God, Schools, and Government Funding
God, Schools, and Government Funding

Author: Laurence H. Winer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1317126424

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In recent years, a conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, over vigorous dissents, has developed circumventions to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that allow state legislatures unabashedly to use public tax dollars increasingly to aid private elementary and secondary education. This expansive and innovative legislation provides considerable governmental funds to support parochial schools and other religiously-affiliated education providers. That political response to the perceived declining quality of traditional public schools and the vigorous school choice movement for alternative educational opportunities provokes passionate constitutional controversy. Yet, the Court’s recent decision in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn inappropriately denies taxpayers recourse to challenge these proliferating tax funding schemes in federal courts. Professors Winer and Crimm clearly elucidate the complex and controversial policy, legal, and constitutional issues involved in using tax expenditures - mechanisms such as exclusions, deductions, and credits that economically function as government subsidies - to finance private, religious schooling. The authors argue that legislatures must take great care in structuring such programs and set forth various proposals to ameliorate the highly troubling dissention and divisiveness generated by state aid for religious education.

God, Schools, and Government Funding
God, Schools, and Government Funding

Author: Laurence H. Winer

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-15

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1317126432

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In recent years, a conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, over vigorous dissents, has developed circumventions to the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment that allow state legislatures unabashedly to use public tax dollars increasingly to aid private elementary and secondary education. This expansive and innovative legislation provides considerable governmental funds to support parochial schools and other religiously-affiliated education providers. That political response to the perceived declining quality of traditional public schools and the vigorous school choice movement for alternative educational opportunities provokes passionate constitutional controversy. Yet, the Court’s recent decision in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn inappropriately denies taxpayers recourse to challenge these proliferating tax funding schemes in federal courts. Professors Winer and Crimm clearly elucidate the complex and controversial policy, legal, and constitutional issues involved in using tax expenditures - mechanisms such as exclusions, deductions, and credits that economically function as government subsidies - to finance private, religious schooling. The authors argue that legislatures must take great care in structuring such programs and set forth various proposals to ameliorate the highly troubling dissention and divisiveness generated by state aid for religious education.

Does God Belong in Public Schools?
Does God Belong in Public Schools?

Author: Kent Greenawalt

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-01-10

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1400826276

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Controversial Supreme Court decisions have barred organized school prayer, but neither the Court nor public policy exclude religion from schools altogether. In this book, one of America's leading constitutional scholars asks what role religion ought to play in public schools. Kent Greenawalt explores many of the most divisive issues in educational debate, including teaching about the origins of life, sex education, and when--or whether--students can opt out of school activities for religious reasons. Using these and other case studies, Greenawalt considers how to balance the country's constitutional commitment to personal freedoms and to the separation of church and state with the vital role that religion has always played in American society. Do we risk distorting students' understanding of America's past and present by ignoring religion in public-school curricula? When does teaching about religion cross the line into the promotion of religion? Tracing the historical development of religion within public schools and considering every major Supreme Court case, Greenawalt concludes that the bans on school prayer and the teaching of creationism are justified, and that the court should more closely examine such activities as the singing of religious songs and student papers on religious topics. He also argues that students ought to be taught more about religion--both its contributions and shortcomings--especially in courses in history. To do otherwise, he writes, is to present a seriously distorted picture of society and indirectly to be other than neutral in presenting secularism and religion. Written with exemplary clarity and even-handedness, this is a major book about some of the most pressing and contentious issues in educational policy and constitutional law today.

The Thief in the Classroom
The Thief in the Classroom

Author: Jeff Swensson

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-04-01

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1475860293

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An undetected thief lurks in America’s classrooms: funding for public education. Dynamic instruction, robust learning, and student futures are stolen when funding for public education is inadequate and inequitable. The devastating impact of this thievery is examined throughout this book. Student engagement with the potential and promise of traditional public education is stolen by funding formulas crafted by state legislatures. Theft in the classroom results when these funding schemes misdirect and disconnect the resources required to educate all US students. Called upon to deal with an ever-changing cascade of mandates, standards, legislation, and counterproductive testing marathons, but provided with funding so inadequate that instruction is often little better than anemic “test prep,” public educators in pursuit of the common good are robbed by insufficient funding. Although funding for public education is a topic unlikely to command frequent public discussion, no topic is more consequential for achievement, adequacy, and social justice in the learning, lives, and futures of America’s children and young people.

The Role of Religion in 21st-century Public Schools
The Role of Religion in 21st-century Public Schools

Author: Steven Paul Jones

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 9781433107641

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The fight over the role of religion in public schools is far from finished, and the last and final words have not been written. This collection of original essays reveals and updates the battlefield. Included are essays on school prayer, the evolution/intelligent design debate, public funding of religious groups on university campuses, religious themes in school-taught literature, and more. With diverse tones and points of view, these essays offer quality scholarship while revealing and honoring the heat these themes generate.

A New Social Contract
A New Social Contract

Author: Mahmoud Yousef Askari

Publisher:

Published: 2019-02-03

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 9781795559591

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book proposes that a new social contract between governments and citizens is needed to facilitate higher education funding. The rationale for this new social contract is based on the lifelong relationship of governments and citizens that should be seen as a partnership between two partners. The book assumes that the relationship between government and its learning citizens extends beyond citizens' acquisition of knowledge or completion of degrees and includes different periods of funding in which the two sides exchange the funding role throughout the lifetime of a citizen. The book proposes that higher education should be seen by governments as a public good due to the benefits gained by the general public in the form of higher income taxes paid by educated citizens throughout their working years. The book argues that if governments consider higher education as a private good and force learners to finance their own education, the benefit of consuming this private good should only stay with its private consumer, and may not be shared with anybody else. This means that governments may not have the right to tax those who paid for their own higher education, and may not share their assumed private benefits. This also means that the higher income taxes paid by educated citizens who financed their own education may not be justified.To explain the proposed social contract, the book has investigated whether the partnership approach and the three life stages of citizens (the learning stage, the working stage, and the retirement stage) can be used as a guiding rationale for a new social contract that supports full government funding of higher education. The book proposes that during the learning stage of a citizen, the government, as the financing partner of this stage, needs to pay the full cost of all learning levels. After the citizen completes the intended levels of education, the citizen moves to the working stage and starts paying the government partner a share of the partnership profit (income taxes) throughout the working life of the citizen partner. When the citizen partner reaches retirement, the government resumes its financing role through pension payments, old age security payments, or other kind of payment to help the retired citizen through retirement years.

Taking God to School
Taking God to School

Author: Marion Maddox

Publisher: Allen & Unwin

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1743315716

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Marion Maddox argues that in Australia's public schools, students are now routinely exposed to evangelism from very conservative Christian groups. Maddox claims these groups have a surprising impact on once secular public schooling, and the ways in which governments have been persuaded to support their cause. Maddox is openly against Christian school education.