by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Oct 26, 2016
In the dust-up of this election year, education settled near the bottom of the heap of news headlines. Before the final presidential debate, a Politico banner read, “Will Trump and Clinton Ever Debate Education?” Both candidates have education policy proposals, but these ideas have been buried under column inches devoted to hacked emails and sordid trysts.
Education may not be in the headlines now, but learning is front and center for parents and families across the country every day. And no matter who is elected, states and the federal government stand to ask taxpayers for another $600 billion or more next year to cover the educations of some 50 million students.
So, what could Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s education proposals mean for taxpayers and parents?
In September, Donald Trump announced that he is in favor of school choice. Before we celebrate, know that Trump volunteered taxpayers to pay $20 billion to provide more choices in education for low income students. The money will purportedly be repurposed federal funds—not requiring new money—yet this proposal is a stretch.
The largest portion of federal money for K-12 is directed by Title I of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Washington’s education law, and totals approximately $15 billion, a figure close to the amount Trump plans to redirect. Last year, Congress fought for months over whether Title I could be repurposed as a school choice option for families. The proposal eventually failed.
Thus, Trump says he can do what Congress couldn’t with a significant sum of federal education money. Herein lies the problem with federal officials trying to meddle in issues best left to states, like education: It’s easy for a Washington lawmaker to overestimate his ability to build consensus around ideas he may like and underestimate the drudgery of the deliberative process.
Such drudgery has a purpose, namely to protect individuals and their interests by requiring lawmakers to engage in intentional, consensus-building efforts first. Even if he can build a consensus in Congress, Trump would have to convince state leaders that his idea would not interfere with states’ school choice programs, like Georgia’s tax credit scholarships or Special Needs Scholarship Program.
Furthermore, regulations inevitably follow money from Washington. President Obama signed ESSA in December 2015, and education officials around the country are still deciphering what the law means for states. We may not see the full litany of regulations until November, nearly a year after Congress voted on the law and the president made ESSA official.
Hillary Clinton has designs on more taxpayer money at the pre-kindergarten, K-12, and postsecondary levels. She plans to require taxpayers to pay for preschool for all 4-year-olds, regardless of a child’s learning needs at that age; spend more taxpayer money on computer science and school facilities; and allow taxpayers to pay tuition for college students coming from families making $125,000 or less.
While Trump’s promises are too broad to help states’ different needs (and expensive), Clinton’s are too specific (and also expensive). The job market changes too fast and Washington moves too slowly to adequately forecast future needs. Meanwhile, ideas like more money for school buildings are hardly innovative but surely expensive. The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henniger wrote recently that Clinton’s campaign promises amount to “pouring more federal money down the public-schools mine shaft.”
Regardless of what happens November 8, parents and state lawmakers should not expect the White House to solve the problems presented by only 37 percent of high school seniors being prepared for college work. Parents need quality opportunities to prepare their child for the future, whatever it may hold. State lawmakers should continue to broaden students’ horizons with education savings accounts and individual course choice options and protect existing learning opportunities like charter schools and private school scholarships.
Lawmakers’ responsibilities—especially state lawmakers’ responsibilities with respect to Washington—are to protect individual liberties and restore them as needed, no matter who sits in the Oval Office. Or perhaps because of who sits there.
Jonathan Butcher is a contributing scholar for the Georgia Center for Opportunity and Education Director at the Goldwater Institute.
The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the Georgia Center for Opportunity and are not intended to aid or hinder any political campaign or the passage of legislation before the US Congress or the Georgia General Assembly.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Mar 21, 2016
Like many observers, I was surprised and appalled by the events in Chicago a week ago, when Donald Trump’s campaign cancelled a rally in the face of concerted, well-organized protests both inside and outside the venue. Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have been all that surprised. It was a college campus, after all, and our students have become all too proficient and shutting down and shouting down speakers they don’t like. Donald Trump just received the same treatment campus social justice warriors have been meting out to a long and distinguished list of speakers. There’s nothing special about Trump in this regard.
But this isn’t another essay about the intolerance of campus activists or about the violence associated with Trump rallies, or even about the perfect storm that can be created when those two forces collide.
