You know who loses out in this one? The kids. And they aren't red kids or blue kids. They're just kids. Like the ones in my hometown in rural Pennsylvania: the Chambersburg Area School District lost $1.5 million. Like the kids I taught in inner city Baltimore: the school district stood to gain $72 million under the House's version. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of kids.
A few days back, Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC) was up in arms, stoking the fires of the religious right. According to Senator DeMint, Democrats in Congress were trying to kill school prayer. They were trying to destroy bible study. They were trying to trample your freedom of religion. The cause of his outrage: The original version of the stimulus bill, passed by the House, contained some $20 billion in money for renovations to Americas k-12 schools, colleges, and universities. The money appropriated specifically for institutions of higher education came with a fairly standard condition attached: that it could not be used for religious purposes. This is boiler plate Establishment Clause language:
No funds awarded under this section may be used for... modernization, renovation, or repair of facilities (i) used for sectarian instruction, religious worship, or a school or department of divinity; or (ii) in which a substantial portion of the functions of the facilities are subsumed in a religious mission.
Essentially, this simply meant that schools couldn't use the money to build or renovate buildings that were used primarily for religious purposes. This is decades-old language, and was long ago deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court. It’s nearly identical to the language that exists in the Higher Education Facilities Act. What’s more, the money in question could go to public, private, and even religiously affiliated universities, just so long as it wasn’t being spent on, oh, say, a school chapel.
But, as is often unfortunately the case with the Republican Party today, rhetoric and reality have absolutely nothing in common. After a firey speech by DeMint on the Senate floor, which culminated in the Senator offering an amendment purporting to ban religious discrimination in any spending of the stimulus money, the story spread like wild fire. Former Arkansas Governor and once and future GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, from his bully pulpit at Fox News, attacked the stimulus bill as "anti-religious". Some right-wing bloggers ripped a page out of Ann Coulter’s book, and proclaimed the recovery package was, in fact, a "godless stimulus bill".
When you’re going to tell a lie, you should always tell a big one, or so the saying goes. And you should always keep right on talking. Senator DeMint followed that advice perfectly. He headed over to Fox News, and told the viewing public that the aforementioned clause in the stimulus bill was "an attack on people of faith" and "just a phrase that I think the ACLU had stuck in this bill". Where was DeMint getting the idea that this commonplace Establishment Clause language was an atrocity? A threat to religious freedom? A violation of the Constitution? From Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law & Justice. This is the same Pat Robertson who gave us Regent University, which in turn gave us Monica Goodling of DOJ fame. Right. But the underlying veracity of DeMint’s claims no longer matters. The story has already taken on a life of its own.
Now here comes the cross-over. You know how there were two pools of money in the original stimulus bill for school construction: Roughly $6 billion for school renovations at the college level, and $14 billion for school construction at the k-12 level? That money got cut out of the final version passed by the Senate. That money got cut for a number of bogus reasons. Can you guess one of them? Some republican constituents conflated the funding for colleges and universities (which came with the standard Establishment Clause stipulation) with the $14 billion in funding for k-12 school construction. Just Google it.
You’ll see this conflation everywhere. On conservative message boards, citizens are railing against the left’s attempt to completely ban religion from the schools. Which schools? All of them. College, universities, high schools, elementary schools. When Senator DeMint started pushing that whole bogus argument, he wasn’t just focused on getting the $6 billion in higher education funding removed from the bill. He knew very well people would just view the school construction funding – both higher ed and k-12 – as a single element of the bill. When the conservative base started making phone calls to their Senators, they demanded that the funding for school construction get cut because of religious discrimination. Which school construction funding? All of it. So at the end of the day, when the Republicans moved to oppose such funding, they had cover: it was not only "fiscally conservative", it was also a matter of religious freedom.
The final version of the stimulus package still has some $40.6 billion for local school districts, and $5 billion for the Department of Education to spend on innovative approaches to improving schools. But it doesn’t have that $14 billion for k-12 school construction and renovation.
Some folks like to talk tough, and say that it’s not about the physical quality of the school, but rather, all about having good teachers. In as much as I agree that having good teachers is always the primary element for successful schools, anyone who has seen the state of public school buildings in poor urban and rural districts knows just how big of an issue facilities can be.
When I was teaching 10th grade English at Southwestern High School in Baltimore, Maryland, the roof above my classroom sprung a massive leak. Every morning, I had to get to school early to try to clean up the water on my floor. Usually, I couldn’t track down the facilities manager, so I resorted to mopping it up myself, sometimes with a mop, sometimes with paper towels. Eventually, I bought several large beach towels, and would literally haul them to school each morning, mop up the mess, bring them home to dry them each night, then repeat. Some days, if it rained during class, I had to move my kids to another room. If you’re ever in southwest Baltimore, stop by Font Hill Road and take a look. The place looks like an abandoned warehouse, but it’s really a school.
And that’s not even half of the problem. Think about overcrowding. Poor ventilation. Mold. Energy efficiency. Psychological effect of the physical environment. The list could go on and on.
You know who loses out in this one? The kids. And they aren't red kids or blue kids. They're just kids. Like the ones in my hometown in rural Pennsylvania: the Chambersburg Area School District lost $1.5 million. Like the kids I taught in inner city Baltimore: the school district stood to gain $72 million under the House's version. That's a lot of money. Look up your own school district. Just go here.
The right wing long ago hijacked the debate on public education in America. Who pushed school vouchers? Who is, right now, trying to force creationism back into the classroom? Who hijacked the debate on funding for school construction and improvement? You know who. Now you know also know exactly how this one went down.
EDIT: It would be really great if everyone looked up their own school district and saw how much more money your kids could have had for school construction/improvement if the House version of the stimulus passed. Just go here.