Tax support for church-run schools in Canada

by Edd Doerr

A February poll in Ontario found that Ontarians oppose tax support for Catholic schools by 52% to 38%. Ontario Education Ministry spokesperson  Liz Sandals, however, said that Ontario will continue to provide full tax support for four separate school systems – English language public, French public, English Catholic and French Catholic. The church-run schools get more per student public  funding than the two public school systems. Protestant, Jewish and other private schools in the province get zero public funding. British Columbia provides funding to various church-run schools, but less than in the other three provinces.  This system goes back to Canada’s constitution, the British North America Act of 1867, which created modern Canada. Only three provinces require public funding for Catholic schools – Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Predominantly French and nominally Catholic Quebec ended Catholic school funding in 1999. Newfoundland, which had only  tax-supported church-run schools  – five systems of them – switched to public schools only in two sweeping referenda in the 1990s.

In mid-March Canadian columnist Samantha Emann wrote that it’s time to “put out the fire” in the burning debate over Catholic school funding. Changing the constitution requires only the approval of the House of Commons and the Senate and, importantly, only the province that is affected. Emann notes that this is what happened regarding Quebec in 1999.

“Samantha Emann writes, “are unfair to Canada’s many other religious groups and cultures. Funding all religious schools would be a logistical nightmare, and in my view, public services should be affirmatively secular.” She adds, “As should be apparent to anyone who has been following the news for the past year, some Catholic schools boards, trustees, teachers and advising clergy have  a record of discriminatory, socially regressive efforts to hinder advances made in the interest of student safety and learning. . . .  In Ontario there was opposition from Catholic leaders to the much-needed, recently updated sex-education curricula.”

Emann continues: “That deficit-plagued province [Ontario] recently asked voters for ideas online for ways it could save money in its budget. Here’s an idea. According to a 2012 report from the Federation of Urban Neighbourhoods, mergimg Ontario’s Catholic and public school boards would save the province more than $1 billion.”

The 2016 poll was conducted by Forum Research. Its president, Lorne Bozinoff, said recently that “If it were ever put to a public referendum, Catholic school funding would lose, fair and square.” Just as, I might add, it has in the US in 28 referendum elections by large margins from coast to coast between 1966 and 2014.

In related news, the Ontario-based Civil Rights in Public Education organization (CRIPEweb.org) reports that the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal will consider a complaint “about the treatment one student [non-Catholic Claudia Sorgini] has received from Roman Catholic school board personnel when she applied for an exemption from religious courses and programs in one of the board’s high schools.” The complaint is based on the Ontario Human Rights Code and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which are supposed to provide protection from religious or creed-based pressure.

Edd Doer on The Importance of This Year’s Elections for Secularists

Edd's column from the current (April/May) issue of Free Inquiry, “The Importance of This Year’s Elections,”  is featured on the British web site Churchandstate.org.uk.

Climate change, reproductive choice, and saving public education may be the most crucial issues in this election season

This year’s elections may be the most crucial since 1860. Foreign policy, the economy, social justice, tax policy, the appointment of Supreme Court justices, and the stagnation/retrogression of the middle and lower classes are just some of the many issues that our under-informed, distracted electorate will be asked to consider when choosing among the candidates. But in this column let me just highlight three of the most important ones.

Climate change

While the Paris agreements of late fall 2015 are a small step forward, it is fair to say that most American voters have yet to wrap their heads around the climate-change problem in all its depth and complexity. In addition to the global-warming effects of atmospheric carbon-dioxide buildup caused by burning fossil fuels and consequent sea-level rise, which poses threats to the 40 percent of the world’s population living in coastal areas, there are at least these other serious concomitants: environmental degradation; resource depletion; soil erosion and nutrient loss; deforestation; desertification; biodiversity shrinkage; toxic waste accumulation; growing freshwater shortages; decreasing access to rare minerals essential to modern manufacturing; rising consumer demand and consumption; and increasing sociopolitical instability and violence. Much of this was detailed in Michael Klare’s 2001 book, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, and many other books.

