During her tenure as secretary of education, Betsy DeVos repeatedly 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 billion for K–12 education. Congress expected that the money would be shared, as federal education funds typically are, among the nation’s nearly 100,000 public and 7,000 charter 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 enrolled middle-income and affluent students. 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 private 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 charter schools to apply as nonprofits, thus double-dipping into both the public school and PPP funds (public schools were ineligible for PPP funding). Private and religious schools also qualified for PPP funds as nonprofits. Therefore, through a bill supposed to aid small businesses 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. Religious 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 Stimulus Watch. Antelope Valley Learning Academy, a charter school in California, received $7.8 million. The for-profit Academia Corporation charter school chain won $28.6 million. Buckingham Browne & Nichols, an elite private school in CONTINUE READING: The Dark History of School Choice | by Diane Ravitch | The New York Review of Books
