Conservatives chatter over choice, charters and CPAC

Presented by Sallie Mae®

With help from Marissa Martinez

REPUBLICANS TALK EDUCATION — The partisan fight over American schools was alive and well this weekend.

— Republican presidential candidates (and attention-seeking aspirants) made sure to mention education during appearances at the Conservative Political Action Conference and Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

— “I believe parents in the state of Florida should be able to send their kids to elementary school without having an agenda jammed down their throats,” state Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a visit to the Reagan library in California on Sunday. “They should not be teaching a second grader that they can choose their gender. That is wrong, and that is not going to happen in the state of Florida.”

— Former President Donald Trump called for “universal school choice” and for the election of school principals in remarks that won considerable applause during his Saturday night CPAC speech. “If any principal is not getting the job done, the parents should be able to fire that principal immediately and select someone new,” Trump declared.

— The former president also demanded Congress outlaw gender-affirming medical procedures for children. To that point, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told CPAC attendees that she will soon reintroduce her “Protect Children’s Innocence Act,” which proposes to make it a felony for a doctor to give such care to a minor, to the Republican-controlled House.

— Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said U.S. schools are at risk from internal divisions he described as the country’s greatest threat to national security. “When our schools teach kids to be ashamed of America, when they teach the 1619 Project instead of our founding, we’re at risk,” Pompeo told the CPAC crowd on Friday.

— “Xi Jinping is counting on us teaching our kids this crap. We’re not going to let it happen,” the former CIA director said. “A politicized history of America, fronted by the teachers’ unions, will lock parents out of our schools, and they’ll keep so-called gender transitions hidden from parents. This is immoral, this is evil, and it is dangerous.”

IT’S MONDAY, MARCH 6. WELCOME TO WEEKLY EDUCATION. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is changing how some things are done on the Senate HELP Committee, angering Republicans who accuse the Vermont senator of threatening a tradition of bipartisan comity.

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IN THE STATES

OKLAHOMA’S NEXT STEPS — An attempt to open a publicly funded religious charter school in the Sooner State has entered a critical phase that will play out in the coming weeks.

— Oklahoma’s state virtual charter school board is on track to vote as early as March 21 on a Catholic-led effort to open a first-of-its-kind public campus that teaches its students religious tenets just like a private institution.

— But legal footing that first supported a bid to launch the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School is now unsteady amid a political dispute between top Oklahoma Republicans — putting three school board members in line to spark a court fight over the boundaries between church and state, no matter how they vote.

— The application has divided Oklahoma Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt and newly elected Attorney General Gentner Drummond. Stitt published a full-throated defense of public religious charter schools last week, days after the attorney general withdrew a landmark legal opinion from his predecessor that opened the door to the taxpayer-funded sectarian institutions. The back-and-forth has intensified the quandary facing board officials.

— “Everybody’s asking the same kind of question: What’s next? How’s this going to unfold? It’s on everybody’s mind,” board Chair Robert Franklin told Weekly Education. “It’s kind of a watershed moment for us that have been in public education for a long time.”

— “It’s confounding to try to look at the merits of the application and set aside the politics,” Franklin said. “What’s become clearly obvious in my mind is this decision we’re getting ready to make is really just a step, because both sides of stakeholders have said they intend to take this to court. That’s not what I signed on for. It’s just a weighty feeling.”

— Catholic school officials were scheduled to meet with a charter board executive today to discuss procedural questions over the St. Isidore application, said Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma.

— “Someone will be suing the state of Oklahoma, that’s for certain,” Farley said during an interview on the CPAC sidelines. “Who that plaintiff will be remains to be seen. It depends, of course, on what the board does. But this is a very big priority for us. We’re going to see this through to its end, and the end is going to be a court decision somewhere.”

— Franklin said he has not yet decided on how he will vote, as he weighs the details of the school’s application.

— “I do have questions,” he said. “There are some things that they’re gonna have to dig in hard here on to convince me that this is a really good idea.”

First Look

BIG TECH CONTRACTS — Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is urging the Education Department to help schools safeguard student privacy today.

— Wyden wants the department to provide schools with model contract language that can be used to set terms with education technology companies. Such an effort, Wyden said, can “level the playing field” between under-resourced schools and companies.

— “A nationwide, Department-endorsed approach would give schools greater leverage when negotiating with the largest edtech players,” Wyden writes in a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona obtained by Weekly Education. “These companies have little incentive to negotiate and instead exploit their market power by telling school districts to ‘take it or leave it’ when it comes to invasions of their students’ privacy.”

— Scrutiny of the education technology industry has intensified in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, as schools turned to remote learning and online tools.

— The Federal Trade Commission last year set out plans to “crack down” on education technology companies that violate online privacy laws, a move commended by President Joe Biden. The president’s State of the Union address in February further unveiled a tech agenda focused on protecting children’s privacy.

— But while Wyden noted how the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act offers some federal protections to student education records, he said the law’s authors could not have foreseen the high volume and new types of data generated by digital tools used in schools today.

— “Many edtech companies are taking advantage of these lagging standards,” Wyden wrote, arguing that model contracts and terms of service can include terms to protect student privacy and require data security.

— “Millions of American children and their families are relying on school administrators to protect their privacy when it comes to selecting required classroom technology,” Wyden wrote. “But school districts rarely have the expertise, resources, or leverage to negotiate privacy terms and conditions with large, sophisticated technology companies.”

School Choice

LETTER FROM WASHINGTON — One topic seemed to unite the America First Policy Institute’s recent Black History Month celebration in Washington: school choice.

— The Trump-aligned organization’s event last month marked a notable point in a wider, growing conversation on school choice among Black families across the country and the political spectrum, POLITICO’s Marissa Martinez writes.

— State legislators and local leaders have pushed to pour more public money into vouchers or other incentives that can subsidize private school tuition, saying the additional funding would help Black and Latino students who are not served well enough by traditional public schools.

— At AFPI’s gathering, audience members and panelists repeatedly promoted school choice throughout the five-hour event — down to the national anthem, sung by Quisha King, the founder of the Mass Exodus Movement — to encourage leaving the traditional public school system.

— “Don’t expect the schools to raise our children,” said Alveda King, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr. and conservative activist, during one panel. “There has to be legislation that supports the nurturing and teaching of children, not how to get body parts chopped off. That’s not education.”

— Some of the most pointed remarks came during a discussion on the role of federal and state legislation. North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, a rising Republican star who is expected to run for governor in 2024, said parents need to come before teachers, principals and “certainly before the bureaucrats” in their children’s educational journey.

— “The unions are the least of the problem,” Robinson said during a panel with Ken Blackwell, a former Ohio secretary of state. “If we’re going to change the school system, we got to start changing the hearts and minds of the parents out there.”

— Robinson also targeted sex education in public schools and libraries, asserting that those topics showed how “leftists are out to destroy the minds of our children.”

— “They’re taking drastic measures to steal your children. You have to take drastic measures to protect them,” Robinson said to applause. “If cancer was attacking your child, nothing would be out of reach for you to do it. If some other dreaded disease or some person was after them, you do anything to protect them. The same thing is true here.”

Syllabus

— Florida bills would ban gender studies, transgender pronouns, tenure perks: The Washington Post

— How common is transgender treatment regret, detransitioning?: The Associated Press

— One way U.S. students can save money on college tuition: Head to Europe: The Wall Street Journal

— Opinion: We’d be paying teachers far more if we’d chosen quality over quantity: Fordham Institute