U.S. District Judge Gregory Presnell on Wednesday denied a motion asking that his injunction blocking the law apply only to the plaintiff in the case, the Hamburger Mary’s restaurant in downtown Orlando.
“This injunction protects Plaintiff’s interests, but because the statute is facially unconstitutional, the injunction necessarily must extend to protect all Floridians,” Presnell wrote in his order.
At issue is a new Florida law that contains penalties for any venue allowing children into a sexually explicit “adult live performance.” The law includes potential first-degree misdemeanor charges for violators.
Hamburger Mary’s filed a lawsuit in May against Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state, and Melanie Griffin, secretary of Florida’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation. DeSantis, who signed the measure into law, and the state have since been dropped as defendants, with Griffin remaining.
The downtown Orlando restaurant, which opened in 2008, has held drag performances that include bingo, trivia and comedy.
Presnell in June issued an order preventing Griffin’s agency from enforcing the law pending the outcome of a trial. He also denied the state’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
In that ruling, Presnell, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, questioned what the line in the law about “prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts” would mean for cancer survivors.
“It is this vague language — dangerously susceptible to standardless, overbroad enforcement which could sweep up substantial protected speech — which distinguishes [the new Florida law] and renders Plaintiff’s claim likely to succeed on the merits,” Presnell wrote.
State attorneys representing Griffin then requested a stay to Presnell’s order for parties other than Hamburger Mary’s. The state also has filed an appeal to Presnell’s ruling.
“The Court’s injunction also sweeps beyond Plaintiff to nonparties who may wish to expose children to live obscene performances in violation of the statute,” lawyers for the state agency argued in requesting the stay. “The portion of the injunction that applies to nonparties threatens Florida, and the children Florida enacted the law to protect, with irreparable harm, and is beyond the Court’s remedial authority.”
But Presnell on Wednesday denied that request, writing: “By her motion, Defendant seeks to neuter the Court’s injunction, restricting her enforcement only as to Plaintiff and leaving every other Floridian exposed to the chilling effect of this facially unconstitutional statute.”
Texas doctors fear a new era of government intrusion into medicine as lawmakers ban transition care for kids following prohibitions on abortion.
By William Melhado,The Texas TribuneJuly 17, 2023
People gather in front of the Texas Capitol during a protest against bills limiting transgender kids’ access to puberty blockers and hormone treatments in March.
Lauren Witte/The Texas Tribune
At least once a day Dr. Ximena Lopez sees a parent crying in her clinic. They’re crying because Lopez just told them they need to find a new way to get transition-related care for their children — by leaving Texas or sourcing treatments outside the state — because the state outlawed these treatments for trans youth.
After a yearslong barrage by activists and lawmakers, the state has won the battle against the use of transition-related care, like puberty blockers and hormone therapies, for transgender youth. While the war over this health care remains in question — and a legal fight to block the new law begins in Texas — clinics have closed and some doctors have stopped providing this care.
“The reason why I’m leaving Texas is that it’s unbearable for me,” Lopez said. “It’s so devastating that I just can’t bear living in a state where I feel oppressed and where I’m just seeing my patients suffer.”
Lopez formerly provided gender-affirming care to trans youth as the director of the GENder Education and Care, Interdisciplinary Support (GENECIS) program, which was jointly run by the Children’s Medical Center and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. By the end of July, she’ll no longer practice at the Dallas hospital and plans to move out of Texas.
In light of the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for kids, The Texas Tribune spoke with over half a dozen doctors who practice this type of medicine about the fear of losing their jobs, scaring away medical providers from working in Texas and — most importantly — revoking this critical health care for transgender children.
From state-launched investigations into the families of trans youth, to threats of actual violence, doctors are fearful to speak out against the attacks on transgender health care. Physicians raised concerns that the state is driving physicians away from Texas and inadequately training the next generation of medical professionals.
Many said Texas was treading into a new era of medicine — marked by restrictions to gender-affirming care and reproductive health care — one in which the government tells doctors how and who they can treat.
Many doctors the Tribune spoke with declined to share their names for fear of harassment. Some likened the conversations with parents informing them that they can no longer provide this type of care to their children to cancer diagnoses or impending hospice care.
