RALEIGH – Once upon a time, a program offering scholarships to low-income students so that they can escape whatever failing public school they are trapped in and get a more appropriate education at a nearby private school would be applauded by honest liberals actually interested in providing the best education options to the less fortunate.
In North Carolina they are called ‘Opportunity Scholarships,’ and the Radical Leftists at the North Carolina Association of Educators are suing to eliminate them.
From John Locke Foundation’s Lockerroom Blog:
“Despite a 2015 decision by the N.C. Supreme Court affirming the constitutionality of the Opportunity Scholarship Program, teacher unions filed a new complaint today. They argue:
‘2. The Program sends millions of taxpayer dollars to private schools without imposing any meaningful educational requirements. As implemented, many of the Program’s funds are directed to schools that divide communities on religious lines, disparage many North Carolinians’ faiths and identities, and coerce families into living under religious dictates.
3. The Program as implemented funds discrimination on the basis of religion. Families’ ability to participate in the Program is limited by their religious beliefs and their willingness to cede control of their faith to a religious school.
4. The Program as implemented funds schools that discriminate against students and parents based on who they love or the gender they know themselves to be, and against those with religious beliefs that do not condemn homosexuality, bisexuality, or gender non-conformity.’
This is two-pronged attack, with one aimed squarely at religious education; the other held firmly to the neck of those that dare compete with the NCAE for control of education in North Carolina.
The complaints are nothing new, as the NCAE has been beating this horse for quite a long time. As it mentions in the introduction, this issue has already made its way to the N.C. Supreme Court, where it was found to be constitutional. But the NCAE just cannot stand by when ‘their money’ is giving to private schools.
Therein lies the rub: public school advocates have a misguided tendency to think that the scholarship money awarded to students, and then spent at private schools, somehow is money stolen from the public school system. As if ‘forever encouraging the means of education,’ which is written in the N.C. Constitution, somehow prohibits education funds from following the actual student to whichever classroom they deem fit to further their education.
They then whine that religious schools can discriminate based on…**GASP**…religion. Essentially, they complain that religious schools can group people based on religion, that religions are different, and that sending taxpayer dollars to a Christian religious school is viewed as a direct offense against the particular Woke religion currently dominating public schools administration.
The NCAE has literally filed a legal complaint in court complaining that religious schools are not accepting of different religions and have views on the LGBTQ spectrum that don’t exactly line up with Woke dogma. They complain that religious institutions could indoctrinate children as argument that they should be the only ones allowed to do so with taxpayer money.
‘If anyone is going to indoctrinate children,’ asserts the NCAE, ‘it’s got to be US!’
This is a power move by the NCAE to have ever more control over education in North Carolina. It’s the only way, if they hope to brainwash a sufficient number of voters students into accepting that boys can be girls, that capitalism is evil, that all white people are racist, and that the world will melt if we don’t give government more control.
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