Though too rarely mentioned, all of this is fueled by human population growth, tripled since World War II to well over seven billion. Scientists have been warning that this would happen since the 1950s. In 1974, the U.S. government produced the National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200) report, signed by President Gerald Ford and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, which spelled out the problem and recommended universal access to contraception and abortion. Mysteriously, however, the NSSM 200 report was “classified”  and buried until shortly before the 1994 United Nations population conference in  Cairo. When the report was finally published in 1996 in The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy by Stephen Mumford, I was one of the very few writers who published reviews of it, in several forums. Meanwhile, reactionary Senator Jesse Helms and Representative Henry Hyde succeeded in getting Congress to pass legislation designed to interfere with broad domestic and foreign access to reproductive health aid. As I pointed out a year ago in the National Catholic Reporter, were it not for the 1.5 billion  abortions performed worldwide since 1974 (far too many of them illegal and dangerous), world population today would exceed a mind-boggling, unsustainable nine billion!

This brings us to the conservative religious and political leaders who have gone all-out to deny the dangers posed by overpopulation and to obstruct efforts to deal with the problem. Pope Francis may be commended for his good words on  climate change and social justice, but if he fails to reverse the Vatican’s absurd ban on contraception, ignored by most Catholics but all too influential with politicians, those good words will fall well short. Opponents of  universal access to contraception and safe, legal abortion must be seen as inimical to our species’ surviving, much less thriving.

Reproductive choice

Who by now is not aware of the massive Republican effort, in Congress and state legislatures, to defund Planned Parenthood on the phony charge of selling fetal tissue? Only about 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s budget is devoted to abortions, while the rest is used for a variety of women’s health issues, particularly those of women of more limited means. Then there is in recent years the massive Republican flood of  state laws clamping down on clinics that perform abortions, thus denying an increasing number of women—mostly poor women—access to various forms of health care.

Religion is inserted into the issue by conservative religious leaders and politicians who insist that the Bible is on their side, a claim that is clearly phony. The Bible does not really deal with abortion. Anyone who bothers to look into it would see that the Bible actually supports the science side of the argument. Here is how: Genesis 1:27 and 2:7 state that “God created man in his own image” and humans became persons at their first breath. To cut to the chase, if “God” is not flesh and blood and DNA, then the Bible authors must be referring to some other qualities, such as consciousness and will, which modern science shows are not possible until sometime after the fetal brain is sufficiently wired to permit consciousness, after twenty-eight to thirty-two weeks of gestation. About 90 percent of abortions are performed by thirteen weeks and over 99 percent by twenty weeks. The small percentage that occur after “viability” at twenty-three to twenty-four weeks are due only to serious medical problems, such as threat to the woman’s life or severe fetal abnormality. This point was made in an amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court in the 1988 case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, signed by 165 distinguished scientists including twelve Nobel laureates, one of whom was DNA codiscoverer Francis Crick. (Note: I engineered the brief, which grew out of an Americans for Religious Liberty conference of scientists, lawyers, and theologians on “Abortion Rights and Fetal ‘Personhood.’”) Judaism, we might note, has always generally regarded personhood as beginning at birth.

Of course, readers of this column may well be indifferent to what the Bible says on this matter, but it is useful to know that one of the main arguments against women’s rights of conscience and religious freedom on this issue is essentially groundless. Opposition to abortion rights, if not based on what the Bible actually says, must be based on something else. That something else is the misogyny found throughout the Bible (and the Qur’an) and deeply rooted in most societies today. Official Catholic opposition to women priests and assorted evangelical forms of misogyny, not to mention Orthodox Jewish and Muslim forms of it, are among the many manifestations of that worldwide ailment.

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM DAY January 16, 2016, the 230th anniversar

Charles Sumner, a church-state separation activist in Tennessee wrote the following for posting on Blogs.

