New York Review Books (2021-01-14)

During her tenure as secretary of

education, Betsy DeVos repeat-

edly asked Congress to allocate

billions of dollars for vouchers

for religious and private schools.

She was repeatedly rebuffed.

Even Republican members of

Congress were unwilling to use

the federal education budget to

pay for vouchers. After all, most

of their constituents’ children

attend public schools.

After the pandemic struck,

DeVos tried again. Late last

March, Congress passed a $2.2

trillion relief bill called the

Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and

Economic Security (CARES)

Act, which allocated $13.2 bil-

lion for K–12 education. Con-

gress expected that the money

would be shared, as federal

education funds typically are,

among the nation’s nearly

100,000 public and 7,000 char-

ter schools, as well as private

schools based on the number of low-

income students they enroll. DeVos

instead directed states to share the

money allotted to public schools with

private and religious schools that en-

rolled middle-income and affluent stu-

dents. The NAACP and several states

responded with lawsuits, arguing that

her order was illegal. Three federal

judges in different parts of the country

ruled against DeVos, and she backed

down.

But the Trump administration found

another way to enrich charter and pri-

vate schools. The Paycheck Protection

Program (PPP), also part of the CARES

Act, was supposed to rescue small

businesses. Lobbyists for the charter

industry, however, encouraged char-

ter schools to apply as nonprofits, thus

double-dipping into both the public

school and PPP funds (public schools

were ineligible for PPP funding). Pri-

vate and religious schools also qualified

for PPP funds as nonprofits. Therefore,

through a bill supposed to aid small busi-

nesses at risk of bankruptcy, thousands

of charter, private, and religious schools

received an average of about $855,000

each, compared to about $134,500 per

public school through CARES. Reli-

gious schools of every denomination,

elite private schools, and more than

one thousand charter schools received

anywhere from $150,000 to $10 million

each according to a database compiled

by a website called COVID Stimu-

lus Watch. Antelope Valley Learning

Academy, a charter school in Califor-

nia, received $7.8 million. The for-profit

Academia Corporation charter school

chain won $28.6 million. Buckingham

Browne & Nichols, an elite private

school in Cambridge, Massachusetts,

which has a thousand students, high

school tuition of $52,300, and an en-

dowment of $75 million, received be-

tween $5 million and $10 million. The

Paycheck Protection Program turned

out to be a multibillion- dollar bonanza

for nonpublic and religious schools, at

a time when most public schools lacked

the funding to pay for social distancing,

health measures, and personal protec-

tive equipment for students and staff.

DeVos has spent the past three de-

cades leading a campaign against pub-

lic schools and personally subsidizing

political candidates who favor private

alternatives. Trump’s decision to ap-

point her as secretary of education was

a reward to right-wing Christian groups

that share her extremist views. In The

Power Worshippers, Katherine Stewart

documents these groups’ long-standing

crusade against public schools. They

are “the New Right,” the Moral Ma-

jority, Christian nationalists, and the

Christian Coalition: angry crusaders

against secularism, liberalism, abor-

tion, feminism, gay rights, and public

schools. They include groups like Capi-

tol Ministries, Focus on the Family, the

Family Research Council, Concerned

Women for America, the American

Family Association, the Alliance De-

fending Freedom, the Council for Na-

tional Policy, and the World Congress

of Families. At least eleven members of

the Trump cabinet met weekly for Bible

study with Ralph Drollinger, the leader

of Capitol Ministries, who argues that

God favors private property owners

and that social welfare programs “have

no basis in Scripture.” The needs of the

poor, he writes, should be addressed

not by government but by “the husband

in a marriage . . . the family (if the hus-

band is absent) and . . . the church.”

Initially, the animating issue behind

this amalgam of radically conservative

groups was not abortion, Stewart’s re-

porting shows, but protection of the

tax- exempt status of segregated schools

and universities after the Supreme

Court’s Brown v. Board of Education

decision of 1954................