It’s about the First Amendment, which Trump invoked in responding on Twitter (apparently his favorite medium) to the events at and around the cancelled rally. Here’s his tweet: “The organized group of people, many of them thugs, who shut down our First Amendment rights in Chicago, have totally energized America!”
Some observers have been quick to point out that the First Amendment only protects speech against (some) government restrictions, not against private individuals or groups that interfere with your ability to speak your piece. Stated another way, neither side in a cacophonous shouting match is depriving the other of any First Amendment right, however both might in certain circumstances have a claim against government agents who sought to silence them.
So Donald Trump was speaking loosely on Twitter, which is par for the course, both for him and for his chosen medium of expression. But he actually was onto something that lawyers or pedants like me who sometimes try to sound lawyerly in front of a classroom all too frequently forget: a bill of rights, of which ours is an outstanding example, isn’t only the basis of an actionable legal claim. It is also meant to teach us which of rights are most important, which we should be most jealous of, and which we should respect in our daily lives as neighbors and citizens. In other words, a bill of rights can teach us what to cherish, both for ourselves and for others.
Let me explain by recurring to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. In the first chapter, Mill writes of a number of developments in “the struggle between Liberty and Authority,” the first of which was “obtaining a recognition of certain immunities, called political liberties or rights, which it was to be regarded as a breach of duty in the ruler to infringe.” Such a bill of rights—think of the Magna Carta as a prime example—historically preceded other measures to protect individual liberty, like institutional checks and balances and representative government. Indeed, even at the time of the American Founding there was no necessary connection between arguments insisting on the necessity of a Bill of Rights for the new constitution and those suggesting the advisability or necessity of judicial review. The former wasn’t thought necessarily to imply the latter as the principal vehicle of enforcement.
So what was, then, a Bill of Rights? It was an attempt to list the rights that the people regarded as most important to protect, by one means or another, from government encroachment. It was certainly addressed to those who exercised political power, warning them that such encroachments would evoke a response. But it was also addressed to the people, reminding them of the rights they should cherish and defend, so that any government attempt on them would indeed evoke an appropriately vigorous response. We’re not just supposed to wait for someone else to protect our rights, but, knowing what they are, we’re supposed to take it upon ourselves jealously and zealously to guard them.
The almost inevitable consequence of this jealous and zealous defense of rights is that it might be invoked in “technically” inappropriate contexts, against other citizens rather than against government. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if it prompts, not litigation (all too often Trump’s first recourse), but a little self-reflection. Perhaps we can remind ourselves, or perhaps we can be reminded, that the rights we cherish for ourselves we ought properly to cherish for everyone. When I claim freedom of speech for myself, I should remember that my freedom is not mine alone, but everyone’s. As I demand that my rights be respected (in the first instance by government, but ultimately by everyone), so I should respect the rights of others.
One possible result of loose rights talk, corrected not by lawyers, but by (say) political theorists or historians, is an appreciation of the roles that mutual respect and civility play in facilitating the speech that makes self-government possible. Here both Donald Trump and his detractors have a thing or two to learn. For Trump, while it’s entirely appropriate to be indignant when someone interrupts you, it’s altogether inappropriate to threaten or encourage a violent response. (In fact, if you want to get technical or legalistic here, the kind of speech in which Trump engages in response to hecklers approaches incitement to violence, which is potentially actionable and is not protected by the First Amendment.) For the protesters and hecklers, a decent respect for one’s fellow citizen requires that you let the man speak. If you disagree with him, find your own forum, don’t try to hijack his.
Courts in any event should be our last resort, especially if we cherish our rights and demand that others respect them. Above all, we should make ourselves worthy of respect, or, if you will respectable. That ought to be the first lesson of all our rights talk: with rights come responsibilities.
by Kimberly Sawatka | Feb 22, 2016
As a military brat sacrifice was my middle name. My siblings and I spent many family events, recitals, school plays, family dinners and holidays without my dad. We became exceptionally good at packing up our lives every couple of years and starting over in a new place, including a new school. This often meant in the middle of the school year too.
In each duty station we faced new challenges such as making new friends, finding someone to eat lunch with in the school cafeteria, and most of all worrying if we would be ahead or behind in our studies as part of a new class.
My parents would spend hours discussing our education with new teachers in order to figure out what learning track or reading group we needed to be added to.