Medical providers say this type of care is lifesaving for transgender youth who face higher rates of suicide attempts and mental health problems than their cisgender peers. One in five trans and nonbinary young people attempted suicide in the past year, according to a 2023 survey conducted by The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization that focuses on LGBTQ+ youth.
Last month Gov. Greg Abbott signed legislation that restricts transgender youth from accessing puberty blockers and hormone therapy, two treatments used to address gender dysphoria, the medical term for the distress someone experiences when their gender identity doesn’t match their body.
“In Texas we must protect children from making permanent, life-altering decisions before they have the mental capacity to do so, and Senate Bill 14 does just that,” Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott, said in a statement to the Tribune. Medical providers say puberty blockers are reversible and hormone therapy is partially reversible.
Mahaleris pointed to a recent survey from the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation that found a majority of the Americans surveyed oppose the use of puberty blockers and hormone therapy to treat transgender youth.
Senate Bill 14 was the forerunner in a broad swath of bills, aimed at reshaping the lives of LGBTQ+ Texans, that lawmakers pushed through this legislative session. Republican politicians also passed restrictions on drag shows and transgender athletes this session, but the implications of SB 14 are long reaching and profoundly affecting the lives of Texas families, said doctors who practice gender-affirming medicine. Families of trans youth have already fled Texas, but those who remain in the state must grapple with the consequences of losing health care access.
In recent months, many patients — including adults — have lost access to care as providers have left the state, a spokesperson for Texas Health Action, a nonprofit health care provider with clinics in Dallas, San Antonio and Austin, told the Tribune.
Dr. Anita Vasudevan, a primary care physician from Texas who chose to continue practicing in California instead of returning to her home state because of the ban on gender-affirming care and abortion, said the loss of Lopez and the GENECIS program highlights the issue of specialized providers leaving the state. This translates to missed learning opportunities for medical professionals in training, which will result in worse care for patients, she said.
“We’re building a generation of providers that just, unfortunately, won’t receive the level of training that they need in order to take care of patients in the ways that they need to be taken care of,” Vasudevan told the Tribune. “That’s a hard pill to swallow.”
An onslaught of interventions
For children already receiving puberty blockers and hormone therapy under the guidance of their medical team, SB 14 taking effect presents a daunting transition.
Lawmakers decided doctors must “wean” their patients under 18 of these treatments “in a manner that is safe and medically appropriate.”
But doctors who administer gender-affirming medical treatments say there is no such thing.
“This is comparable to asking a medical professional to wean a Type 1 diabetic off of their insulin — you would never do that,” Brett Cooper, an adolescent medicine physician from Dallas, said in a statement to the Tribune.
Cooper said SB 14 prohibits medical professionals from providing evidence-based, best-practice care to their patients. Including evidence that supports the use of these treatments and the recommendations of major medical groups like the American Medical Association.
He added that, like the state’s ban on abortions, this legislation will make it more difficult to recruit medical professionals to do business in Texas.
“There has been a chilling effect of the Legislature getting involved in the doctor-patient relationship and attempting to prevent physicians from providing the evidence-based and medically necessary care to their patients,” Cooper said. “Physicians know best how to care for their patients, not the Legislature.”
Texas Republicans’ effort to regulate the lives of transgender youth started long before Abbott signed SB 14 in June. Six years ago, the Legislature unsuccessfully tried to pass a bill requiring transgender people to use restrooms in public schools and governmental buildings that aligned with their sex assigned at birth.
In the years since, Republicans in the state have mounted a multipronged attack on gender-affirming care, in part, because issues like restrictions to medical care for LGBTQ+ people and drag shows had strong support from Republican voters.
In 2021, after the Legislature failed to restrict gender-affirming care, activists turned their attention to Lopez’s GENECIS program, targeting hospital board members and accusing the program of committing child abuse. Shortly after Children’s Health quietly closed the clinic, which was jointly run by UT Southwestern, Lopez was prompted to sue the hospital for shutting down operations to new patients.
The following year, Abbott directed the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate parents providing this type of care to their trans children for child abuse, terrifying families that they might be separated from one another.
More recently, suspended Attorney General Ken Paxton launched investigations against both Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston and Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas for providing this type of care — even before SB 14 became law. Doctors working at Dell Children’s parted ways with the hospital after Paxton’s announcement, which left patients and their families scrambling to find specialty care, some of the needed treatments were unrelated to the gender-affirming treatments the state targeted.
