Overview:
What would happen if religious charter schools were approved and taxpayers paid for them? Read this short story that explores that.
Last week, the US Supreme Court was deadlocked 4-4 on a ruling that would have allowed a Catholic charter school in Oklahoma to receive public funding. In the decision, Amy Coney-Barrett recused herself. Although this decision at first might seem like a victory for public and secular schools, it may just lead to some dystopian future rulings at the state level. If the US Supreme Court takes in even one more conservative justice, or if in the future Barrett decides not to recuse herself in a similar ruling, this decision could change. Furthermore, like the US Supreme Court decision on abortion rights, this decision essentially “sends back” the vote to the state level. Some state supreme courts in the US will almost certainly uphold the change from what was only meant for secular public funds to religious charters instead.
In the following dystopian tale, I imagine a teacher in my neighborhood turned principal, who accepts a position at a new religious charter school for better pay. Unfortunately, he and his fellow principal are unaware of the new politics that religious charter school vouchers are having beyond their school fence. Set in an imaginary third Trump term, vouchers have become commonplace. It can be imagined that religious organizations would look to gain a foothold in certain communities, especially poorer neighborhoods, as charters currently do, and use public funds to do it.
However, the difference in this future scenario is that when faith-based doctrine is allowed into the school system, and the separation of church-and-state is complete, organizations like the Church of Latter Day Saints will be free to use their financial capital to establish footholds in ways they couldn’t walking door-to-door. This tale is not meant to criticize the religious faith of anyone. Rather, it is meant to examine what could happen should we couple church and state, instead of keeping them separate as is intended in the US Constitution. It can be argued that this is exactly what we are on the precipice of doing, right now, in 2025.
Today is the first time I’ve been to the La Jollan Country Golf Club. I’m not here to golf, which is fine with me. Besides, if everything goes well, I’ll be way too busy to do any golfing for quite some time.
Everything about the lobby screams La Jollan to me—palm trees in large ceramic containers and tropical cut flowers in wide vases. Marble countertops. The floor is polished so well that it reflects the ceiling, a massive fresco of Mount Soledad looking out into the azure blue of the Pacific.
Before I ask, the man in a dark suit at the center counter escorts me to the back room. I can see through massive windows an expanse of green grass and a well-manicured landscape beyond. Past that is the deep endless blue of sea under a clear sky.
Three men are sitting on couches in their weekend blazers and golf polos. None of them notice me at first; they all seem to be having a row over some joke I was too late to hear. My escort disappears, and the intricately carved wooden doors behind me close.
“Tom!” A shout from a man I don’t know. He’s the eldest, possibly in his seventies. He’s in a red hat and a blue blazer. He points behind him to a rolling bar. It’s meant to look like a golf bag caddie. Cute. “Pour yourself a drink, buddy.”
“He’s an educator,” quips the man who invited me, Parker. I’ve only met him a couple of times at church, but here there’s a trace of something in his voice I don’t recognize. As if the venue itself were a dialect of English. He says to me, “We got iced tea, lemonade?”
“And come join us, amigo,” says the man in the red hat. “You don’t want to miss this next story. Trust me.”
I walk to the caddie bar and pull an imported IPA from a bucket of ice. While I pop the top, I read the room a little as casually as I can. There’s three men here, all in their sixties or seventies, maybe eighties. Two of them are a bit older, the man I know from church and the elderly man in the red hat. The elderly men each hold a tumbler in a hand just above a wrist where an expensive watch catches light from the window outside.
The last man is close to my age. He is the only person of color here, including me. He’s Latino. He’s holding a beer like me and his wrist doesn’t bear a fancy watch. Everyone seems about as relaxed as if they were at a picnic at a friend’s Labor Day barbecue. But there’s business here, underneath the surface. There’s something else too, but I can’t quite place it yet.
The men sit around a massive coffee table where a large map of San Diego is spread out. There are little miniature models of school buildings and miniature models of school buses laying strategically on the map in certain places. It’s quite detailed, like something under plexiglass in a cheap museum. I take a sip of my beer, and chuckle a little to myself. The whole thing looks like Bob Hope planned a school takeover in some kind of golf war-room.