Today, Georgia legislators are considering a bill that would ease the burden on military families as they are often required to move to multiple areas and schools.
Sen. Hunter Hill has introduced Senate Bill 395, the “Junior G.I.” bill, to allow the children of veterans, active duty military, national guardsman, and reservists to attend the school of their parents’ choice – using the money the state is already spending on their education in their current public school.
Students would not have to attend public school in order to be eligible, allowing those just moving to military bases around the state of Georgia to also participate in the scholarship program.
As a now military wife and mom, I see the benefits a program would have had on my education over the years, but also the positive impact that this could have for my child.
The military does not just enlist the service member, but the whole family – including the children. Let’s show our support for our service members and their families by contacting state legislators in support of the Junior G.I. scholarship program.
by Kimberly Sawatka | Jan 8, 2016
The new year has begun, which means writing resolutions, reorganizing the closets, forced time in the gym and change. For many Georgia parents, the new year brings hope for the passage of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and expansion of meaningful education choice.
It’s that hope that is bringing together more than 2,000 parents, students, educators and community leaders for the school choice rally at the Georgia State Capital on January 27th. The rally will take place at Liberty Plaza, next to the Georgia Capitol Building, to show support for allowing parents to decide how best to educate their children and to celebrate the options some families currently enjoy. The celebration is part of National School Choice Week’s nationwide spotlight on choice and empowering parents with the best education options to fit their children’s needs.
The program will begin at noon and feature student speakers, the National School Choice Week Dance, and a state proclamation declaring School Choice Week in Georgia.
In 2015 there were more than 11,000 events in support of choice throughout the United States, this year more than 13,000 schools, of all types, are participating in national celebrations around the country.
Join fellow Georgians later this month at the state’s capitol and show your support with the school choice dance. We want to see your moves!
Click here to watch dance video
Click here to watch dance video
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Nov 19, 2015
Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) have dominated the school choice policy conversations as of late. However, many people are still unsure what ESAs truly offer, and some of the terminology can be confusing.
ESAs are similar to an Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) or a Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) in terms of the flexibility they provide but are used to pay for education expenses. A portion of the state’s allocated dollars that are already designated for each child’s public education are instead loaded onto a debit card that parents use to customize their child’s education. This money can be used for any educational resources including tutors, textbooks, private-school, homeschooling curriculum, and virtual learning.
Often these programs are confused with Coverdell Education Savings Accounts which are instead set up with personal money invested into tax-free accounts. These Funds can be used at any eligible educational institution whether that be elementary, secondary, or postsecondary. With a regular ESA, funds are coming from “legislative appropriations, local districts, and the federal government.”
Several states have already implemented ESA programs. For example, Arizona offers ESAs to children with special needs, attending failing public schools, in the foster care system, or children of active-duty military. Nevada offers a universal ESA program, allowing all public school students the opportunity to obtain quality education in the environment that best fits his or her learning needs.
Parents know their child’s learning needs best, so they are best equipped to decide how these resources should be spent to ensure their child obtains a quality education. By having control over the money the state is already spending on their child, parents who were previously limited by income or geography, now have access to more educational options for their children. Parents can keep their child in their school if they’re happy with it, but ESAs give more options to parents who feel that their child’s current school environment isn’t meeting their needs.
You can learn even more about ESAs at esaga.org.
by Georgia Center for Opportunity | Aug 5, 2015
On July 25th, AJC columnist Jay Bookman dismissed Georgia House Speaker David Ralston’s “Pastor Protection Bill” as an essentially meaningless symbolic gesture. I’m uncharacteristically inclined to agree with him.
In its current form the bill simply states that “[n]o minister of the gospel or cleric or religious practitioner ordained or authorized to solemnize marriages according to the usages of the denomination, when acting in his or her official religious capacity, shall be required to solemnize any marriage in violation of his or her right to free exercise of religion.” This would seem to follow pretty directly from the First Amendment Free Exercise Clause, as University of Maryland law professor Mark Graber has observed.
While I’m not averse to symbolism and, indeed, regard it as an important teaching function of the law, the prospect that pastors will actually be compelled to perform same-sex marriages is a remote one. To be sure, in our current circumstances anything is possible, but that’s not one of the pressing concerns keeping me up at night.