On the 230th anniversary of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, it is important for today's generations to understand the tremendous change this measure represented to world history. Until the American experiment, there had never been a complete separation between the institutions of religion and government. Passed by the Virginia legislature in 1786, this statute is regarded by historians as the precursor of the religious liberty clauses of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

In 1776, Virginia took a step toward disestablishing the Anglican Church. The leading figure in that monumental change was an Anglican, George Mason. But Virginia did not stop collecting taxes for the support of the Anglican (soon to be Episcopal) Church at that time. An Act for Establishing Religious Freedom was drafted by Thomas Jefferson and introduced into the Virginia General Assembly in 1779 but not acted upon until 1785, when Jefferson was in France. At that time the great orator and patriot, Patrick Henry, introduced a general assessment bill that would continue the tax for religion but alter its distribution.

At the time of the American Revolution there were established religions in nine of the 13 colonies, following the European pattern. It meant that one religious denomination was favored. It often meant you were taxed for someone else's religion. That became apparent to Patrick Henry because the church that had received the money no longer was the predominant religion in Virginia. He proposed that the tax be altered to go to some other denominations as well.  He called it a tax for "teachers of the Christian religion."

Jefferson's desire was to have no tax for religion, but support for Henry's bill seemed strong. So James Madison and other supporters of Jefferson's plan managed to delay action while they let the citizens know of the situation. Madison, Mason and others circulated petitions.

Madison's argument was made in the now famous "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments." This document stated, "Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? That the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?"

The wide circulation of this among the citizenry had the desired effect; the tax for religion failed. And in 1786, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom passed. It was one of the three items Thomas Jefferson wanted memorialized on his tombstone. It might seem odd, but president of the United States was not one of the three.

"No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry, whatever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief ; but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of  religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities," the statute said.

It was Madison, author of the "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," who was also the primary architect of the First Amendment and is regarded as the Father of the Constitution. That gives you a clue as to the true significance of the religion clauses of the First Amendment.

It might also let you know how Madison and Jefferson would regard a Tennessee bill that would take tax money from the public schools and channel it to private schools, most of which are religious schools.

Celebrate Religious Freedom Day by reading these documents and their history. Celebrate that in the United States, with its separation of church and state, we have vibrant religions existing not because they are supported by the state but because people believe in their religion's worth.


CHARLES SUMNER, President-Emeritus, Nashville Chapter
Americans United for Separation of Church and State
PO Box 210005, Nashville TN 37221
Sumner7540@bellsouth.net

BTW, 

Celebrate Religious Freedom with the Fredericksburg Coalition of Reason

Fredericksburg Coalition of Reason (FredCor) will host Professor Emile Lester on January 10, 2016 as the speaker for the Religious Freedom Celebration. 

• January 10 · 2:30 PM
• Central Rappahannock Regional Library

Shopping at Walmart is equivalent to drinking water from the Flint River

Edd Doer cites Courtland Milloy’s Jan 20 column in the Washington Post: 

“To get approval to build three stores in wealthier parts of the city, Walmart promised to build two in under-served neighborhoods. So they built the three they wanted. Then, last week, Walmart told city officials that it . . . decided not to build them. . . . To make room for the new, Walmart-anchored Skyland Town Center in SE Washington, the city had demolished a tattered but vital neighborhood economy. . .  Some apartments were also demolished, and residents were displaced.”

Walmart, probably the world’s largest retailer, is noted for underpaying its employees, many of whom need food stamps to survive, while exporting American jobs to foreign sweatshops. Walmart’s incredible profits feed the Walmart Family Foundation, which in turn pours tsunamis of tax-free money into massive efforts to undermine public education through vouchers  and charter schools not answerable to taxpayers. On Jan 13 Education Week reported that the Walton Family Foundation will now spend $1 billion on its efforts to sabotage public education.

So the Walton gang is giving the finger to Americans generally, the middle class (what’s left of it) and the poor (whose numbers are growing), and the public schools and teachers serving nearly 90% of American kids.

So shopping at Walmart is equivalent to drinking water from the Flint River or voting for Scott Walker.

 Happy New Year!