Other states that have passed laws forbidding trans youth from taking puberty blockers and hormone therapy have encountered legal challenges. In Arkansas, a similar restriction to gender-affirming care was struck down as unconstitutional on the basis that it violated the due process and equal protection rights of transgender children and families. Legal groups in Texas have already committed to challenging SB 14.
Despite the rebukes of these laws in the courts across the country, the quiet closures of clinics and doctor departures in Texas have left medical professionals feeling alone in the fight for their patients’ best interests. Evidence shows access to gender-affirming care for young people improves the mental health of trans minors. Doctors said hospitals facilitating this type of health care are aware of its benefits, but are fearful of pushback from politicians.
“Many hospitals in these states, like Texas, I think are against these politicians and extremists and legislators, [but] they’re afraid of financial risks, they’re afraid of retaliation and they’re taking the easy way out which is to abandon their doctors and their patients and just subdue to this political pressure,” Lopez said.
Her employer, UT Southwestern, did not return requests for comment for this story.
While large hospital systems are not the only providers who treat trans youth, advocates say it’s evident that a chilling effect has reached physicians who prescribe gender-affirming care across the state.
In San Antonio, a city of nearly 1.5 million, only one doctor was administering gender-affirming care to trans youth in recent years, said Andrea Segovia, senior field and policy adviser for the Transgender Education Network of Texas. But after Abbott leveraged DFPS to investigate Texas families, the provider stopped providing these treatments, Segovia said.
She’s watched the number of providers who care for trans patients shrink. She said parents of trans youth are struggling to find pediatricians for their trans kids even for non-gender affirming care purposes, like routine vaccinations and physicals.
“People are being treated like they have a scarlet letter,” Segovia said.
De facto elimination of care
Prior to his graduation from UT Southwestern Medical School this spring, Antonio García was deliberating where to pursue his residency training in family medicine.
He could stay in Texas, where he grew up and his family lives, by leveraging his existing geographic connections to ”match” into a residency — a competitive process in which medical students are placed at specialized programs in hospitals or clinics for further medical training after graduating.
During medical school, García worked with providers in the GENECIS program, including Lopez, where he saw the positive impact the clinic had on patients and their families. He wanted to continue doing that important work, by providing gender-affirming care to trans people.
To do that García has decided to leave Texas.
“I also saw that as an opportunity to leave all of this behind and go somewhere where I knew that I was going to be able to get gender-affirming-care training, where I was going to be able to live my life openly, freely and not have to have all of these kind of concerns,” García told the Tribune. As a gay man, García said the state’s increasing hostility to the LGBTQ+ community prompted his decision to leave Texas.
Seeing the backlash against individual providers and clinics has been devastating, García said. Noting Lopez’s departure, he said the animosity toward medical professionals and trans people is driving doctors away.
“[The doctors are] doing the right thing for these families, for these kids, and seeing that work be stifled and impeded has been just really unfortunate,” he said.
One area of particular concern, doctors said, is the worsening of an existing pediatric specialists shortage. In Texas, an estimated 17.4% of children have special health care needs that require attention from specialized pediatricians, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. These shortages mean patients have to travel longer distances and wait for weeks or months to see subspecialists, which can result in delaying or forgoing treatment.
Lauren Wilson, a pediatric hospitalist and the president of the AAP Montana chapter, partially attributes this shortage of doctors for children to the disparity in pay between adult and pediatric specialists. According to a 2023 compensation report from the healthcare-related companies Doximity and Curative, endocrinologists make nearly $60,000 more annually than their pediatric specialist peers, who undergo commensurate levels of training.
Shortages in this speciality — pediatric endocrinology — is of particular concern to Wilson because these doctors treat a wide range of children. This area of medicine deals with hormones and associated issues and mostly treats children with diabetes or growth problems. But these physicians also often specialize in gender-affirming care treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapies for trans children (less specialized physicians can also administer gender-affirming care.)
Wilson said these laws targeting pediatric health care — which could criminalize medical practices not even related to gender-affirming care — are unprecedented. In April, Montana became one of 20 states to ban trans youth from accessing gender-affirming care. It’s also the state that barred a transgender lawmaker from the Montana House floor for violating “decorum” rules after she told colleagues that voted in favor of restricting gender-affirming care would have blood on their hands.