Here are the things that, to my mind, are causes of concern:
- The tax-exempt status of churches and other faith-based institutions that remain faithful to the traditional understanding of marriage
- The eligibility of faith-based institutions (above all, schools, universities, and social service agencies) to compete on a level playing field for government funding if they continue to act in accordance with their long-held belief that marriage is between a man and a woman
- The ability of churches and other faith-based institutions—if they so choose—to demand doctrinal and behavioral conformity, not just of ministers, but of all employees
In a nutshell, I’m concerned that we’re facing a significant challenge to the ability of churches and other faith-based institutions to remain theologically and morally faithful while fully and equally participating in civil society.
And before I discuss these substantive concerns in a bit more detail, let me add a procedural worry. I fear that Speaker Ralston and many other Republicans, having been chastened by the religious freedom contretemps earlier this year in Indiana, Georgia, and elsewhere, will regard this pastor protection legislation as all they need to do. If true friends of religious liberty accept this down payment on a robust commitment to our first freedom as the full price, they will have left our religious institutions vulnerable to all sorts of threats. I recognize that some of my concerns will have to be addressed at the federal level by something like the First Amendment Defense Act, but there is no reason why Georgia could not provide similar protections at the state level. And I also recognize that laws are mere parchment barriers, weaker than constitutional provisions (which may themselves be no more than papier-mâché); neither will protect religious liberty from a public (or an elite) that has grown indifferent or hostile to it.
I turn now to the challenges, beginning with tax-exempt status. During the oral arguments for Obergefell v. Hodges, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli conceded to Justice Samuel Alito that the tax-exempt status of religious institutions that uphold the traditional understanding of marriage is “certainly going to be an issue.” The dissenters took note of this exchange. Chief Justice John Roberts said this:
Hard questions arise when people of faith exercise religion in ways that may be seen to conflict with the new right to same-sex marriage—when, for example, a religious college provides married student housing only to opposite-sex married couples, or a religious adoption agency declines to place children with same-sex married couples. Indeed, the Solicitor General candidly acknowledged that the tax exemptions of some religious institutions would be in question if they opposed same-sex marriage.… There is little doubt that these and similar questions will soon be before this Court.
Justice Clarence Thomas seconded this concern:
Numerous amici—even some not supporting the States—have cautioned the Court that its decision here will “have unavoidable and wide-ranging implications for religious liberty.” … In our society, marriage is not simply a governmental institution; it is a religious institution as well…. Today’s decision might change the former, but it cannot change the latter. It appears all but inevitable that the two will come into conflict, particularly as individuals and churches are confronted with demands to participate in and endorse civil marriages between same-sex couples.
Justice Samuel Alito spoke of the larger consequences of the Court’s decision:
Today’s decision usurps the constitutional right of the people to decide whether to keep or alter the traditional understanding of marriage. The decision will also have other important consequences.
It will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy. In the course of its opinion, the majority compares traditional marriage laws to laws that denied equal treatment for African-Americans and women … The implications of this analogy will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.
Perhaps recognizing how its reasoning may be used, the majority attempts, toward the end of its opinion, to reassure those who oppose same-sex marriage that their rights of conscience will be protected.… We will soon see whether this proves to be true. I assume that those who cling to old beliefs will be able to whisper their thoughts in the recesses of their homes, but if they repeat those views in public, they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.
Let me emphasize this last point, for it is a clear allusion to the context of Justice Alito’s exchange with the Solicitor General, which involved the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the IRS’s revocation of the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University over its policy forbidding interracial dating. If the analogy—insisted upon by the Court’s majority—between opposition to same-sex marriage and opposition to interracial marriage holds, then the former amounts to the same sort of bigotry as the latter and, perhaps, deserves the same legal treatment.
In the Bob Jones case, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment Free Exercise Clause does not protect the University from the IRS’s revocation of its tax exempt status. The Court’s reasoning was that, in the first place, tax exempt status is granted under the Internal Revenue Code only to institutions and organizations that “serve a public purpose” and are not “contrary to established public policy.” While the University might well serve a public purpose, augmenting or supplanting public efforts at higher education, its practice of racial discrimination was certainly contrary to established public policy. And if free exercise claims, in the best instance, require strict scrutiny, overcoming racial discrimination is surely the kind of compelling state interest that justifies an abridgement of that right.
