Conservative families have long been
accustomed to funding a public education system that teaches values contrary to
their own. Now, a Florida program that uses
public tax credits to support private scholarships for low-income students at
parochial schools is under fire because Christian schools are, well, Christian.
Having failed to defeat school-choice
programs on the merits, the Left is turning to anti-religious bigotry to attack
Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FL-TCSP) … which serves more than
100,000 children.
Florida’s initiative, the nation’s
largest school-choice program, has faced a sustained assault from the press for
the Christian curricula of some of its participating schools. The Huffington
Post created a chart chronicling the “offensive” views that Christian schools
teach – creationism to Biblical distinctions between the sexes. The Orlando
Sentinel called what students learn at private schools “hillbilly science” and
“a 12-year sentence to some anamorphic Sunday school class from hell.”
The Left’s anti-school-choice hysteria
increasingly echoes Senator (CA-D) Dianne Feinstein’s chiding of Judge Amy
Coney Barrett last year: “the dogma lives loudly within you.”
Media attacks on the curricula and
values in schools of choice rarely include an examination of the values of
taxpayer-funded public schools:
- In 2016, a Palm Beach high school teacher’s final exam included the question, “If Donald Trump becomes President of the United States, we are: A. Screwed, B. Screwed, C. Screwed, or D. Screwed behind a really YUGE wall that Mexico pays for.”
- Another school took its cheerleading squad and band to perform at a Hillary Clinton political rally as a field trip.
- A third Florida school required students to recite “There is no god but Allah; Muhammad is the prophet of God.” None of these incidents got much play in the Sentinel.
- In Albuquerque, New Mexico, an elementary school instructed teachers not to refer to students as “boys” and “girls” in order to make transgender students feel more welcome.
- In California, a teacher was placed on administrative leave for suggesting that if students were allowed to walk out of class without consequence to protest for gun control, they should also be permitted to cut school to oppose abortion.
- In Vermont, a high school flew a Black Lives Matter flag to celebrate Black History Month.
- And hundreds of public school districts across the country partner with Planned Parenthood to teach a sex-education curriculum that many parents find objectionable.
Disagreements among parental
supporters and critics of the aggressively secular public school curriculum are
unlikely to disappear soon. America is
not only an ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse nation, but also a
place where families often disagree on what a good education should look like.
Those who want to yank scholarships
out of the hands of low-income kids because they object to public support for
Christian education don’t think twice about forcing deeply religious parents to
pay taxes to teach progressive values … even as many of those parents pay
double freight for their own children’s private educations.
Any potential solution should follow
the model of higher education: Fund the student, not the school.
Public investment in education is
vital in a republic, but there’s no reason why taxpayers must bankroll a
monolithic agenda. It’s time to empower
parents to take back their role as directors of their children’s educations. In Florida, the TCSP is doing just that.
Rev.
Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.
Chaplain
(Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army
Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel
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