Wilson also noted the de facto elimination of care by targeting clinics, by state leaders and extremists, has forced hospitals to stop this care.
“We’re in a position as physicians where we want to do what’s best for our patients, we want to follow all relevant guidelines. But we also want to not go to jail or lose our license to practice medicine,” Wilson said.
The Tribune asked Abbott’s office about the prospect of Texas losing medical providers because of the new law.
“Passed by a bipartisan majority in the Texas Legislature, SB 14 ensures access to appropriate and medically necessary services, with parental or legal guardian’s consent. Endocrinology treatments and procedures that are not intended to change the biological sex of a minor are unaffected by this law,” Mahaleris, Abbott’s spokesperson, said.
It’s not clear how many doctors have left or will leave Texas in response to restrictions on gender-affirming treatments, but states that have enacted other health care restrictions offer some clues.
States with abortion bans saw a 10.5% decrease in applications for obstetrics and gynecology residencies in 2023 compared to the previous year, according to data from the Association of American Medical Colleges.
Doctors, including Lopez, said they have already seen the effects with candidates deciding after the interview process not to accept positions in Texas “because of the politics.”
“Living in a medical dictatorship”
Treating gender dysphoria in Texas is not new. In 1965, the UT Medical Branch opened a gender clinic, providing treatment for hundreds of transgender people in the decades that followed.
Most major hospitals in Texas have been providing this type of care for over a decade. It only became widely controversial after lawmakers sought to criminalize doctors for providing this care, Lopez said.
Doctors lamented the spread of misinformation by lawmakers advocating against gender-affirming care during the most recent legislative session. Experts say this has further contributed to distrust between the public and the medical community, which worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic because of vaccine misinformation.
Hospitals across the country, including Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. and Boston Children’s Hospital, have received bomb threats and violent messages after far-right harassment campaigns falsely accused the hospitals of performing genital surgery on minors.
Doctors say while transition-related surgeries are rarely performed on people under the age of 18, these procedures were also banned by SB 14. Conservative activists have incorrectly cast gender-affirming care as irreversible “genital mutilation” in an effort to restrict access to these treatments.
Several doctors declined to share their names publicly, citing a fear that false allegations would be directed at them. Doctors suspect threats of violence and harassment are why some Texas hospitals targeted by far-right activists chose to quietly stop providing these medical treatments, instead of standing with patients and doctors.
“No one feels particularly safe,” said one doctor who spoke with the Tribune on the condition that their name would not be published.
Lawmakers who oppose this type of care feel emboldened, Lopez said.
“It’s just also, again, a dangerous precedent because if politicians can tell hospitals what to do, then they can do that for so many things,” she said. “And then where is the patient’s autonomy? Where’s the voice of science and medicine at that point?”
Doctors pointed to an example of a trial court in 2021 that ordered doctors to administer the drug ivermectin, commonly used to treat parasitic worms in horses, after a patient’s relative sued the Fort Worth hospital to compel physicians to administer it. The treatment gained notoriety as a false cure for COVID-19 in right-wing circles, including from then President Donald Trump. The 2nd Court of Appeals reversed the lower court’s decision, but the attempt to supersede the doctor’s expertise was clear.
Doctors worry that the latest health care restriction for trans youth is a dangerous precedent with an uncertain future. While much of the attention around gender-affirming care was aimed at children, bills limiting this type of care for adults have also gained traction in the Texas Legislature.
“I can compare this with living in a medical dictatorship, in which you are told what treatment you can and can’t do,” Lopez said. “But it’s not based on reason. It’s based on whatever the person in power is saying is best.”
Republicans have introduced more than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in 2023 alone, all over the country. They’re obsessed with controlling who Americans love, how they identify, and even where they can go to the bathroom. Here’s why.
