a second.
$600,000 divided by 53 is $11,320 per kid. The average per pupil spending in Vermont’s public schools is $25,053, according the National Education Association’s calculations. So, by choosing to send a child to an independent religious school, parents are saving Vermont property taxpayers on average $13,733. That is, shall we say, quite a bit. Any and all “cha-chings” here fully accrue to the taxpayers’ benefit.
For a more specific example, the towns in Grand Isle County and Georgia of Franklin County in the northwest corner of the state are all tuitioning towns (meaning they enjoy school choice). Many parents choose to send their kids to the public South Burlington High School. The cost to do that for the 2023 school year is $17,378 per student. However, for the families who choose Rice Memorial High School, a Catholic school in Burlington, which is now an option following Carson v. Makin, the tuition cost to taxpayers is $12,900. Not as much savings as the averages, but still a lot. Certainly, worthy of a “cha-ching” for the property taxpayers of Grand Isle/Georgia.
Education, of course, is not just about money. It’s also about the quality of programs provided and student outcomes. So how do the religious schools stack up in the results column?
Sticking to the Rice example, according to its website, “Rice has 13 Honors classes and 15 AP classes accessible to all students. Rice is the only school in Chittenden County offering the prestigious Advanced Placement Capstone Diploma.” Rice students have average SAT scores that are more than twenty points higher than the state average, and 90 percent of graduates matriculate onto college.
More generally, an October 27, 2022 article in the Wall Street Journal analyzed the most recently published NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores and concluded, “Today, the divergence between Catholic schools and public ones is so great that if all U.S. Catholic schools were a state, their 1.6 million students would rank first in the nation across the NAEP reading and math tests for fourth and eighth graders.”
This is not a case of wealthy elites sending their children to exclusive private schools. Catholic schools are overwhelmingly lower cost than most private schools, and more economically diverse than public schools that restrict student access according to zip code (ie. segregated based on property value). And let’s not forget that when Covid hit, it was the Catholic schools that were the first to pay attention to the accurate science and re-open for in-person learning – a decision that put the best interests of students and families first. As such, if you were a Catholic school kid during Covid, you didn’t suffer two years of learning loss like your public school counterparts did.
Catholic schools also tend to attract more racially diverse student bodies as a disproportionate number of immigrants from dominantly Catholic Latin American countries, and African countries such as Nigeria, Uganda, and Tanzania gravitate toward Catholic schools for their children. Therefore, it is more than a bit ironic that the opponents of school choice cite “anti-discrimination” as a primary motive behind their desire to discriminate against religious schools and the families that would attend them.
A Catholic education may not be for everybody, and the beauty of a school choice system is that it doesn’t have to be. If you prefer drag queen story hour to a prayer before meals for your child’s upbringing, you have your pick of institutions. After all, those folks in Grad Isle/Georgia can choose South Burlington High School, Milton, BFA, or anyplace else that makes the most sense for them. But when lawmakers move to take those choices away and make decisions for others’ children that rightly should be made by parents, they are doing damage to families, students, and, as shown above, to taxpayers. They do this for the purpose of satisfying their own anti-Christian prejudices, and/or to pay off the politically powerful, special interest public education Blob. Not the most noble of motivations, for sure.
Rob Roper is a freelance writer who has been involved with Vermont politics and policy for over 20 years. This article reprinted with permission from Behind the Lines: Rob Roper on Vermont Politics, robertroper.substack.com
The good news is the criminal syndicate overplayed their hand by revealing their intolerance toward people of faith. They miscalculated the fact that the Muslim community, the Latin community, and many other communities do not relent on their traditional, multi-generational faiths. The criminal syndicate has done much damage with drug trafficking, media, and infiltrating education to turn society sideways and away from faith. They are moderately successful in creating luke-warm, fence sitting, lemmings to go along to get along and “accept” the unacceptable. However, the great awakening (unification of all colors, tribes and creeds) is taking hold because the criminal syndicate is exposed and they can’t hide from the ire coming at them from all sides. They may attempt to deem the People the enemy – it won’t work – it has never worked. Their game is coming to a cataclysmic end for them. Declared and decreed.
About 30 years ago all my kids were placed in the advanced programs. Suddenly, in the name of “equity”, the program was going to be dropped. So I taught my children to organize and demonstrate. We burnt no buildings, hurt no one. We demonstrated and won. They had no true justification, and everyone knew it. Little did I understand it was the first step to destroying the education system…and parents’ authority over their children and their needs.