It doesn’t require much imagination or legal expertise to see how this line of reasoning could be applied to churches and other faith-based institutions that act “contrary to established public policy” in upholding the traditional understanding of marriage.
This doesn’t mean that the IRS must or will revoke their tax exempt status, only that it can, and that the First Amendment provides no sure defense against that action. If countering discrimination based on sexual orientation comes to be regarded as a compelling state interest, then the free exercise rights of religious institutions will likely have to give way if the IRS bows to the pressure that will surely be brought to bear on it to use its powers for that end.
I think that a case can be made on behalf of continuing to extend those exemptions, both in terms of the manifold human needs all churches address and in terms of preserving the pluralism that is the essential ground of free institutions and a free people, but we have to make that case over and over again, in the face of a faction that isn’t particularly interested in listening to it. I take some solace from the fact, that, at the moment, public opinion seems to favor religious freedom, but that delicate flower needs to be carefully cultivated.
Now, if tax exemptions are a problem, then you know eligibility for government grants will be. To be sure, this isn’t an issue for houses of worship as houses of worship (which, generally speaking are not and should not be eligible for government grants), but it is one for schools and colleges, as well as for social service agencies. While the Supreme Court has frequently upheld the channeling of government aid to religious institutions under certain circumstances (see, for example, Mitchell v. Helms, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, and the Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization case), it has also held that governments are perfectly within their rights to deny otherwise generally available aid and facilities to religious organizations (see, for example, Locke v. Davey and CLS v. Martinez).
Governments can attach any number of conditions to the aid they provide. Adoption agencies may be required to place children with couples without regard to the gender of the partners. Universities may be required to provide housing—if they provide it at all—to couples that are married in the eyes of the state, regardless of whether those marriages have the sanction of the sponsoring religious body. And if you put the recent EEOC ruling on sexual orientation together with the way in which the Department of Education is interpreting Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, it’s pretty easy to see how a lot of government money could be riding on conformity with what appears to be the new normal in regard to sexual orientation and marriage.
For higher education institutions, access to government money is a big deal. According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, 55% of spending on undergraduate education in 2009-10 came from federal aid (which amounted to $124 billion that year). While there are a few colleges (Hillsdale and Grove City, for example) that take pride in not accepting a dime of federal money, most would at the moment not be able to survive without it.
Again, this doesn’t have to happen. Congress could pass legislation that protects religious freedom, or agencies could voluntarily refrain from impinging on it. But pressure will be brought to bear on behalf of those who, as they would put it, don’t want to subsidize discrimination.
This brings me to my next concern, the religious hiring rights of churches and faith-based organizations. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act permits them to take religion into account when hiring. And the “ministerial exception” based in the First Amendment—recently vindicated in the Hosanna-Tabor case—means that a number of federal laws granting employees enforceable rights cannot be applied to those a church holds out as ministers. But these provisions do not provide comprehensive protection of religious hiring rights. There is certainly a gap between the legislatively-acknowledged right to hire coreligionists and the constitutionally-grounded ministerial exception. What if someone who signs a statement of faith as a condition of employment comes out as gay and/or enters into a same-sex marriage? Unlike the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, the recent EEOC ruling about sexual orientation discrimination does not contain exceptions for religious organizations. It isn’t at all clear that Courts will find that the Free Exercise Clause will protect them from EEOC complaints, in the event that these organizations choose to enforce doctrinal or behavioral requirements on their employees.
Now, this parade of horribles does not have to march into our sanctuaries. The threats that loom on the horizon do not have to materialize. Those who currently hold the upper hand in government may practice forbearance, either out of a genuine commitment to pluralism and religious freedom or out a fear of overplaying their hand and alienating public opinion.
We on our part must be both vigilant and winsome, vigorously defending and advocating for our rights when they are threatened and offering a model of the charity and forbearance that we hope others will also display. Our society is pluralistic, reflecting deep disagreements about how we ought to live. History teaches us that faith doesn’t require hegemony to prosper. But it does require that those who have it live it, loving their neighbors as themselves. There is room both for political and legal action, and for the building and maintenance of personal relationships. If we forgo the former, there may be no room for the latter. If we focus on the former, we run the risk that those parchment barriers will be swept away by the animosity we have done nothing to disarm and dispel.