I have not been able to get to all the news tabs I had opened, so each night I pushed them into the next morning. I had several hundreds of open tabs, at least past the beginning of the month into last June. Maybe 300+ But Ron left Sunday morning to go to NC to pick up his family and take them to see their brother in a nursing home under hospice care. He does this at least once a year, often more. This year with everything going on, it is a huge hardship drain on our finances. But it is family, so …
So with Ron gone, no distractions over the simple needed chores (feeding cats, cleaning cat boxes, doing dishes, taking out trash) I have had all the free time to work on the computer. I am now with this post caught up to Friday night / Saturday morning. I hope to finish the next few days worth quickly, so I can tell everyone what my medical tests showed. Spoiler I have minor heart damage, but seem to have a bad lung problem. The first meme is my fav. More later. Best wishes and hugs
Ron DeSantis has quietly rejected hundreds of millions of dollars in federal energy funding https://t.co/Xlm7tHGFxr
According to a green energy group, the rebates would have meant people in Florida would get “lower utility bills and healthier and more comfortable homes as well as lower greenhouse gas emissions.” Meanwhile, DeSantis has proposed millions in tax credits for people who buy gas stoves.
The "missing" Hunter Biden witness the GOP was promising for a while there was just charged by the DOJ with being a Chinese spy. https://t.co/lLiVEmfrU1
— follow @bencollins on bluesky (@oneunderscore__) July 10, 2023
Timeline:
Gal Luft was arrested for allegedly acting as an unregistered foreign agent in February.
Released on bail, he fled.
GOP Rep. Comer claimed "we can't track down the [Hunter Biden] informant" in May.
Luft put out a videos 5 days ago.
DOJ announced charges today.
— follow @bencollins on bluesky (@oneunderscore__) July 10, 2023
House Oversight Committee chair James Comer was on Laura Ingraham's Fox News show last night raising questions about whether the arrest of one of his supposed whistleblowers for serving as an unregistered agent of China may be political. pic.twitter.com/AoxnbQjYqv
Whoops. Gal Luft, the GOP's new fake Hunter Biden "whistleblower," was just indicted by the Justice Department for arms trafficking, violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, making false statements to federal agents, and being an unregistered foreign agent for China.
Gal Luft knew he was being indicted for being a foreign agent for China & charged w/arms trafficking, violating sanctions against Iran & making false statements to the feds so he decided to team-up w/corrupt Republicans and become a fake whistleblower for Hunter Biden. #DOJhttps://t.co/kUDzoOfZXjpic.twitter.com/LnwYqFKUsE
Leading medical groups recognize the medical necessity of treatments for gender dysphoria and endorse such treatments. Most of these groups have also explicitly rejected insurance exclusions for transgender-related care.
This is from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH). OASH oversees the Department’s key public health offices and programs, a number of Presidential and Secretarial advisory committees, 10 regional health offices across the nation, and the Office of the Surgeon General and the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. In order to add the resource links and the footnotes to display properly (and to save my self a lot of work) I did screen captures. To click on the links, use the PDF link to the government site, where they are clickable. This is from the US government, it is facts! The sources, links, and footnotes are all on the webpage. The US government doesn’t promote conspiracy fringe group made up bullshit. For you anti-trans people, modern medical science says gender-affirming care is the best practice for treating people and children with gender identification issues. Please take your anti-trans made up crap else where, because I rate it right up there with anti-vaccine / Covid conspiracy nonsense. Thanks
Gender-affirming care is a supportive form of healthcare. It consists of an array of services that may include medical, surgical, mental health, and non-medical services for transgender and nonbinary people. For transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents, early gender affirming care is crucial to overall health and well-being as it allows the child or adolescent to focus on social transitions and can increase their confidence while navigating the healthcare system.
Why does it matter?
Research demonstrates that gender-affirming care improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents.(1) Because gender-affirming care encompasses many facets of healthcare needs and support, it has been shown to increase positive outcomes for transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents. Gender-affirming care is patient-centered and treats individuals holistically, aligning their outward, physical traits with their gender identity.