Why are we non-parental homeowners forced to pay tax for schools? Is it a deliberate disconnect between parents and their children’s education? Is it to cause resentment between homeowners and apartment renters? You know, divide and conquer?
Stop kidding yourselves…the time is nigh…take a stand or knowingly accept the shackles of slavery.
I think it only right that those politically SELECTED (NOT elected!!!) here in Vermont get out of my kids education. And yes, it’s time Vermonters took off the sunglasses and showed some chutzpa in confronting the horrible reality that We-The-People have not elected ANYONE in …..how long???
Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.
Christians of all stripes need to realize that the democrat and progressive parties DO NOT have their best interests at heart. The solution then is simple…STOP VOTING FOR THESE CHARLATANS.
And you really think people voted for this mess???? Really??
A M E N !
We could do it for $4,000 per year with a different model, using existing structures similar to our two room school houses and give a much better education.
Ca- ching…we are getting so fleeced in this state, people have no idea. We’ve accepted the highway robbery as normal.
The arch enemy of a marxist is Jesus Christ and his followers. Truth an Love, vs lies, hatred and a disdain at best for your neighbor.
Thankfully good guys win. TGBTG. Christ has won, we only need to relax and enjoy his
Grace.
We’ve empowered our government to collect obscene amounts of resources from us. They’ve used it to build a monopoly schooling business. They put forth a product with which significant numbers of us citizens are dissatisfied. Then they demonstrate that they’ve made us into a captive customer pool. We can’t take our resources back and spend them on services we’d like for our kids. We actually submit to this bondage. Would it be prudent to use our political process to return control of these resources to the parent so they can educate their kids any way they want? Do we want these resources to be TAX money so the government can make judgments about what services we want to buy? Is it time for the government to return education to the citizens? …to get out of the schooling business?
We are so full of government protected monopolies……isn’t that fascism? Amazing how so many cant see the irony huh?
You can see the destruction caused by Unions & the NEA….combined, they are a toxic brew. But, look what Rice HS can do, with FAR less money:
“Rice has 13 Honors classes and 15 AP classes accessible to all students. Rice is the only school in Chittenden County offering the prestigious Advanced Placement Capstone Diploma.” Rice students have average SAT scores that are more than twenty points higher than the state average, and 90 percent of graduates matriculate onto college.”
When did the NEA and their unionized “Komrade teachers” lose sight of accountability and “student outcomes? My rwo kids were bright, worked hard. But our union run school abandoned any AP or Honors classes….it wasn’t fair. But truth was they didn’t want them. VT education is now the dumbing down of education to the lowest common denominator…..so there will be “Equality Of Outcome” (that is the goal of Progressive Socialists, to EQUALLY…dumb you)….no achievement of outcome based on work, ethics or hard fought study. no reward….it’s really more of a Communist idealism…. “equality” of all…. dummies.
Great Op-Ed in the WSJ, telling how Obama went on terrible attack on U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, a BLACK conservative & very popular. Obama cannot stand him – for what he stands for. . Catch in the Op-Ed, appropriate to what Mr. Roper get’s at, WSJ nails the “failing public schools”…and the “unions” that run them:
“But Democrats can’t abide that (Sen Scott a Black & conservative)…might upset their advantage among minority voters. If Republicans ever broke through to win 20% of the black vote, for example, Republicans would become the majority party. Democrats want to keep racial tensions boiling with accusations about “Jim Crow 2.0” and “systemic racism” lest more minority voters give GOP candidates a hearing.”
“Mr. Scott in particular is a threat because, as he often notes, his life story symbolizes the country’s racial evolution. He has never sugar-coated America’s racist history, noting how he has experienced it in his own life. But he doesn’t use that as an excuse to deny progress.”
“His ideas to reduce poverty are also far better than Mr. Obama’s default to government dependency and failing public schools. Mr. Scott wants to free minorities from union schools (to places like Rice HS in BTV) and escape poverty by giving them more economic opportunity. Those ideas are a dagger pointed at the heart of the progressive project that sustains a permanent underclass dependent on Democratic welfare programs. That is the real reason Mr. Obama is attacking Mr. Scott…..”
You forgot to mention white people and all Republicans. Social Justice advocates believe that the only remedy to past descrimination is present descrimination.
They hate religion because they believe it is the opioid of the masses, which keeps them from being liberated.