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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   34904 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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Wise To The World

Ohio Capital Journal reports:

Westerville City Schools Board of Education voted 4-0 last week to end a religious release time policy that allowed LifeWise Academy to take public school students out of class to conduct Bible instruction during school hours. [...]

In Ohio, school districts may choose to allow students to earn up to two high school credits, during non-'core' education school hours, subject to a number of limitations such as on funding (solely private) and parental consent (written).

Why are they popular? My impression from what I've been able to gather of their curricula -- admittedly, the full contents of which they play pretty close to the chest -- is more Lutheran Sunday School than anything Hellfire Baptist. I'm not hugely tied into the fundie religious parents, but what contacts I do have, these programs are seen as offering a good compromise. Unlike homeschooling, the student is still getting core curricula and socialization with the general public (uh, for better or worse). Unlike the school's non-core programs, there's some integration with religious processes. Why not just do those things outside of school hours? The growth of after-school extracurriculars and increased reliance on those successes for college acceptance or scholarships have made 'traditional' afternoon or weekends religious programs harder and harder to maintain, while the reduced presence of religious programs elsewhere has made transportation overhead more costly.

What were the big arguments against these policies? Parents Against LifeWise has a more varied set of issues on their web page, for those who want a (very) deep dive. At least from my read, the vast majority of concerns are hypotheticals and/or trivialities, but perhaps a more critical eye will pick up something I've missed. OCJ offers:

“I was raised to know that religious teaching belongs in the home, at the church, with your friends, with your family, and those various people that believe the way you do,” said Dr. Allison Baer, an Associate Professor at the University of Findlay, and mother of Center for Christian Virtue President Aaron Baer. “If this program, and this teaching, is so vital to their Christian life, why isn’t it offered after school, which would help working parents with free after school child care?”

“Westerville City Schools preaches diversity, equity and inclusion. But diversity, equity, and inclusion does not call for every human being to be a Christian,” said Luke Bauman, a Westerville resident. “It is the goal of LifeWise, tied closely with Project 2025, to dismantle public education from the inside out.” [...]

LifeWise is a gold level sponsor of the Essential Summit, a two-day conference organized by religious lobbying organization the Center for Christian Virtue, who’ve helped craft school choice laws and anti-trans bills in Ohio. CCV is listed as a hate group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center [ed: good luck figuring out why?]. The keynote speaker of the CCV summit was Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts.

Which... seems more to cut to the quick, here. Opponents are not driven by the terror of a slightly disrupted school schedule, or a flyer mentioning a religious organization being printed on a school printer. They're appalled that broad-scale religious organizations exist in the public square, and have defenders. And a purple town in a purple-leaning-red state agreed.

Well, is this just a one-off? Each school board covers a relatively small area, so it's not that weird if some random people did something kinda meh.

The Huron City School Board decided in a majority vote to end their released time policy on Aug. 20 this year. Prior to them, the Vermillion Board of Education also voted on June 29 against starting their own program. Bowling Green City Schools, Johnson-Monroe City Schools, Gahanna-Jefferson City Schools, and Sylvania City Schools have also come out against the released time policy.

There's some !!fun!! legal discussion about how this sort of policy change based on a fig leaf of organizational difficulty on top of overt disquiet with religious belief -- there's a certain comparison to the animus in Cleburne that I don't think either side of this debate would find particularly complimentary. But in practice school boards outside of Florida have pretty free reign to pick and choose supported programs, and courts can and will treat that fig leaf as if it were substantial when they want.

There's a bill in the state house requiring schools to permit released time programs, but it's unlikely to go anywhere and poorly written enough that it has no enforcement mechanism against school boards that defy it or find 'secular' cause to ignore it. And, again, courts can and will treat that fig leaf as if it were substantial when they want.

What sorta solutions might come up, instead?

ProPublica [bleh] reports:

Following Hurricane Katrina and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, some federal taxpayer dollars went toward repairing and improving private K-12 schools in multiple states. Churches that operate schools often receive government funding for the social services that they offer; some orthodox Jewish schools in New York have relied on significant financial support from the city, The New York Times has found. But national experts on education funding emphasized that what Ohio is doing is categorically different.

“This is new, dangerous ground, funding new voucher schools,” said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center and the author of a new book on the history of billionaire-led voucher efforts. For decades, churches have relied on conservative philanthropy to be able to build their schools, Cowen said, or they’ve held fundraising drives or asked their diocese for help.)