Gender diverse adolescents, in particular, face significant health disparities compared to their cisgender peers. Transgender and gender nonbinary adolescents are at increased risk for mental health issues, substance use, and suicide.(2, 3) The Trevor Project’s 2021 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health found that 52 percent of LGBTQ youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year.(4)
A safe and affirming healthcare environment is critical in fostering better outcomes for transgender, nonbinary, and other gender expansive children and adolescents. Medical and psychosocial gender affirming healthcare practices have been demonstrated to yield lower rates of adverse mental health outcomes, build self-esteem, and improve overall quality of life for transgender and gender diverse youth.(5,6) Familial and peer support is also crucial in fostering similarly positive outcomes for these populations. Presence of affirming support networks is critical for facilitating and arranging gender affirming care for children and adolescents. Lack of such support can result in rejection, depression and suicide, homelessness, and other negative outcomes.(7,8,9)
Additional Information • Endocrine Treatment of Gender-Dysphoric/Gender-Incongruent Persons: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline • Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents | American Academy of Pediatrics • Standards of Care (SOC) for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender Nonconforming People | World Professional Association for Transgender Health
A ‘new breed’ of charter schools is spreading Christian nationalism — at taxpayers’ expense
Texas Sen. Donna Campbell, R-New Braunfels, speaks as students, educators and policy makers rally for school choice at the Texas Capitol on Friday advocating a voucher plan where parents could choose to remove children from low-performing public schools into better charter schools. (Photo by Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis via Getty Images)
Charges that public schools are subjecting children to leftwing indoctrination are proving to be mostly over-hyped or not at all based in fact. Yet, there’s evidence, according to a new report, that a fast-growing sector of the charter school industry is engaged in indoctrination, only, in this case, the schools are instructing children in white, conservative ideology.
The report, “A Sharp Turn Right: A New Breed of Charter Schools Delivers the Conservative Agenda” by the Network for Public Education (NPE), finds that charter schools that market to families a “classical” or “traditional” approach to schooling are essentially catering to parents and politicians that follow “right-wing ideology.”
Using keyword searches, news stories from local and national media, and examinations of charter school websites and other resources, the authors claim to have “identified a representative sample”—273 currently open charter schools—that resemble their definition of what constitutes a right-wing educational agenda.
The report authors offer this number with the caveat that “we are confident there are schools and even chains we missed.”
Two principal criteria the authors used to determine the political leanings of the schools were whether they offered what’s commonly called a “classical” curriculum or a “back-to-basics” curriculum and/or whether the schools’ websites made politically conservative or religious references or were “designed to attract white conservative families.”
Other evidence the authors looked for to determine a school’s political orientation was whether the charters’ owners or founders had publicly stated overtly conservative political beliefs or had substantial connections to right-wing individuals or advocacy groups.
Some charters blatantly signaled their education agendas by, for example, having a cross on their buildings or exhibiting religious symbols or hyper-patriotic messages in school common areas.
The report also accuses this sector of the charter school industry of enrolling mostly white and middle-class and wealthy families and discouraging attendance of low-income and non-white families.
“Unlike the entire charter school sector, the overall student body of these charter schools is disproportionately white,” the report states, citing evidence from the 2021-2022 school year that “more than 52 percent of the students who attended these charter schools were white, compared with 29 percent of all charter school students. Nationally, nearly one in four charter students is Black. In right-wing charters, Black students comprise only seven percent of enrollment.”
Students who were eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunch, a typical measurement of poverty, were also under-represented in these schools, making up only 17 percent of students enrolled in these charters “compared with 48 percent of all charter school students and 43 percent of the students in democratically-governed public schools.”
Moreover, these schools are a growing presence in the nation’s education system since the election of Donald Trump as president. “Since the inauguration of Donald Trump, the number of classical and right-wing charter schools has grown by 90 percent with 66 more schools in the pipeline,” the report assesses. “Forty-seven percent of the schools we identified opened since [his] inauguration.”
The report challenges the notion that charter schools are a bipartisan or even progressive issue, as they are often framed, and calls into question whether public school tax dollars should continue to pour into the charter industry.
“Charter schools took a sharp turn right and now serve a purpose never imagined by their early proponents,” the report concludes. “[T]hese new laboratories of right-wing thought are flourishing with the silent accord of charter school supporters on both the left and right ends of the political spectrum.”
A Threat to ‘Upend American Education’
The report comes at a critical time as the nation’s first religion-based charter school has been allowed to open in Oklahoma.
Up until now, “[charter] schools [were] deemed public by state law, and must be secular just like any other public school,” according to Chalkbeat reporter Matt Barnum. Allowing a religious charter to open—in this case, an online charter school affiliated with the Catholic Church—“is a direct challenge to existing charter laws, which critics say discriminate against churches and other religious entities,” Barnum states.
