David C. Berliner: A Hug for Jennifer | Diane Ravitch's blog

David C. Berliner: A Hug for Jennifer | Diane Ravitch's blog

David C. Berliner: A Hug for Jennifer 

David C. Berliner, one of our nation’s most honored researchers of education, shared this essay for readers of the blog.

                                             A Hug for Jennifer

          I met Jennifer for the first time at a party. She taught elementary school to mostly white, mostly middle-class kids in a suburb of San Francisco. We chatted about education for a while and she invited me to visit her class. I like visiting classes, in part, because they are always so difficult to understand. It is an enormous intellectual challenge to witness and make sense of the interaction of teachers and students with curriculum materials in a classroom setting. Sometimes, with teachers you come to admire, it is like trying to put together a recipe after  tasting  a delicious food. It’s hard to figure out the ingredients that made it so special. 

More frequently, my observations struck me as a bit like trying to study what comes out the end of a funnel–without much confidence that you know all about what went into the funnel. It’s hard to figure out the ingredients—the stuff that makes a classroom hum or fail. Some of the things that are sure to have entered the funnel are: all of society’s values; the pop culture of today, particularly as represented on television; the individual child-rearing practices of 25 or so different families; the economic, CONTINUE READING:  David C. Berliner: A Hug for Jennifer | Diane Ravitch's blog

David Berliner: Why Religious Schools Should Never Receive a Dollar of Public Funding | Diane Ravitch's blog

David Berliner: Why Religious Schools Should Never Receive a Dollar of Public Funding | Diane Ravitch's blog

David Berliner: Why Religious Schools Should Never Receive a Dollar of Public Funding

Since the 2020 election, when Republicans won many seats in state legislatures, there has been an explosion of proposed voucher laws, to allow people to get public money to pay for religious schools. David Berliner, one of our nation’s most distinguished researchers of education, explains why funding religious schools with public money is a terrible idea.

Why Religious Schools Should Never Receive a Dollar of Public Funding

David C. Berliner Regents’ Professor Emeritus

Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College Arizona State University

I believe in separation of church and state. I think it has done the United States a lot of good to honor Jefferson’s metaphoric and aspirational “wall” between the two. I also believe that money corrupts too many people and too many institutions. Holding those two beliefs simultaneously means 1.) I never want to see any local, state, or federal money used to aide any religious group, and 2.) I don’t want to see any religious group, or affiliated religious organizations, donating to the campaigns of public officials. The latter may be impossible to stop in an era of “dark money.” But the former—government support of religious institutions– is almost always done in public view and is worth stopping CONTINUE READING: David Berliner: Why Religious Schools Should Never Receive a Dollar of Public Funding | Diane Ravitch's blog

David Berliner on the Travesty of Public Funds for Religious Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

David Berliner on the Travesty of Public Funds for Religious Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog

David Berliner on the Travesty of Public Funds for Religious Schools

David Berliner, a distinguished scholar of American education, is writing a long essay about the dangers of public funding for religious schools. Currently numerous red states are considering proposal to expand vouchers and transfer more public funds to religious schools, typically without accountability. Their actions will overturn the historic tradition of separation of church and state. As the Pastors for Texas Children often say, that separation guarantees religious Liberty.

Berliner writes:

Public dollars for support of religious schools costs citizens billions of dollars annually, and ends up supporting some horrible things. A contemporary example of this is the criteria for entrance to the Fayetteville Christian School (FCS) in North Carolina. 

The Fayetteville Christian School is recipient, in a recent school year, of $495,966 of public money. They got this in the form of school vouchers that are used by students and their families to pay for the students religious schooling. The entrance requirements for this school, and other religious schools like it, frighten me, though they are clearly acceptable to North Carolinians. From their website, in 2020:¹

“The student and at least one parent with whom the CONTINUE READING: David Berliner on the Travesty of Public Funds for Religious Schools | Diane Ravitch's blog