Tag Archives: Pro Publica

House Bill 1136

The assault on democracy and rationality isn’t just at the federal level.

At the start of every session, the culture warriors in Indiana’s terrible legislature introduce all kinds of wacky and extreme bills. Some of them are so wacky and so extreme that they go no farther. They don’t even get committee hearings.

Of course, lots of perfectly reasonable measures–even obviously excellent ones, if sponsored by Democrats–also go to the  bill graveyard.

Media folks who cover the statehouse have learned not to take bills seriously until there are indications that they have some chance of actually passing. That should be our reaction to House Bill 1136, which has received a good deal of publicity and generated significant anguished pushback. H.B. 1136 provides that, if more than 50% of students who live within a school corporation’s boundaries are enrolled in a school that isn’t operated by that school corporation, “the school corporation must be dissolved and all public schools of the school corporation must be transitioned to operating as charter schools.” The bill establishes a new governing board and procedures for dissolving and reorganizing the school corporation.

I tend to lump this bit of legislative nastiness (it’s clearly aimed at urban schools that serve minority and low-income kids) in with the other looney-tune measures that will go to the big bill cemetery in the sky, but it does trigger several of my pet peeves, the most “peevish” of which is lawmakers’ persistent war on public education.

Before I focus on recent evidence bolstering my argument that vouchers are simply a way to evade the First Amendment and allow legislators to send tax dollars to religious schools, I need to focus on a preliminary pet peeve: the public discourse that makes no distinction between charter schools and the private schools that accept vouchers. 

Charter schools are public schools. They operate under restrictions that don’t apply to private schools (like the Constitution). Overall–depending upon their sponsorship and management–their performance has been positive. That’s overall, but–just as with traditional public schools–there are exceptions. (Most of the problems, according to what I’ve read, have come from charters managed by private, for-profit companies.)

Voucher-accepting private schools are another matter entirely, as I have repeatedly documented.

Pro Publica recently added to the huge volume of data on that subject.

In an article titled “On a Mission From God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools,” the report focused on the religious underpinnings–and successes–of the voucher movement. The article highlighted three conclusions.

The Ohio Model: Rarely seen letters show how the voucher movement started in the 1990s as a concealed effort to finance urban parochial schools and expanded to a much broader push.

Helping the Affluent: An initiative promoted as a civil rights cause — helping poor kids — is increasingly funneling money to families who already easily afford private school tuition.

The Voucher Deficit: Expanding programs threaten funding for public schools and put pressure on state budgets, as many religious-based schools enjoy new largesse.

I really urge you to click through and read the entire hair-raising report, which documents the real purposes of educational vouchers: they are tools meant to enrich religious institutions and the well-to-do, and undermine separation of church and state.

The risks of universal vouchers are quickly coming to light. An initiative that was promoted for years as a civil ­rights cause — helping poor kids in troubled schools — is threatening to become a nationwide money grab. Many private schools are raising tuition rates to take advantage of the new funding, and new schools are being founded to capitalize on it. With private schools urging all their students’ families to apply, the money is flowing mostly to parents who are already able to afford tuition and to kids who are already enrolled in private schools. When vouchers do draw students away from public districts, they threaten to exacerbate declining enrollment, forcing underpopulated schools to close. More immediately, the cost of the programs is soaring, putting pressure on public school finances even as private schools prosper. In Arizona, voucher expenditures are hundreds of millions of dollars more than predicted, leaving an enormous shortfall in the state budget. States that provide funds to families for homeschooling or education-related expenses are contending with reports that the money is being used to cover such unusual purchases as kayaks, video game consoles and horseback-­riding lessons.

Strategists behind this effort started with targeted programs that placed needy kids in parochial schools. Then they fought to expand the benefits to far richer families — “a decadeslong effort by a network of politicians, church officials and activists, all united by a conviction that the separation of church and state is illegitimate.” 

So much for that pesky Constitution…

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An Object Lesson

The most frustrating thing about Indiana’s terrible legislature is the dismissal of empirical evidence by the super-majority of GOP ideologues impervious to any facts contrary to their closely-held beliefs.

When reality conflicts with the religious fundamentlism that permeates their worldviews, Indiana citizens suffer. We are already seeing the truly horrific consequences of Indiana’s abortion ban–women suffering and dying unnecessarily, and large parts of the state becoming ob/gyn deserts. We are also seeing it in the legislative (and gubernatorial) insistence on funding religious schools at the expense of the state’s public schools, despite the amply-documented negative effects on education. (People familiar with education policy have long been aware that vouchers were intended as an Establishment Clause “work around,” not as an educational tool.)

The Republican super-majority–and Governor-elect Braun–are intent upon extending Indiana’s dreadful school voucher program despite its costs, despite the failure of vouchers to do any of the things that were initially promised, and despite the fact that voters have rejected voucher programs in every state where a vote has been allowed.