“The prospect of religious charter schools threatens to upend American education, far beyond Oklahoma,” Barnum continues, contributing to “the successful conservative campaign to allow more public funding to go to religious education.”
Also hanging in the balance, Barnum writes, is a current U.S. Supreme Court case—Charter Day School, Inc. v. Peltier—that would potentially rule whether charter schools are public or private actors. Should the court rule that charter schools are private entities, the ideologically conservative charters that NPE examines in its report would not only flourish; they would become even more blatant in their instruction of right-wing ideology and more restrictive in denying non-Christian, non-conservative, and LGBTQ+ students to enroll in their schools.
Indeed, the charter school chain at the center of this supreme court case, the Roger Bacon Academy, is examined extensively in the NPE report.
The report calls attention to the daily oath students at the schools are required to chant, in which they pledge to, among other things, “[guard] against the stains of falsehood from the fascination with experts … and from over-reliance on rational argument.”
The report also notes that the schools run by the company “emphasize a ‘traditional curriculum, traditional manners, and traditional respect’—‘more like schools were 50 years ago compared to now,’ according to one of its board members.”
While these calls for “traditional” education can seem non-controversial, NPE warns they are a type of “dog whistle” to convey a right-wing political agenda and a marketing strategy to “attract conservative families with Christian nationalist identities anxious to place their children in schools that reflect early- and mid-20th century values, pedagogy, and curriculum.”
Dog Whistles That Signal Right-Wing Ideology
Among the dog whistles the report cites are uses of the word “classical” in the schools’ branding and marketing and promises on their websites and other marketing materials to “[emphasize] Eurocentric texts and the study of Latin and Greek.” The report says these are signals for attracting conservative families and discouraging families who’d want their children instructed in a broader range of viewpoints and perspectives.
In classical schools that have overtly Christian personae, “the curriculum focuses not only on the Western canon—Homer to C.S. Lewis—but also on scripture,” the report states.
Other dog whistles the report describes include the use of “red, white, and blue decor, patriotic insignia, white students and teachers featured almost exclusively on [the schools’] websites, and the generous use of the word ‘virtue,’” in their marketing.
These are meant to “signal to families which students would be a ‘good fit’ for the school,” the report states.
According to NPE, “more than 80 percent of the new classical charter schools have websites designed to attract Christian nationalist families.”
Another type of charter school the report designates as overtly conservative offers a “‘back to basics’ curriculum without necessarily identifying the curriculum as classical.”
These charters use a similar marketing strategy of “[including] right-wing clues on their website[s] to attract families with Christian nationalist beliefs. Such clues include red, white, and blue school colors, patriotic logos, pictures of the founding fathers, using terms such as virtue, patriotism, and even outright references to religion.”
Sometimes the dog whistles the report describes come from the founders or leaders of the schools. One example came from the founder of the Tulsa Classical Academy who said his school is “a school that’s about justice, not ‘social justice.’ Virtue, not ‘virtue-signaling.’ Objective truth, not ‘your truth’ and ‘my truth.’”
As a result of these marketing tactics, the NPE report finds, “[These charter schools] are whiter and infused with Christian nationalist leanings and aligned with right-wing leaders who make no secret of their plans to turn back progress.”
Schools With Strong Ties to Conservative and Christian Ideology
The NPE report also cites numerous anecdotes showing the strong ties that many of these charters have to conservative, Christian ideology and right-wing advocacy groups.
One example the report points to is Great Hearts Academies, a company operating an extensive network of 34 classical charter schools in Texas and Arizona. In 2018, the report notes, Great Hearts enforced a policy requiring students to use bathrooms “corresponding to the gender listed on their birth certificates.” The company eventually reversed the policy after students formed groups to protest the policy, according to NPE.
Also, Great Hearts launched a network of “micro-schools,” as alternatives to public schools during the pandemic, according to NPE, some of which are “located in churches.” And the company announced in 2023 that it was opening a network of Christian private schools.
Another charter school chain the report identifies as being a conveyor of right-wing ideology is the extensive network of schools operated by Hillsdale College and its Barney Charter School Initiative.
The report references a 2022 series of articles by Kathryn Joyce in Salon, that reported that Hillsdale College, a small private college based in Michigan, “has inconspicuously been building a network of ‘classical education’ charter schools, which use public tax dollars to teach that systemic racism was effectively vanquished in the 1960s, that America was founded on ‘Judeo-Christian’ principles and that progressivism is fundamentally anti-American.”