The 2015 Year in Secular Perspective Blogs

by Gary Berg-Cross

2015 was a diverse year with many issues, some ups and more seemingly downward trends.  In between, as they say there were some learning situations and perhaps some insights. On this Secular Perspective site we had range of topics posted which offers its own perspective.  In case you missed it here are some of the top ones from our volunteer posters. Edd Doerr, president of Americans for Religious Liberty, provided the first 6 or so on some of his favorite issues.

10. Aborting Aristotle  Edd Doerr’s review of a book by  Dave Sterrett had over 200 readers.  He found it an “odd little opus” with an “ anti-abortion screed extruded by an evangelical publisher and concocted by a youngish Southern Evangelical Seminary grad who evidently dwells in a rickety Ivory Tower somewhere in the Twilight Zone beyond Cloud Nine.”

9. Edd Doerr  also had A brief comment on "Zombies of 2016"

Based on Paul Krugman’s column in the April 24 NY Times, that  choped up Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and other Repubs who would like to infest the White House.

8. Edd Doerr also provided a Review of Liberty’s First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech

Freedom of speech, press, assembly and petition, like religious freedom  and church-state  separation, were/are intended to be protected by the First Amendment to our Constitution. However, in 1798, less than a decade after the Bill of Rights was adopted, the Federalist controlled Congress and President John Adams enacted the Sedition Act, which was immediately used to prosecute/persecute the slightest printed or spoken utterance that annoyed the Federalist establishment.

7. Edd published several on vouchers including, “The unpopularity of vouchers” which discussed the DC situation with the Congress and the Obama administration on the wrong side of the issue.   “Despite the council’s objections, Congress seems determined to continue D.C. school vouchers”

6. School Choice Works, Privatization Won't noted the importance of knowing  where the candidates stand on important issues like improving public education.

5. Edd’s Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools? Had over 300 readings and give a 5 star rating to a book by Mercedes K. Schneideron the controversial “Common Core State Standards” system.  The “Core” was largely pushed by big-money entrepreneurs and so-called “reformers” with little actual connection to teaching, including such conservative school-voucher-promoting outfits as the Fordham Institute.

4. I authored the next three mostly popular starting with the seasonal Channeling  Robert Ingersoll for Thanksgiving which had over 300 views.  It excerpted Robert Ingersoll’s 1897 , “Thanksgiving Sermon.” Turning from the divine he instead asked who should be thanked.  He found real groups of people - scientists, artists, statesmen, mothers, fathers, poets in contrast to religious organizations and their operatives.. He found plenty of things to be thankful for starting with the long rise from savagery to civilization.  

  

3. The trouble with Hanukkah? Had over 600 views since it was posted in Dec. based on a fact finding article on the Jewish Holiday.  The blog’s title is based on Tom Flynn’s more famous take on that bigger winter holiday in The Trouble with Christmas.

2. Also seasonally popular (>800 views) was my Sustained Seasonal Symbolic Struggles noting various symbolic struggles over words and associated values.
 such as Italian parents who were reportedly furious when a school canceled the "Christmas" concert with a winter recital.

1.  By far our most popular blog was by Matt Goldstein whose recent Can leftism be saved from Jeff Sparrow?  Had over 1000 views since published on Dec. 6^th. Matt notes that the Guardian newspaper’s Jeff Sparrow has been on the attack against New Atheism for some time. Matt rebuts Jeff’s latest salvo We Can Save Atheism From the New Atheists which begins with the question "Why are the New Atheists such jerks?". The provided explanation for the New Atheist's "dickishness" is "anti-Muslim bigotry" and "paranoid, racist shit". Matt sides with Chris Hitchens & Sam Harris’ idea that, "All religions are bad but some religions – especially those in the Middle East, by sheer coincidence! – are worse than others." 

Matt proposes that “What we really need is to save liberalism from bigoted regressive leftist dickish know-it-all jerks like Jeff Sparrow.”

Happy New year all, from one of the editors of Secular Perspectives.

Juan Bosch, Pentagonism: A Substitute for Imperialism

by Edd Doerr

This year, 2015, marks 50 years since President Johnson sent the Marines to the Dominican Republic.  

