Three Education Stories To Watch In 2024

What’s a new year without predicting which stories will require attention in the coming months. Here are three education stories (and one non-story) to watch in 2024.

Taxpayer-funded Religious Schools

The advance of voucher programs in 2023 has already led to many states using taxpayer dollars to fund private religious schools. But activists still want to see another line crossed.

At the moment, Oklahoma is trying to launch a taxpayer-funded Catholic charter school. As Heidi Przybyla reported for Politico, the legal challenges to that launch have drawn the attention and involvement of a wide assortment of groups from the conservative legal world, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian firm that helped bring the end of Roe v. Wade.

Many conservatives sense an opportunity, given the Supreme Court’s willingness to value the free exercise clause over the establishment clause in previous cases attacking the wall between church and school; Trinity Lutheran, Espinoza, and Carson, three cases that poked holes in the wall between church and state. Kevin Welner, director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s School of Education, warned that in light of these three decisions, “states will probably be forced to let churches and other religious institutions apply for charters and operate charter schools.” The fact that charter schools may be described in state law as public schools will not matter.

That’s where the Oklahoma case may take us this year. The hope appears to get to The Supreme Court, which could erase the last bit of the wall, requiring taxpayers to fund religious schools just as they fund public schools.

School Discrimination Backlash

Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond sued to block that proposed Catholic charter school. He foresees a problem, a “slippery slope” that would require the state to fund other religious schools, including non-Christian ones.

And in some areas, events are well down that slope. The Satanic Temple has successfully shown in school after school that the ruling that allows a Christian club in public school must also allow for After-School Satan Club. Responses to Satanic “incursions” reveal yet another slippery slope—one in which the government rules on which religions are “legitimate.”

Meanwhile, in states where taxpayer-funded vouchers are already fueling private religious schools, taxpayers are starting to notice the kind of discrimination these schools employ. Voucher laws are being written to protect the discriminatory practices from government “interference,” and lawsuits have been filed to that same end. Parents and other taxpayers are discovering that the promise of school choice is only available for a few, as schools retain the right to reject or expel students for being LGBTQ, for not practicing the right religion, or even for reasons that they don’t have to give or explain.

Illinois has just become the first state to undo a voucher program, at least in part because of the level of discrimination involved in the system.

The advance of school vouchers in 2023 will lead to many questions in 2024. Who decides which religions get access to public funds? If the public is going to be forced to fund religious schools, how much like a public school should those religious schools be required to behave?

DEI is the new CRT

Critical Race Theory panic is so two years ago. Diversity, equity and inclusion programs are the new target of choice.

CRT was turned into a broad catch-all category for everything conservatives disliked, but was ultimately difficult to target, mostly because virtually no K-12 schools have any sort of formal CRT programs or instruction.

DEI makes a better target because programs actually exist, in both the education and corporate world. Are there schools where such programs are being initiated in clumsy and even damaging manners? Undoubtedly, and we’ll be hearing all about them. Will attacks on DEI programs provide cover for folks who are simply old-fashioned racists? Also likely.

Expect the debate and attacks and counter-attacks to rage on this coming year.

Not a story: Education and the 2024 election

When Glen Youngkin won the Virginia governorship, election strategists thought that they’d just seen a successful field test of education and parental rights as a campaign strategy. But that was 2021, and the bloom is off that rose.

Moms For Liberty was supposed to energize boots on the ground and build grassroots coalitions that would lift Republicans into office up and down the ballot. But their results in 2023 elections were lackluster (and probably even worse than reported, because they had backed away from endorsing many candidates aligned with their group, perhaps already sensing that the group was becoming a liability).

Ron DeSantis, like Jeb Bush before him, was angling to ride Florida school reform all the way to the White House. That appears unlikely.

Public education has never been a major feature of Presidential races. The closest we’ve come in recent memory was the 2016 stampede away from Common Core. Do not expect education to get more than the occasional cursory head nod in the 2024 race.