Not only has the General Assembly continued to send tax dollars to private schools that are overwhelmingly religious, that money has continued to flow with minimal oversight. A recent investigation by Pro Publica has documented what happens when tax dollars support schools while imposing virtually no rules or offering any transparency.

The article began by chronicling  the closing of the “Title of Liberty” private school. The principal informed parents that

They could transfer their children to another private or charter school, or they could put them in a microschool that the principal said she’d soon be setting up in her living room. Or there was always homeschooling. Or even public school.

These families had, until this moment, embodied Arizona’s “school choice” ideal. Many of them had been disappointed by their local public schools, which some felt were indoctrinating kids in subjects like race and sex and, of course, were lacking in religious instruction. So they’d shopped for other educational options on the free market, eventually leading them to Title of Liberty.

Arizona offers Empowerment Scholarship Accounts — a type of school voucher spreading to more than a dozen other states. ESAs give parents an average of over $7,000 a year in taxpayer funds, per child, to spend on any private school, tutoring service or other educational expense of their choice. There is little oversight, and as the article notes, no transparency.

The state never informed parents who were new to Title of Liberty and were planning to spend their voucher money there that it had previously been a charter school called ARCHES Academy — which had had its charter revoked last school year due to severe financial issues. Nor that, as a charter, it had a record of dismal academic performance, with just 13% of its students proficient in English and 0% in math in 2023.

When it was a charter (which is a type of public school), these things could be known. There was some oversight. The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools had monitored the school’s finances and academics, unanimously coming to the conclusion that it should be shut down.

Arizona does no vetting of new voucher schools. Not even if the school or the online school “provider” has already failed, or was founded yesterday, or is operating out of a strip mall or a living room or a garage, or offers just a half hour of instruction per morning. (If you’re an individual tutor in Arizona, all you need in order to register to start accepting voucher cash is a high school diploma.)

You really should click through and read the whole, depressing article.

To the best of my knowledge, Indiana’s program doesn’t pay individual tutors, but there is a similar lack of accountability. (Charter schools–which, unlike voucher schools, are public schools–are supervised and must have institutional authorizers. It’s an important difference.)

Honest folks who numbered among the original proponents of Indiana’s voucher program have conceded the failure of the program to achieve its desired results.  Michael Hicks, for example, who had been an advocate of expansive “school choice,” recently wrote that “school choice effects are smaller than almost anyone hoped or expected. Today, it’s clear that the average student in private school underperforms their public school counterparts (charter schools tend to out-perform both).”

I don’t expect Indiana’s legislature to modify its support in response to the mountains of negative evidence, just as I don’t expect them to reconsider the state’s abortion ban just because women die. Over 90% of Indiana’s vouchers go to religious schools, and supporting those schools is their actual definition of “success.”

And we wonder why educated students flee the Hoosier state…..

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Quasi-Church And State

When does a political ideology become a religion–or a political nonprofit a church?

Those questions weren’t uncommon back in the days of the “evil empire,” when a number of pundits suggested that the fervor of communists and fellow-travelers was indistinguishable from that of devout religious believers. When the world became less bipolar–when there was no longer a single, global menace (or savior)– those comparisons also faded away, but the underlying issue remains.

Now, with a new twist.

Is a religion any belief system characterized by an accepted dogma? Wikipedia defines dogma as “a belief or set of beliefs that is accepted by the members of a group without being questioned or doubted,” and goes on to note that It may be in the form of an “official system of principles or doctrines of a religion” –and may also be “found in political belief-systems, such as Marxism, communism, capitalism, progressivism, liberalism, conservatism, and fascism.”

Belief in a deity characterizes some, but certainly not all religions, so that “marker” isn’t dispositive.

If a political ideology is indistinguishable from a religion, what are the consequences for a legal system that separates church from state?

That is just one of the questions that arises from a recent trend reported by Pro Publica— a growing number of right-wing political entities have been petitioning the IRS to declare them churches.  That status allows such organizations to shield themselves from financial scrutiny, which is undoubtedly the prime (and arguably corrupt) motivation. The article focused on the Family Research Council (FRC), a rightwing think-tank

The Family Research Council’s multimillion-dollar headquarters sit on G Street in Washington, D.C., just steps from the U.S. Capitol and the White House, a spot ideally situated for its work as a right-wing policy think tank and political pressure group.

From its perch at the heart of the nation’s capital, the FRC has pushed for legislation banning gender-affirming surgery; filed amicus briefs supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade; and advocated for religious exemptions to civil rights laws. Its longtime head, a former state lawmaker and ordained minister named Tony Perkins, claims credit for pushing the Republican platform rightward over the past two decades.

What is the FRC? Its website sums up the answer to this question in 63 words: “A nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to articulating and advancing a family-centered philosophy of public life. In addition to providing policy research and analysis for the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government, FRC seeks to inform the news media, the academic community, business leaders, and the general public about family issues that affect the nation from a biblical worldview.”

In the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, though, it is also a church, with Perkins as its religious leader.