The Ohio One-Time Strategic Community Investment Fund, a widely available fund of the type that Trinity Lutheran expressly prohibits governments from blocking out religious organizations. You might make one of many arguments that this is a graft (why is the dayton airshow getting state grants?). Opponents might argue that puts an increasing wide and variety of education funding outside of the domain of electoral control (uh, admittedly with a little bit of hypocrisy).

What did you think "teacher's unions are unambiguously and emphatically against the Republican Party" meant? Vibes? Papers?

I Told You Those Stories, So I Could Tell This One

This is a 3 week Academy for rising 3rd-6th grade NHUSD students grounded in the the call to action of the Alameda County Office of Education Racial Justice Resolution #2226 in which community members such as educators are asked to, “help our children understand and react to racial differences, and to teach our youth how to speak up against injustice, racism and inequality.

[way more]

Come for the Gender Unicorn; stay for the hilarious claim that Donald Trump would simultaneously call all undocumented immigrants animals but not use the word 'illegal immigrant'. Okay, that's trite, and there are some distinctions, here. Lifewise operated in school hours with solely private funding; the New Haven Social Justice Academy program operated during the summer with at least some of public funding. Lifewise is a religious organization, the Social Justice Academy is... well some of these programs get a little on the nose with the extent that they're replacements for religion, but afaict the New Haven Program here avoids direct reference to the topic except to call George Floyd an austere religious scholar mentor.

There's a lot of snark to be made, here, but there's also a more serious point.

A complete rando talking about Lifewise offers :

"Whether Lifewise is a good program or a secretly evil program with a long term goal of eroding the public school system and the separation of church and state, the way that it has emboldened the Christofascists in my town to speak without a hint of self awareness makes me extremely wary of my neighbors (and one of them... lives on my street.)"

The DailyWire's piece quotes a complete rando "Director of Outreach" from an aligned political group :

“This summer program should have been advertised as an indoctrination camp where ideologues who spell the word ‘women’ with an x feed students propaganda about defunding the police, transgenderism, and oppression."

These programs all say a lot about fragmentation. I'm writing about them -- I'm reading about them -- because people want each and every one from the other team removed. Deleted. Unalived in minecraft lava, if you will. The possibility that someone might take the wrong choice, or defend the possibility of taking the wrong choice, is enough.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Westerville City Schools preaches diversity, equity and inclusion. But diversity, equity, and inclusion does not call for every human being to be a Christian,” said Luke Bauman, a Westerville resident. “It is the goal of LifeWise, tied closely with Project 2025, to dismantle public education from the inside out."

A "Westerville resident" said this? Just like a guy on the street?

"Hey, we're with this organization, do you have any thoughts on Westerville City Schools' policy that allows LifeWise to educate Christian children during school release time?"

"Oh, let me think about that for a moment. Westerville City Schools preaches diversity, equity and inclusion. But diversity, equity, and inclusion does not call for every human being to be a Christian..."

Clearly this was a public-relations type statement, it's incredibly disingenuous to attribute it to "random resident" as though this is just what some guy who lives in the community thinks.

But as an aside, I really don't know where the "Christian Nationalist" slur came from, particularly how it's been applied to just about anything Christian. I know there were some idiot influencers a few years ago talking about something like that, like requiring a religious test for public office or something, but c'mon people, this is not representative of the mainstream of Christianity in the US, even in the most Christian parts, which are Baptists who come from a long tradition of church-state separators. I guess the idea is something like, "These people are Christians, they're also nationalists, so huh! They're Christian nationalists!" But I don't understand the idea that mainstream Christians are fascists or something. They're not. It's your chill grandpa who reads bible stories to the grandkids, or your cousin who has a 'homestead'. Brownshirts these people are not.

I think he's a public education/special education careerist with a public outreach focus, though I've not been able to track it down much further than that (who names a company EDU_?).

I'm now even more confused. He graduated from Liberty with a History/Theology degree? I'd expect someone with that background to sound much more like me than like whatever it is he sounds like. Graduating from Liberty with a degree in Theology and then down the line saying that not every human should be a Christian? Harvard Divinity I could understand, but Liberty?

Perhaps we're just looking at another one of those Christian-moralist-to-progressive-moralist conversions, like the VeggieTales guy. I certainly know some goody-two-shoes Southern Baptists who probably sounded like me 15 years ago but nowadays sound like progressive twitter. Maybe he started to see the limitations of his Liberty degree and swung the other way to try and challenge the low prestige.

It's too bad, I guess.

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