The backstory: Rafael Trujillo was the brutal military dictator of the country from 1930 until he was assassinated in 1961, by some reports with the aid of the CIA. (The recent Colombian TV series, El Chivo, scripted by Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa, tells the story.)

 In 1962 noted liberal writer Juan Bosch was elected president. He was ousted

in 1963 in a military coup, which in turn was overthrown by younger military officers who invited Bosch and the elected congress to return to office. This upset Lyndon Johnson, who, claiming that this was the work of “communists”, intervened with  the Marines to halt Bosch’s return. Bosch retaliated with his 1968 book, Pentagonism: A Substitute for Imperialism (Grove Press). The US in 1965 was in the process of accelerating the war in Vietnam.

Here is a brief summary:

First published in 1967, Bosch wrote El Pentagonismo: Sustituto del Imerrialismo to explain the role that the United States played in internal affairs in the Dominican Republic during the turbulent 1960s. Following the collapse of the Trujillo dictatorship in 1961, Dominicans experienced U.S.-supported democratic elections in December 1962. In what U.S. politicians heralded as a showcase for democracy, Bosch won the elections with almost 60 percent of the vote and took office in February 1963. After seven months in office, however, Bosch lost the support of the U.S. government and was overthrown in a military coup. A group of military officers and civilians attempted to restore Bosch to power in April 1965. The result, however, was the intervention of 23,000 U.S. Marines in the Dominican Republic. The United States, however, did not impose colonial rule in the Dominican Republic nor did the United States stand to reap huge benefits from controlling the Dominican economy. An embittered Bosch, therefore, attempted to understand the motives behind U.S. foreign policy.

In the late 1960s or early 1970s, I recall, I met a young US scholar who was heading to the Dominican Republic to interview Bosch for a thesis he was writing. I gave him some money and asked if he would buy some of Bosch’s books for me. He did and I still have them, including a book of short stories and a nonfiction book titled Judas Iscariote: Calumniado (Judas  Iscariot: Framed).

For more see: 

Five social science resources by Juan Bosch

Endless Efforts to Undermine Public Education

Edd Doerr

Article XI, Section 10 of the Nevada constitution: “No public funds of any kind or character whatever, state, county, or municipal, shall be used for sectarian purposes.” 

But as noted in the article Nevada Taxpayers File Motion to Immediately Stop Implementation of SB 302 SB 302 proposes a voucher program that "

"uses public money for religious instruction and other religious functions and activities at religious schools, in violation of this strict constitutional prohibition. With over a century of Nevada precedent and Nevada Attorney General opinions, the motion makes clear that voucher program funds are public funds. Any pass-through bank account for funds that the state continues to own and control is a fiction that does not alter the public character of the funds."

“The Nevada taxpayers in Duncan are standing up and asking the Court to immediately block implementation of this unconstitutional program. SB 302 funds private religious indoctrination, and funds private religious schools which operate with discriminatory admissions policies, all at the expense of the existing system of public schools and public instruction. This directly contravenes the Nevada Constitution and more than 130 years of state-law precedent,” said Amy M. Rose, ACLU of Nevada legal director.

Let’s hope that the above mentioned ACLU lawsuit is successful and that the state courts are more attentive to the state constitution than the nose-thumbing Republicans who dominate the legislature, unlike the disgraceful Indiana supreme court.

These attacks on public education, church-state separation, and religious liberty have been led for decades by Republicans in state legislatures and Congress for decades. 

See Edd Doerr's column titled “Public Education under Siege” in the current issue of Free Inquiry. 

Also, Americans for Religious Liberty has been reporting and analyzing this issue for 34 years. See ARL’s web site – arlinc.org.

Republicans in their endless efforts to undermine public  education seem oblivious to the 50 years of state referenda and opinion polls showing that Americans oppose diverting public funds to sectarian and other private schools by 2 to 1.