There are advantages to this change in status. Since the FRC was classified as a church (in 2020), it no longer had to file a public tax return, known as a Form 990. Form 990s list the salaries of key staffers, the names of board members and the identities of related organizations.  They also contain information about any large payments to independent contractors and any grants the organization has made. And as the article notes, “Unlike with other charities, IRS investigators can’t initiate an audit on a church unless a high-level Treasury Department official has approved the investigation.”

Very convenient. And not, evidently, an anomaly. FRC’s former parent organization, Focus on the Family, became a church for tax purposes in 2016.

In a statement, the organization said it made the switch largely out of concern for donor privacy, noting that many groups like it have made the same change. Many of them claim they operated in practice as churches or associations of churches all along.

FRC has defended the status change as a protection of its “religious liberty” rights, and noted that Treasury Department rules exempt church organizations from the mandatory coverage requirements for contraceptives. They can also discriminate with impunity–refusing to hire women or LGBTQ citizens.

I’m sure that delights them.

The article identified a rogues’ gallery of extremist rightwing organizations that have chosen to identify themselves to the IRS as churches, and noted that the IRS has been inexcusably lax in determining whether those organizations actually meet the agency’s own definition of a church.

Forgive me if I’m being dense here, but if these organizations are churches, can’t the IRS enforce the Johnson Amendment–the rule that prohibits churches from engaging in nakedly political activity–and strip them of their tax-exempt status? (If any of my readers are tax lawyers, please weigh in…)  FRC pretends that an affiliated entity is responsible for its direct political activities, but that entity apparently has no employees.

At this point, the various “churches” of Theocracy-R-Us are having it both ways.

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Corporatism On Display

I used to be persuaded by arguments from “big Pharma” that the enormous costs of research and development justified the sometimes staggering prices of new drugs.

That justification seemed eminently reasonable, until I learned some inconvenient facts. For example, the amounts drug companies spend on television advertising (“ask your doctor for the purple pill”) exceeds the amounts they spend on research and development. And for another example, significant percentages of those front-end R and D costs are paid for by citizens’ tax dollars, through government research and grants.

Those discoveries left me disgusted, but unsurprised, by recent reporting from Pro Publica.

Five years ago, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tried to plug a crucial hole in its preparations for a global pandemic, signing a $13.8 million contract with a Pennsylvania manufacturer to create a low-cost, portable, easy-to-use ventilator that could be stockpiled for emergencies.

This past September, with the design of the new Trilogy Evo Universal finally cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, HHS ordered 10,000 of the ventilators for the Strategic National Stockpile at a cost of $3,280 each.

But as the pandemic continues to spread across the globe, there is still not a single Trilogy Evo Universal in the stockpile.

Instead last summer, soon after the FDA’s approval, the Pennsylvania company that designed the device — a subsidiary of the Dutch appliance and technology giant Royal Philips N.V. — began selling two higher-priced commercial versions of the same ventilator around the world

When Trump belatedly invoked the Defense Production Act, forcing General Motors to begin mass-producing a different company’s ventilator (for which taxpayers will also pay), no one even mentioned the Trilogy Evo Universal.

Nor did HHS officials explain why they did not force Philips to accelerate delivery of these ventilators earlier this year, when it became clear that the virus was overwhelming medical facilities around the world.

An HHS spokeswoman told ProPublica that Philips had agreed to make the Trilogy Evo Universal ventilator “as soon as possible.” However, a Philips spokesman said the company has no plan to even begin production anytime this year.

Instead, Philips is negotiating with a White House team led by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to build 43,000 more complex and expensive hospital ventilators for Americans stricken by the virus.

It’s despicably corrupt to use a pandemic to–excuse my phrasing here–suck even more deeply at the public tit. But it is the foreseeable result of America’s thoughtless, decades-long embrace of “privatization” and “public-private partnerships,” which have all too often simply been a more sophisticated form of patronage. Old-style patronage–whatever its flaws– mostly benefitted working people; you helped to get out the vote and if your candidate won, you got a (usually low-level) job with the city. Now, you write a nice fat check to the candidate and your company gets a lucrative contract with the city. (And no one gets out the vote, which is a different problem..)

As Pro Publica reported,

The story of the Trilogy Evo Universal, described here for the first time, also raises questions about the government’s reliance on public-private partnerships that public health officials have used to piece together important parts of their disaster safety net.

“That’s the problem of leaving any kind of disaster preparedness up to the market and market forces — it will never work,” said Dr. John Hick, an emergency medicine specialist in Minnesota who has advised HHS on pandemic preparedness since 2002. “The market is not going to give priority to a relatively no-frills but dependable ventilator that’s not expensive.”

Reagan began what has since become a concerted attack on the very idea of government–an attack that has benefitted corporations and businesses in a position to profit, but has eroded (“hollowed out” in the words of one scholar) the capacity of government to act on behalf of the common good.

We are about to see what happens–and how many people needlessly die–when what is left of our hollowed-out governing institutions is incompetent and corrupt.

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