A story in the Washington Post this week spotlights a national trend familiar to those following the governor’s “education reform” efforts here in Arkansas: Public money is increasingly going to pay tuition at religious private schools.
Vouchers go by various names — in Arkansas, they’re known as “Education Freedom Accounts,” which sounds like a stray phrase from a dystopian novel written by an AI program, but the gist is the same. Taxpayer money is used to help families pay the tuition at private schools.
The Post examined the five states that currently have the largest voucher programs — Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, Arizona and Pennsylvania. These states have implemented universal programs, meaning that all K-12 students are eligible to apply, with around 700,000 students participating. Where data was available, the Post found that the overwhelming majority of those students were attending religious schools: 91% in Ohio, 96% in Wisconsin, 82% in Florida and 87% in Arizona.
“Nationally, about 77 percent of students attending private school go to religious schools, according to federal data,” the Post reports. “But in the states with big voucher programs, the share of money going to religious schools is higher — in some cases, much higher.”
Arkansas passed its own voucher program last year as part of Arkansas LEARNS, the state’s education overhaul law. The program is limited to certain categories of students this year but will eventually become universal for the 2025-26 school year. The Post’s article doesn’t cover Arkansas, though it includes a photo of Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signing LEARNS into law, a signal that Arkansas will likely soon be taking its place among the nation’s most sizeable voucher programs.
Like the states profiled in the Post article, the schools benefitting from LEARNS vouchers this year are overwhelmingly Christian schools. Around 38% of the total number of students receiving vouchers attend ten schools, which tend to be among the largest and most expensive in the state. Nine of those ten are Christian schools. The lone exception is Pulaski Academy, which was originally founded as a segregation academy.
Private schools receiving vouchers do not have to play by the same rules as public schools. They mandate religious participation and discriminate against students or families from different religious backgrounds or who identify as LGBTQ.
For example, last November, the Arkansas Department of Education used its public platform to release what amounted to an infomercial for Cornerstone Christian Academy, a K-12 private school in the southeast Arkansas town of Tillar. According to the school’s handbook, “students will NOT be permitted to attend CCA who profess any sort of sexually immoral lifestyle or an openly sinful lifestyle including but not limited to: promiscuity, homosexuality, transgenderism.”
This sort of policy is not all that unusual at more conservative Christian private schools, but it raises some thorny questions about the state’s voucher program. LEARNS vouchers funneled somewhere in the neighborhood of $419,000 in public funds to Cornerstone this school year, part of $32.5 million projected to be spent on private school vouchers across the state.
The Department of Education video sells vouchers as a vehicle of parental choice, but ultimately it’s the schools themselves that decide who can — or cannot — attend. The only obligation these schools face in terms of admission is that they cannot discriminate based on race, color or national origin, which would violate federal law. But unlike traditional public schools, they are under no obligation to take all comers.
That’s not all. More or less everything about Cornerstone Christian Academy undercuts the notion of separation of church and state. The school uses the Bob Jones curriculum (“based on the authority of Scripture, our science program establishes for students a young-earth model that views the earth and the universe as being about 6,000 or 7,000 years old”), as well as materials from similar Christian publishers Abeka Book and Positive Action for Christ. Christian studies is a mandatory class at Cornerstone, according to the school’s website; chapel is held every Wednesday. “We get to learn about God,” one student says in the Department of Education video.
As part of the application process at Cornerstone, parents are asked what church they attend and must agree to “maintain the basic principles of biblical morality in my home.” They also must report whether their child has been involved with “sexual immorality” and “give a statement as your child’s personal experience and faith in Jesus Christ. If your child has not yet made that decision, please note.”
From the Washington Post story:
To critics, the burgeoning number of taxpayer-financed religious students adds up to an unwelcome mingling of government and religion, and a drain on dollars that could support public schools, which unlike private schools are required to serve all students. That occurs both when public school students use vouchers to attend private schools — meaning their public schools lose per-pupil funding — and when the state spends large amounts of money on students whose families would otherwise pay private school tuition themselves.
The trend has been bolstered by the increasingly rightwing Supreme Court, the Post notes:
Like the growth in vouchers, those developments stem in large part from a shift in how the conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court, operating along largely ideological lines, has redefined religion’s role in education and public life.
For much of the 20th century, a bipartisan consensus protected a separation of church and state. But in recent decades, advocates who thought separation had gone too faradvanced the opposite argument: Limiting the rights of religious groups in schools and other government settings constitutes discrimination. …
Richard Katskee, a professor who directs the Appellate Litigation Clinic at Duke University School of Law, said recent court actions represent a sweeping change in the relationship between government and religion.
“We are, as a society, underwriting religion,” he said. “That’s not what the public schools are supposed to be about.”