I get a couple of pats on the back, and the man who invited me, the relative of a coast-to-coast retail chain, makes room for me on the leather couch. His name is Parker.
“Friends, this is Tom Courtney, my buddy from church,” Parker says. “He’s flat out the best teacher I’ve ever seen. He’s just completed his admin credential, and we’ve stolen him away from the once ubiquitous and now failed San Diego Unified School District. Tom is going to be taking the principalship of our flagship school, right here,” Parker points to a school building model on the map. “Right in what we call the diamond area of southeast San Diego. Tom is going to change lives.”
“Here’s to Tom changing lives,” says the red-hatted older man. He’s resting against the couch on the other side of the map. “It’s about time these minority kids in that community had a fighter like you, Tom.”
“Well, actually I’ve been there for–” But I stop. “Thanks for having me aboard. It’s a privilege to be doing this work.”
Parker pats me on the back and rubs my shoulder with a gnarled hand. He always calls me his friend, even though we just met a few times at church. And he’s never seen me teach.
“So what’s the story you guys were telling?” I ask, and take a good pull of my beer.
“Oh, it’s a doozy,” says the man in the red hat. He introduces himself and pulls his hat up a bit as if we’d recognize his face. I don’t. His name is Clifford Carver. He tells us about his furniture store commercials. “We were just filling in your co-principal compatriot in on some educational history.” He winks at the younger latino man holding a beer, same as I am. “I’ll try and keep it brief. But basically, you have to understand how we got here.”
“I drove my Jaguar here,” says Parker with a little wha wha at the end. Everyone laughs.
“You see, my friends. You’re looking at the La Jollan Educational Missionary Society. We tried to make something with a fancy acronym, but they never have enough champagne stocked for us to puzzle it out.”
“Go on,” I say.
“We’ve been working towards this moment for decades, kids. Decades,” says Clifford. “And now, thanks to Barrett un-recusing herself, we’ve arrived.”
“How so?” says Carlos.
Parker takes over, “Back in the late nineties, we had a pipe dream. But we couldn’t tackle the god-damned teacher unions. Now, don’t get us wrong. A lot of teachers, like you fellas here, we know how hard you work and all. But let’s be honest, teachers were living high on the hog, and they weren’t–”
“Producing,” Clifford takes over again. “We tried everything. But the liberals were always pushing their crap, pushing for more school money.”
Parker shakes the ice in his tumbler. “Money down the drain.”
“But then Bush got elected,” Clifford says.
“With a little help from his friends,” adds Parker.
“And with the right investment, we were able to pass No Child Left Behind,” continues Clifford. I remembered that time well, and I knew Carlos must, too. NCLB promised to deliver reading and math proficiency in exactly 12 years for literally every child in America. Of course, that never happened. All it did in schools like mine was stop teachers and schools from focusing on other subjects like art or theater. I remembered reading about the schools in places like Chicago where poor kids never got recess or PE, so they could do testable material instead.
Clifford interrupts my memories, “And NCLB was never going to work, guys. I mean look, we all knew that. You can’t just show up into a poor neighborhood and get kids there on the same level as our kids. Come on.” Everyone nods and takes a sip. I find myself doing the same and I’m not sure why.
“But making NCLB work wasn’t the end goal,” says Parker.
“Here’s the real climax of the story, Tom,” says Clifford. “By 2008, it was plain as a dropped egg on a plate of hash, that NCLB had failed, yet we had won.”
“The public didn’t blame the policy, Tom,” said Parker. The guy literally slaps his knee.
“They blamed the system supporting bad teachers,” said Clifford. “Shit, even Barack Hussein Obama couldn’t support the teacher unions back then. Lots of folks don’t even know that it was Obama’s Race to the Top program that helped us wedge charter schools into large districts like SDUSD, LAUSD.”
“Texas, Louisiana, Michigan,” says Parker. “Pretty genius for a liberal. Offer a huge pot of dough in a massive recession. Only give it out to districts bleeding cash.”
“If they make a portion of their schools, charter,” says Clifford. “Damn liberals gave us the next step themselves. You had Teach for America dropping in their ivy-league graduates like the airborne infantry. After their two-year stint, we’d pump cash into advocacy groups. Got quite a few elected to school boards, and such too.”
