Hey Everyone,

I’d be remiss if I didn’t begin this 15^th and final newsletter for Education Law Center and Public Funds Public Schools with a bit of good news from the U.S. Supreme Court. By a 4-4 vote the Court affirmed the decision of Oklahoma’s own state supreme court in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond. That means, for now, we don’t have to worry about states setting up directly funded, religious public charter schools.

Shout out to Education Law Center, co-counsel in the companion case challenging the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, whose plaintiffs also filed an amicus brief in Drummond last month. More on SCOTUS below.

A lot has changed since I accepted the chance to spend a year as a Visiting Senior Fellow with the ELC/PFPS team: Betsy DeVos had yet to find a way to ram universal vouchers into states like Tennessee and Texas. Donald Trump was still a former president. No one had ever heard of DOGE. Elon Musk was just a weird billionaire who happened to own a social media company. The people of Canada and Mexico still looked at us as trading partners. And the people of Ukraine still looked at the U.S. as a friend.

We already needed to find new and better ways to build an economy that worked for everyone. But at least as of a few months ago, the federal government wasn’t combing through its budget to find new ways to screw working families out of healthcare just to pay for tax cuts for billionaires.

Recently, Republicans in Congress have been furiously debating with each other whether to cut programs like Medicaid by a lot—or a heck of a lot. And each of the other pieces of their agenda are cycling around that. The stakes are high, of course, because whatever comes out of Congress will have Donald Trump’s approval.

And that includes the scheme to use federal funding to ram private education vouchers into each and every state.

Let’s review how all of this fits together.

Vouchers and the Rest of the Right-Wing, Anti-Family Agenda

We know that vouchers mostly fund students already in private school. We know about the horrific learning loss suffered by kids who do use a voucher to leave public school. And we know that when it comes to vouchers it’s not about school choice at all—it’s the school’s choice. Voucher schools can pick which kids to serve and which to leave behind.

But to me, right now, the most important thing to know about school vouchers is that they are a key part of a larger GOP plan to cut Medicaid and gut SNAP food assistance programs—all to afford new tax breaks for billionaires.

That’s always been true as far as the overall right-wing political agenda goes. But right now it’s also literally true: vouchers, cuts to Medicaid, and the rest of the attacks on public investments in families are all part of the GOP’s mega budget bill that just passed the House and is off to the Senate.

That bill, by the way, also comes at a massive new cost to states, just as many of those states are facing an escalating budget crunch from their own voucher programs. You can read this new report on how much the federal GOP bill will cost your state from the national voucher piece alone.

And it’s not just vouchers. It’s the threat of disinvestment in public schools across the country. And that will create real costs to your community. Here’s a new tool from the team at Education Law Center you can use to find out more about federal education aid where you live. The tool lets you drill right down to your own congressional and local school district level to see just what those federal dollars are doing.

We could do this all day. Here’s a new report on what’s at stake in Head Start funding for pre-K programs in each congressional district. Now, technically Head Start seems safe in this year’s round of federal budget cuts, but we know that destroying the program was a key part of Project 2025 and was in the initial Trump White House plan.

Here’s the point. Whether it’s investing in healthcare for working families; pre-K programs for the youngest learners; food assistance for folks looking to get back on their feet; or just solid, reliable funding for schools in your community—all of this is at stake over the next three to four years.

Wrapping Up

If you’ve read this far—and especially if you’ve been reading the last 14 newsletters—you’re probably engaged one way or another in the fight for public schools. Or maybe you believe as I do that school vouchers are just the education piece of a much bigger agenda to roll back and walk away from public investments across the board: from healthcare commitments to retirement security and so much more.

I hope you keep doing whatever it is you’re doing in the fight to defend and renew each of those investments. But I want to ask you for one more thing.

One of the reasons I chose to spend a year with ELC is that even before Donald Trump took office again, I really saw the courts and the law as the next stage of the work to protect public education. And the most recent example of that is the Oklahoma religious charter school case at the Supreme Court that went our way.

States can invest in public schools. States can, on their own, try to make sure students with disabilities get the support they need. States can make sure kids in rural communities get invested in just as much as kids from the suburbs. States can make sure everyone—from the most vulnerable kids to middle class families and folks in the wealthiest communities, too—all have a fair shake when it comes to educational opportunity.

But sometimes it’s taken the federal government to ensure that all happens. And sometimes it’s taken the courts too, watching out for our state or even U.S. constitutional rights. We’re seeing that more than ever now, with more than 165 different rulings (as of this writing) pausing or even outright halting Trump’s efforts to trample all over key legal rights and protections.

Point is: I think Education Law Center is at the tip of the spear in this fight—at least when it comes to defending investments in and support for public education. I knew that before I came temporarily onboard last year, and I believe that even more today.

So, keep an eye on these folks at ELC, will you? And do what you can, if you can, to help them out. I’ve learned a lot from this team over the last nine months, and so can you.

As for me, my time at ELC is up, but I’m not really going anywhere. And I’ll have more to say in the coming weeks about my own future in public service.

Stay tuned and stay in the fight.

Josh