American Companies & American Dreams

Edd Doerr focuses on a NY Times story " Walmart’s Imports From China Displaced 400,000 Jobs, a Study Says" , dated Dec 9 that reports on a new study showing that between 2001 and 2013 Walmart, the US’s largest retailer and importer, “eliminated or displaced 400,000 jobs in the US....an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive research group that has long targeted Walmart’s policies.

The jobs, mostly in manufacturing, represent about 13 percent of the 3.2 million jobs displaced over those same years that the study attributes to the United States’ goods trade deficit with China. Walmart’s Chinese imports amounted to at least $49 billion in 2013, according to the study, which was based on trade and labor data. Over all, the United States’ trade deficit with China hit $324 billion that year.”

But that’s not all, the Walmart “charitable” foundations have been pouring many millions of their dollars into expensive campaigns to undermine church-state separation and public education throughout the US.See also "5 Reasons Shopping at Walmart Makes You a Scrooge This Holiday Season"

Is it too much of a stretch to say that shopping at Walmart is a subversive activity?

As noted in the Scrooge article:

Walmart doesn't support American business.
While the company proudly boasts and encourages shoppers to "Buy American," the majority of the company's goods are made outside of the United States and often made in sweatshops. When you buy something at Walmart, you are not buying American.

2. Walmart creates more poverty than jobs.
When a Walmart store comes to town --  it isn't the economic golden child the company's PR machine would like you to believe. In fact, a study done by the Northwest Community group estimates that a Walmart opening up in a local town will actually decrease the community's economic output over 20 years by an estimated $13 million. It also estimates that Walmart will cost the community an additional $14 million in lost wages for the next 20 years. This translates to communities being worse off in the long run when Walmart strolls into town. When you shop at Walmart, you are not creating jobs.

3. Walmart's jobs are poverty jobs.
This year numerous studies released expose Walmart's poverty wages and the corporation's willingness to place that burden on taxpayers -- not the company. A report by Wisconsin's Democrats looked at how to quantify Walmart's cost to taxpayers in that state. At a minimum, Walmart workers in the state rely on at least $9.5 million a year to subsidize medicaid for workers. If these poverty level wages were raised to $10.10 an hour it would create 100,000 new jobs in the overall Wisconsin economy, not to mention adding another $13.5 billion to the overall economy. When you shop at Walmart you support poverty wages.

4. Walmart fires workers illegally.
Walmart has a long history of violating workers' rights far beyond mistreatment. The National Labor Relations Board found that Walmart has violated the rights of workers by "unlawfully threatened, disciplined, and/or terminated employees" for "having engaged in legally protected strikes and protests" and "in anticipation or response to employees' other protected concerted activities." In essence  --  Walmart not only encourages its managers to bully employees who want to speak out about unfair practices, they will also fire you if they find out you're planning a strike. When shopping at Walmart you support their anti-worker practices.

5. Walmart is a JOB KILLER. 
We've touched on how Walmart promotes itself as a company that values made-in-America products while their products on its shelves are largely produced overseas and in sweatshops. We've highlighted how Walmart relies on subsidies by the federal government to legally pay their workers poverty wages. We've even exposed Walmart for illegally firing its workers who plan to strike or threatening their jobs to keep the workers from speaking out. All of this adds up to Walmart costing us an estimated 196,000 jobs  --  many of them manufacturing jobs between 2001 and 2006. To prove the power Walmart has in the job market  -- each store opened destroys almost three local jobs for every two it creates. When you choose to shop at Walmart you don't create jobs.

Selectivity of NYC charter schools

Edd Doerr notes that this excellent  letter by Martin Brahms was published in the NY Post on 11/13/15. 

Brahms is a NY writer who frequently gets letters published in NY papers. I wish more of us would take advantage of this medium of communication. It is one cheap way of engaging on issues of importance and hopefully influencing opinion. (I have had several thousand letters published in papers and magazines across the country.over the years.) 

Dear Editor

Although the Post may deny it, the selectivity of NYC charter schools is well-established. Their student populations contain a far lower percentage of children with learning disabilities or who cannot speak English than do the regular public schools. Disruptive students are quickly expelled and kids who cannot cut it academically are  routinely "counseled out" to become the responsibility of the "failing" public school system.  It is also no secret that the vaunted charter school "lotteries" draw in kids from stable families who are more committed to their children's education rather than kids from dysfunctional family backgrounds.

