Aiden Buzzetti: Bad teachers 'make children ideological slaves'



Aiden Buzzetti is the president of the 1776 Project, and he believes parents need to take their child’s education into their own hands.

“It’s important to realize that not every teacher is bad, but the ones that are bad disregard all of the rules. They want to make children their ideological slaves,” Buzzetti tells James Poulos, adding, “This trend cannot continue.”

This creates a never-ending cycle, as the children who’ve been indoctrinated will grow up to be teachers who indoctrinate.

“It seems like they’ve built a perpetual-motion machine,” Poulos notes.

Buzzetti and the 1776 Project have been working to change the political landscape of school boards in order to stop this.

“Right now, especially here in Texas, where we’ve done a fair amount of elections — the school boards were dominated by progressive parent groups,” Buzzetti explains. “If you have a group of parents who are willing to stand shoulder-to-should with you and make the case that something needs to change, you’re actually laying the groundwork for something substantive.”

Though 80% of kids in America attend public schools, there’s been an explosion in alternative schooling options across America.

“There’s more opportunities for parents to go to private schools, or charter schools and religious schools, even one of the classical Christian associations had their membership triple over the course of the pandemic,” Buzzetti explains. “That means parents are taking their kids out of a public school and seeing what their options are.”

However, Buzzetti believes it's extremely important to continue to fight for change within the public school system and not abandon it.

“It’s important that we stand firm on public schools, that we don’t necessarily abandon them,” he says.


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Supreme Court strikes down Maine law that discriminated against religious schools



In a victory for religious liberty and school choice, the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a Maine law that unconstitutionally discriminated against sectarian schools.

The court held in a 6-3 ruling that Maine's prohibition on using private school tuition assistance for religious schools violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

The case, Carson v. Makin, concerned a tuition assistance program for parents who live in school districts that do not have a public secondary school for their children. The program made funds available to assist these families with private or charter school tuition, provided that the chosen school met state accreditation requirements and that it was "nonsectarian in accordance with the First Amendment."

The Maine law was a kind of state law known as a "Blaine Amendment" law, named for a failed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have prohibited direct government aid to schools that have a religious affiliation. These laws generally prohibit funding from state benefits programs from being given to religious schools.

A group of families that qualified for the program but wanted to use the tuition funding to send their kids to religiously affiliated schools filed a suit challenging the law. They argued that the "nonsectarian" requirement violated the Constitution, and their case worked its way up to the Supreme Court.

The six Republican-appointed justices in the majority agreed with the families. They held that because Maine offered its citizens a benefit, denying that benefit to families who wanted to use it for religious schools unconstitutionally discriminated against those institutions "solely because they are religious."

Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion. He wrote that the principles outlined in two recent cases, Trinity Lutheran v. Comer and Espinoza v. Montana, were sufficient to decide this cases. Those cases concerned a religious preschool in Missouri that was denied benefits from a state program and a Montana scholarship program that excluded private religious schools, respectively. In both of those cases, the court ruled in favor of the religious schools.

"[A]s we explained in both Trinity Lutheran and Espinoza, such an 'interest in separating church and state "more fiercely" than the Federal Constitution ... "cannot qualify as compelling" in the face of the infringement of free exercise,'" Roberts wrote.

"Justice Breyer stresses the importance of 'government neutrality' when it comes to religious matters ... but there is nothing neutral about Maine’s program. The state pays tuition for certain students at private schools — so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion."

The three Democratic-appointed justices dissented.

"The First Amendment begins by forbidding the government from 'mak[ing] [any] law respecting an establishment of religion.' It next forbids them to make any law 'prohibiting the free exercise thereof.' The Court today pays almost no attention to the words in the first Clause while giving almost exclusive attention to the words in the second," Breyer wrote in his dissent.

In a separate dissent, Sotomayor accused the majority of making the separation of church and state unconstitutional.

"What a difference five years makes. In 2017, I feared that the Court was 'lead[ing] us .... to a place where separation of church and state is a constitutional slogan, not a constitutional commitment.' Today, the Court leads us to a place where separation of church and state becomes a constitutional violation," she wrote.

SCOTUS to decide whether states can deny voucher funds to religious schools



The Supreme Court will soon decide if states that give money to parents for their child's high school education can exclude institutions that offer religious instruction.

In the recent past, the Supreme Court has been friendly to cases that made claims of religious discrimination.

In a case last year involving the state of Montana, the Court concluded that when a state provides money to fund a child's tuition, religious institutions cannot be excluded.

On Wednesday, the Court heard oral arguments in a case involving two sets of parents who are suing the state over a program in the state of Maine that pays a child's tuition to a school of the family's choice provided there is no public school in the area. The program requires the schools in question to be entirely secular.

The two families involved in the case wish to send their children to private Christian schools and have sued the state.

"Other families would have an opportunity to send their kids to a religious school of their choosing if they couldn't afford it themselves," Amy Carson, a plaintiff in the case, said.

The Carson family paid out of pocket so that their daughter could attend Bangor Christian School. Amy Carson argues that this is a case based on religious discrimination and that families who cannot afford the cost of a private school are being denied the same benefits as everyone else due to the religious affiliation.

The libertarian interest firm the Institute for Justice, which is representing families, says that this case has the potential to be "a landmark case" in a statement Friday. The lead attorney on the case, Michael Bindas, says that by "singling out religion and only religion" as a basis for exclusion from the tuition assistance program, the state of Maine has limited the rights of its citizens.

The state of Maine has successfully defended this case for the tuition program's decision on every level up to the Supreme Court and is confident that the decision will remain intact.

The state of Maine claims that the families have been denied tuition assistance on the grounds that the education the children are receiving is "not equivalent to public education."

“Parents are free to send their children to such schools if they choose, but not with public dollars," said Maine Atty. Gen. Aaron Frey.

The ACLU of Maine has filed court papers in support of the state and believes that the Supreme Court will side with the state of Maine in their ruling.

The Court is expected to reach its decision on the case by the end of June, according to NBC news.