News Stories to Follow—and a Note on Democracy and “the Price of Eggs”

Hi Friends,

It’s always hard to sit down and try to write a few thoughts about the news. This fight against billionaires trying to privatize schools—and other longstanding public investments—seems to take a new turn by the day. So, I always worry that some new development will make whatever I put down here a bit out of date.

But with that caveat, I still want to run through a few events and news items just to flag what I’ve been following and chewing on. And then I want to make a couple comments about something that’s never going to get old or out of date, and that’s connecting the fight for public education to the fight for democracy.

Keep Your Eye on These Stories

First, any minute now, the U.S. Supreme Court will be hearing the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond case about the proposed St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which will determine whether charter schools—independent but public schools—can be run by a religious entity. This has monumental implications for both public schools specifically and for the separation of church and state more generally. Education Law Center is co-counsel in the companion case, and the plaintiffs in that case filed an amicus brief in Drummond earlier this month.

Next, make sure you’re following the pushback by state departments of education against the Trump regime’s threat to rescind federal funding over DEI initiatives. As of this writing, California, Minnesota, New York, and Vermont, as well as Colorado, Pennsylvania, Washington, my own state of Michigan, and ELC’s home state of New Jersey have responded to the federal threat by saying, essentially, “we already follow the law.”

I also want to make sure we’re all monitoring the shutdown of regional offices serving Head Start families. It’s affecting providers across the country—there’s little or even no staff now to serve those providers. Here’s sample coverage from Michigan, but you can find similar stories in many states. Bottom line: this is a slow-moving disaster for so many families, and with everything else going on right now I’m worried it will get lost in the mix. Let’s not let that happen, okay?

Finally, we’re all still waiting to see what happens with the so-called Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA)—aka the tax shelter for the wealthy that’s also a federal voucher scheme intended to ram vouchers into every state—even those that don’t want it. Those of us with our ear to the ground have heard conflicting things: maybe it will make it into the federal reconciliation process (where it would need only a simple GOP majority to pass) or maybe it’ll come up for a vote later in the year. One thing we know is that Betsy DeVos’s group is continuing to make this a top priority, so it’s something to keep monitoring closely.

A Note on Democracy—Recapping the Network for Public Education Conference

Now I want to give a shout out to Diane Ravitch, Carol Burris, and the entire team at the Network for Public Education for putting together an outstanding conference in Columbus, Ohio, on April 4-6. I had the honor of opening the conference with a Friday night fireside chat-type session with Diane. And then none other than Governor Tim Walz closed us out.

In between, several of us working with or as part of Education Law Center contributed to and presided over panel sessions. These included ELC Executive Director Bob Kim, ELC Litigation Director Jessica Levin, and Sharon Krengel, who is ELC Director of Policy, Strategic Partnerships, and Communications. These panels ranged from a discussion of voucher impacts on neighborhood school closures, a recap of victories against the voucher push in both red and blue states, and a session I joined with the Economic Policy Institute’s Hilary Wething to walk through EPI’s fantastic tool that lets you calculate how much vouchers will cost any school district in the country.

(Ongoing shout-out here as well to ELC’s own cost-calculator that lets you estimate the hit to your state education budget from a universal voucher program.)

Bob, Sharon, and I also joined NEA’s Kyle Serrette for a standing-room-only discussion of the link between public education and democracy. One of the things that I struggle with in conversations like that is trying to connect some of the big, underlying philosophical goals—standing up for democracy, defending the principle of equal citizenship, and so on—with the everyday events in people’s lives. This is the education version of a debate that progressives are having right now in the aftermath of the 2024 election: do we talk about democracy, or do we talk about the price of eggs?

The answer is both. The NPE conference took place on the same weekend that hundreds of thousands of people turned out in states across the country for a day of protests, demanding Hands-Off public schools, Social Security, Medicaid, and so much more. It was a highly specific, and unusually policy-focused type of organizing. But it was also democracy.

I think the lesson there is that as much as we need to defend democracy as a core and motivating principle itself, we also need to remember that people experience democracy in many different ways.

For a single mom trying to get extra support for her child learning with dyslexia, democracy might mean a public school that responds to that advocacy on behalf of her kid.

For a guy with a longstanding, chronic health condition, maybe democracy means a law that prevents him from getting kicked off an insurance plan.

For a senior living check-to-check on Social Security, maybe democracy means having a regional staffer return her call if the check goes missing or delayed.

For someone who’s just lost their job, maybe democracy means a few extra dollars of support until they get back on their feet. Or, for thousands and thousands of folks with jobs, maybe democracy means the chance not just to survive by putting food on the table, but to thrive and invest some of their paycheck in their children’s futures.

All of that is at stake right now. But the flipside is also true: all of that is still possible. And it’s with that possibility, that potential, and another call to defend that future that I’ll leave you this week.

Josh

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