Martin Brahms
Brooklyn, N.Y. 

BTW for an earlier comment on one of Marlin's letters see Charter Schools 
See also 

Pauvre, Pauvre NYC Charter Schools?

Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?

Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools?, by Mercedes K. Schneider. Teachers College Press, 2015, 245 pp,  $29.95 was reviewed by Edd Doerr.

A “common core” of K-12 education in math and reading sounds like a good idea on the  surface, given the complexity and mobility of our society, but the controversial “Common Core State Standards” system (Common Core or CCSS for short) that started off late during the Bush administration is nothing so simple. Mercedes  Schneider, a veteran public school teacher and author of the important 2014 book, A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education  (which  I reviewed in Voice of Reason No. 128 at Arlinc.org), traces the development and “selling” of Common Core in this well-researched, carefully documented report on the who, how and why of this  little understood movement in the schools that serve nearly 90% of our nation’s kids. This book is essential to understanding what is happening in American public education today.

Now, to get to the heart of the matter, let’s all too briefly summarize Schneider’s opus, quoting the author. “CCSS is a hurriedly produced product intended to impose high-stakes outcomes onto those without power over it. In general, CCSS is not owned and valued by those  required to institute it – current American public school teachers and administrators nationwide. This alone makes CCSS destined to fail.” Common Core grew out of George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind,” with its “dependence on high-stakes testing outcomes to ‘prove’ that education was occurring – or else.” CCSS was largely pushed by big-money entrepreneurs and so-called “reformers” with little actual connection to teaching, including such conservative school-voucher-promoting outfits as the Fordham Institute,  headed by one Chester Finn, appointed in 2015 to the Maryland state board of education by Republican governor Larry Hogan. (Years ago Finn was a speaker at a Catholic University conference on vouchers; I was there and heard him declare that he was “ashamed to be a Jew” because the main Jewish organizations opposed vouchers; a prominent rabbi in the audience responded appropriately.)

Schneider explains that two groups, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, got “their unsuspecting state education systems” to commit to “what would be a set of inflexible standards tied to punitive assessments,” a set-up that “did not emerge from teacher practitioners and other education stakeholders.” And all this before the CCSS had actually been created. She shows that the CCSS was never field-tested before being foisted on the states by the federal government.  She concludes that “In the name of educating children, profitability assumed center stage – an exploitation that is indeed tragic for its corporate-serving end.” Then: “Those who love and respect the locally controlled American classroom  -- and resist its takeover by profiteers or by right-minded but misguided nonprofits who, for funds received, must produce studies, plans, influence, and results – need not despair.”

Schneider’s conclusions are worth citing. “We  need to put an end to policies and programs that betray our vulnerability for worshipping standardized test scores. Test-centric education allows for incredible scapegoating and profiteering even as it bankrupts our children’s education experience.” And: “A second lesson is that CCSS is principally the creation of those outside of the K-12 classroom. . . . There was no piloting of CCSS, and this incredible oversight continues to be excused by CCSS promoters. . . . [It] reduces public education to a dollar sign.”

The emphasis on endless testing in just two subjects tends to stifle other subjects, such as social studies, the arts, phys ed, languages, etc. Note that the respected 2015 Gallup education poll showed that fully 67% of Americans polled agree.

A short review  cannot do justice to this powerful, important, 5-star book. It needs to be purchased and read by everyone who cares about the future of education in our country.

For a 2014  interview with Mercedes K. Schneider see 

Bill Gates and the Push to Privatize Public Education

Again Junipero Serra: “What not to do”

Edd Doerr of  Silver Spring, MD had this letter (“What not to do”) published in the Nov 6/19, 2015, issue of the rather liberal National Catholic Reporter (NCR) newespaper.    

