To still relatively scant notice, the call for “School Choice” or Vouchers continues to play out in state capitols across the nation in an effort to increase Biblically based education through a redirection of tax dollars from public to private religious schools. In order to accomplish the end goal of Christianizing all students, stealth remains largely the rule of the day. In 2002, Dick DeVos told The Heritage Foundation.
“We need to be cautious about talking too much about these activities. Many of the activities and the political work that needs to go on will go on at the grass roots. It will go on quietly and it will go on in the form that often politics is done – one person at a time, speaking to another person in privacy. And so these issues will not be, maybe, as visible or as noteworthy, but they will set a framework within states for the possibility of action on education reform issues.”
During the 2011-2012 school year, thirty-two private school choice programs were in place with more than $800 million available for vouchers and scholarship tax credits, money that by all rights should have gone to our public school systems, many of which are in dire need. Groups with heart-warming names like The Alliance for School Choice and American Federation for Children encourage naive donors to support vouchers for reasons that are as deceptive as they are fundamentally non-democratic.
Additionally, over the years, far too many of these overzealous Christians have quietly insinuated themselves onto School Boards across the country and are hard at work challenging the historical mandate to provide a religion-neutral public education by insuring that the Bible become part of high school curricula.
In 2007, a piece of legislation backed by the Center for Reclaiming America for Christ and the American Family Association, passed in the Texas State House. The bill stated that Texas public schools must offer, as required curriculum the “history and literature of the Old and New Testaments.” Recently, the Texas Freedom Network (TFN) issued a chilling report on a study they coordinated with Mark Chancey, Professor of Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University.
In his report, Chancey stated that “at least 57 (Texas) school districts and three charter schools taught courses about the Bible in 2011-12, a number that more than doubled the districts teaching such courses in the 2006-07 school year.” The oversight spelled out in the bill that should have protected students from religious indoctrination was largely ignored leaving whole districts with Biblically driven curricula. At the time of the bill’s implementation, the bill’s co-author, Rep. Leo Berman, blatantly stated, “I don’t believe there’s such a thing as the separation of church and state.”
Of particular concern is the textbook-like use of scripture to condone homophobia, to slander blacks and Jews, and to deny basic climate and evolutionary science. And Texas is not alone. According to The National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools’ website over a half a million students have already taken these courses nationally for credit. Take a half a million public school minds along with those who are already enrolled in religious schools or who are homeschooled, multiply it by a decade and it’s easy to see why it matters.
This agenda to undermine public education and reintroduce Christianity into the classrooms was the brain child of Jerry Falwell and the so-called Moral Majority, back in the 1980's. And even after Falwell's death it continues apace.
This is why on the local level it is important to keep the Fundamentalists out of our school boards and fight at every turn the idea of charter schools, school vouchers, and "teaching the controversy."
If we are not vigilant these anti-education trolls will destroy the very foundation of America's educational system in the hopes of keeping them ignorant and uninformed enough to continue voting Republican candidates, and continuing to support old fashioned religious faiths that are soon to go the way of the dinosaurs.
And that would be the ACTUAL dinosaurs, not those silly animatronic ones they have hanging out with primitive people at the Creation Museum.
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| Dinosaurs and humans were NEVER alive at the same time, but you will not learn that in many charter schools. |
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