“Things were going fine,” says Parker.
“Except Obama got elected again,” says Clifford. “And the damn charter data didn’t turn out like we hoped. If Hillary had gotten in, our little society here might have focused on one of our other pet projects.”
“But then there was Trump,” says Carlos. He takes a swig of his beer, looking upwards in a clear attempt to be nonchalant.
“We wanted Christ in schools,” says Parker. “That was always the end goal.”
“Devos wasn’t what we hoped for in that regard,” says Clifford, “But McMahon was better. She squeezed the last of the life blood out of the public schools in ways we never could.”
“Like a wrestler,” Says Parker. He slaps his knee again.
“But as it turns out, we’ve had something better than any of that, haven’t we? You know, fellas, there are honestly times when I think the libs just like self-destructing. The stories about litter boxes and trans-athletes have done more to break down the educational complex than any policy ever could. Critical race theory! You gotta be kidding me.”
“The bottom line, my friends, is that now we’re smack dab in Trump’s third term, we’ve got the supreme court all but paving the way. The US is ready to put Jesus back in classrooms. San Diego is ready for us. It’s time to deliver,” says Parker. “Bigly.”
“On our sacred mission.” On cue, Clifford passes out blue folders to me and Carlos. I open mine to see everything I’d hoped for when I agreed to the position last month. At the top is my new school’s location, a K-8 on the site of what once was Chollas-Mead Elementary where I taught for years. The demographics and enrollment estimated by whomever put it together look accurate to me. It’s literally the same as it was before the school was closed down last year over non-compliance of one of the new Federal Anti-diversity Mandate laws. The salary, I notice, is slightly higher than what I was quoted. I am sure this is not an accident. While I take a few moments to look through the packet inside, lunch arrives. California spiny lobster dressed in a nice chutney sauce.
“So,” says Parker. “If all looks well, let’s dig into lunch. We can shake hands after we’re covered in whatever this amazing sauce is!”
I close the folder, and set it aside. “Sounds good to–”
“I didn’t know the school was going to be a Mormon Academy,” says the Latino man. I look across the map, across the plates laid out on trays, to see he is still staring inside his blue folder. Everyone in the room turns to Carlos. He doesn’t look up.
“I didn’t know that we’d be a Mormon Academy,” he repeats. He looks up at me as if he’s wondering if I knew. I did. I just figured based on what Parker told me that it wouldn’t matter much. I mean Parker and I attend a non-denominational church. It’s pretty progressive to be honest, and there’s even a gay pastor from Temecula that takes over when Pastor Stevens is on vacation. I know little about Mormon churches. Something about gold plates and an angel named Moroni. But there’s a bible. And Jesus.
Besides, there’s nothing in our hiring process that says we ourselves need to be Mormon. I certainly don’t plan to leave my church. I figured with the new universal vouchers accepted at religious schools across the country, there’d be quite a few people like that. Any religious school, especially if it were free tuition for parents, would be better than a secular public one, wouldn’t it?
Parker coughs once, and then he laughs a little, “Carlos, I’m sure we went over this–”
“No, we didn’t,” Carlos says. “Parker, my Catholic faith is as important to me as the location you’re giving me. I grew up in that neighborhood. The little Catholic church on the corner is where I used to…we did talk about that, didn’t we?”
“Loooook,” says Clifford. He picks up his napkin and places it inside of his shirt collar. “Wow, this smells good doesn’t it boys? Listen, Carlos. Here’s the thing.” Clifford picks up a tiny fork. He breaks one of the crustacean’s claws and lifts the meat to his mouth. He grimaces slightly. I can’t tell if its on account of the food or at the conversation. “Gentlemen, we are all men of God.”
“Amen,” says Parker.
“We are men of Christ,” says Clifford. “The Mormon Church, which I represent here today, is providing substantial capital for this investment, that other Christian churches in the area frankly do not have-for the infrastructure, for your… salaries. It is meaningful to us and to the Church of Latter Day Saints to invest in this region right now, before someone else does. Since the supreme court’s decision to allow universal vouchers to be used for faith-based charter schools, like the ones you all have graciously agreed to helm, there are many other investors who would like to run schools in these areas. Many of these faiths are not Christian, Carlos. There are Buddhists. There are Muslims. There are, I am told, even atheists. We, Carlos, are on the same team here.”