Loring Abeyta’s excellent critical review of Gregory Orfalea’s book about Junipero Serra, Journey to the Sun (NCR, Sept 24/Oct8),(she called it "

Cloying book skirts damage Serra wrought") is backed up and reinforced by California Latino author Elias Castillo’s well-researched and documented 2015 book, A Cross of Thorns: The Enslavement of California’s Indians by the Spanish Missions. Serra’s mistreatment of the Indians was so bad that the Spanish civil governor of California, Felipe de Neve (1775-82), criticized him.

From a review of A Cross of Thorns:

The myth of California’s missions as a nurturing environment for Indians is stripped away by Elias Castillo. Instead, he reveals the Indians’ enslavement by friars who used whips, chains, and shackles to restrain the unwilling prisoners who provided the labor force for the missions.

Through study of historical reports and letters, Castillo describes the efforts of Father Junipero Serra, father of the state’s mission system, to gain more souls in heaven. But it came at the expense of Indians wrenched from their lives close to nature into a worse one. Serra may be canonized by Pope Francis, but his legacy is stained.

The book is thoroughly researched and well written. It depicts a sad period in California history.

The Church’s Sins Are Ours

Edd Doerr (arlinc.org) thinks that Frank Bruni op ed ( Nov 4 NY Times) “The Church’s Sins Are Ours,” re sex abuse scandals" is right on target.

"It’s fashionable among some conservatives to rail that there’s insufficient respect for religion in America and that religious people are marginalized, even vilified.

That’s bunk. In more places and instances than not, they get special accommodation and the benefit of the doubt. Because they talk of God, they’re assumed to be good. There’s a reluctance to besmirch them, an unwillingness to cross them.

The new movie “Spotlight,” based on real events, illuminates this brilliantly.....

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one,” says a character in “Spotlight.” Indeed it does: a village too cowed, and a village too credulous."

There were 414 comments on this OpEd including:

"American history is replete with examples of religious institutions and ministers betraying their spiritual mission through the pursuit of political influence. Catholic authorities who valued the church's power and influence over the welfare of the faithful violated, in the most egregious manner, the commission they believed they had received from Christ. The Protestant evangelist, Billy Graham, while innocent of any criminal behavior, also betrayed his spiritual calling when he used his pulpit to claim that God wanted Christians to vote for Richard Nixon...."

Below it the comment Edd posted in the Times on-line is a good column.


Bruni's point is reinforced by the 2014 book, Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sexual Abuse, by church-law trained lawyer Kieran Tapsell.


Also note a report this week in the National Catholic Reporter by Jack Ruhl titled "NCR Research: Costs of sex abuse to US church underestimated."


Ruhl's research shows that the sex abuse scandal has cost the Catholic Church in the US $4 Billion in the past 65 years. Ruhl adds that "separate research recently published calculates that other scandal-related consequences such as lost membership and diverted giving has cost the church more than $2.3 Billion annually for the past 30 years." That adds up to a total of $69 Billion! No wonder church officials have been seeking public funds through vouchers and tax credits for their shrinking system of private schools.

NCR research: Costs of sex abuse crisis to US church underestimated

Link provided by Edd Doerr

A three-month investigation of data by National Catholic Reporter (NCR) , including a review of more than 7,800 articles gleaned from LexisNexis Academic and NCR databases, as well as information from BishopAccountability.org and from reports from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops concludes that:

"The U.S. Catholic church has incurred nearly $4 billion in costs related to the priest sex abuse crisis during the past 65 years, according to an extensive NCR investigation of media reports, databases and church documents.

In addition, separate research recently published calculates that other scandal-related consequences such as lost membership and diverted giving has cost the church more than $2.3 billion annually for the past 30 years."

Edd notes that " NCR is the leading liberal Catholic newspaper in the US. NCR has published a number of my letters over the years. Let’s note also that Catholics tend to be more liberal than Protestants and that most Catholics are out of sync with the Vatican on many issues, such as contraception, abortion, marriage, divorce, clerical celibacy, ordaining women, and  the necessity to send kids to church schools. "

See NCR research: Costs of sex abuse crisis to US church underestimated for details.