Carlos and I pull out some of the lobster meat. I take a bite. It’s delicious, and the chutney is a perfect compliment. Carlos seems to like it too, although his face is growing a bit pale.
Clifford continues. “We know of at least one group of Muslims seeking to build schools in either of our locations in Chollas View right now. Can you imagine? Kids being indoctrinated like that, with tax-payer money? This is happening all through the country. Its a battle for the most vulnerable in our society, a battle for their very souls. Do you understand what I’m saying Carlos? Where once we sent boys two-by-two, knocking on doors around the world, now in the US we can open schools. We’re not trying to bring the community to Mormonism here. You’re a Catholic.” And you,” he points to me, “And Parker here, are non-denominational. That’s fine with me, boys.” He points his tiny fork behind him at the window. “We’re talking about protecting kids from false doctrine, here Carlos. There are no more public schools in the area to balance things out.”
“And we use voucher money to do it,” says Parker who himself seems quite pleased with the lobster. “Carlos, your small Catholic church was never going to open a school large enough to sustain itself. It’s simple economics. But with our LDS Christian Academy there, you’re attendance is going to sky-rocket there anyway, and you won’t have anyone moving in on your neighborhood. More Christian believers at our school will bring more Catholic believers into your church. Trust me. Faith in Christ is faith, friend.”
“You want to use the Mormon curriculum in our schools?” Asks Carlos. He still has his folder open.
“We will use the Mormon, Latter Day Saints Teaching Guides for all core subjects at San Diego’s LDS Christian Academy, yes,” says Clifford. “But you really need to think of the school as something a lot less denominational.” He breaks open the other claw, and tears out a piece of flesh. Slowly, he brings it to his mouth, avoiding a portion that is covered in the chutney. “I’m not sure why anyone would replace melted butter for this…is this salsa?”
“What about the guides we discussed?” I ask Parker.
“Tom,” says Cliff. He puts his fork down and points to the model of my school on the map. “Look where you have been all these years? Nothing has changed things for the kids you’ve taught. I know you care about them, their families. Bringing those kids to Jesus is the best thing you can do, always has been. It won’t matter how. Just that they come to the Lord. After that, they can decide for themselves how they’d like to worship.”
Clifford wipes some of the sauce from his pursed lips with his dinner towel. “Would you rather they come to Allah?” He says it a bit like President Trump says China.
I think about the prospectus they showed me. With the investment being made in the school, the influx of money and the voucher money collected, we’d wipe away the local competition, the other local charter schools, and even the local church academies.
“You’re here to change lives, gentlemen,” says Cliff. “I’m here,” he waves his tiny fork at Carlos, “to ensure the investment changes lives towards Christ and that this change takes hold. You’ll not see much of a difference in our curriculum, as compared to the other Christian-based curriculums coming down the pipe right now, trust me.”
I watch Carlos while picking up my own fork. He looks up at me, and closes the blue folder on his lap. Then, he inserts it into a saddlebag lying at his feet.
“I remember when I first started teaching,” he says, turning his plate around a bit. “I knew that if I could instill in kids the type of faith I’ve always had, everything in the Encanto neighborhood would change. I prayed on it.” He then picks up his fork and pulls his tray closer to where he is sitting. “And I still believe that.”
Everyone looks at me. I just nod.
“Excellent,” says Parker, digging into his lobster. “Cliff, you are right about this… sauce. Shame, really.”
Cliff sighs, “Boys, you can’t always get everything you ask for, but you can ask for everything.”
“Here, here,” says Parker..
“Gentlemen, a toast,” says Clifford. “To better ethnic sauces and better schools in ethnic places.”
Parker wipes a chunk of lobster off his lip with his napkin and raises his glass with the rest of us. “And here’s to two new members of the La Jollan Educational Missionary Society. May we do the work that the kids in these poor neighborhoods need, at long last.”
“Amen,” we all answer.