Hillsdale’s Barney Charter School Initiative, according to the NPE report, was started with funding from the Barney Family Foundation and the fortune of Stephen Barney and his wife Lynne, who control the foundation.
The report states, “An examination of the foundation’s 990s reveals that in addition to its health and child-centered charities, it also generously funds right-wing think tanks, foundations, and even organizations that exist to create right-wing model legislation. Beneficiaries include Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, Hoover Institution, the Heartland Institute, State Policy Network, [EdChoice], and the Heritage Foundation.”
The Barney Foundation’s political leanings are reflected in the Hillsdale College’s curriculum, according to NPE. Hillsdale charters often teach the college’s 1776 curriculum, which, the report states, “disparages the New Deal and affirmative action while downplaying the effects of slavery. Climate change is not mentioned in the science curriculum; sixth-grade studies include a single reference to global warming.”
“Another feature of Hillsdale schools is the relative homogeneity of their student body: whiter and wealthier than public schools and other charter schools,” according to NPE. “During the 2021 school year, 66 percent of all Hillsdale-affiliated charter school students were white, and only 12 percent were eligible to receive a subsidized lunch, making Hillsdale charter families not only less diverse and more affluent than the public and charter sectors but even whiter and wealthier than the right-wing charter sector as a whole.”
What the Charter School Coalition Got Wrong
Although the NPE report asserts that the rise of right-wing charter schools “serve[s] a purpose never imagined by their early proponents,” it doesn’t fully explain how conservatives were able to hijack that purported original intent to serve their political means instead.
NPE credits the origins of the charter school idea to education professor Ray Budde, who, in the 1970s, had a “vision [that] states would give schools the authority to create innovative, experimental programs at existing schools.” But there is another origin story that more fully explains how charters became so vulnerable to right-wing co-option.
In her 2017 article for Democracy, journalist Rachel Cohen traced the origin of the charter school idea to, not Budde, but Ted Kolderie.
Cohen describes Kolderie as “quintessentially neoliberal” and a self-described “policy entrepreneur” who was “in the middle of discussions over school reform” in “the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.”
Under his direction, the Minnesota-based Citizens League, was “a powerful, centrist Twin Cities policy group,” according to Cohen, that advocated for “different ways to provide government services, including education.”
“One of Kolderie’s central ideas,” Cohen wrote, “was to ‘end the exclusive franchise’ of school districts providing public education. In several reports, he described the decline of public education as the direct consequence of public districts’ monopolistic power over schooling. His proposal: independent schools, accountable to parents through free market choice, and to the government through a set of contractual obligations. He specified that many different types of entities—universities, corporations, public school districts, nonprofits—should be able to manage these new schools, state law permitting.”
Among the proposals Kolderie and his organization pushed for was “cooperatively managed schools,” which Cohen described as being “strikingly similar to modern-day charters.”
Cohen described Kolderie not as a political operative but as a prominent leader of “technocratic centrists” who “focused on deregulation, disruption, and the hope of injecting free market dogmas into the public sector.”
Their vision, as Cohen described it, is that getting education right is not so much an ideological issue as it is about better systems engineering.
This vision, according to Cohen, was adopted by prominent policy leaders and politicians of both parties in the 1990s and brought about the powerful coalition of business leaders and moderate Democrats and Republicans that created and spread the charter school movement.
But what the charter school coalition got wrong is that education is not just about getting the system “right.” It’s also about values.
Sure, students need to learn how to read and do math. But students also need to learn how to interact with one another; how to care, not just for themselves, but for their fellow human beings; and how to contribute positively to their families and communities.
And if we want to live in a democratic society, that means teaching students about the values of an inclusive democracy that includes people of diverse cultures and beliefs.
But by creating an approach to education that was determined to be apart from, even opposed to, democratic values that are often imposed by public governance of schools, charter school proponents created empty vessels of education institutions that are void of the principles that are shared in a society that upholds a common good.
And we know what happens when there’s a void. As NPE’s report shows, the void is rapidly being filled by the same politically extremist faction that elected Trump and now threatens to impose an authoritative vision for the country.
“The only question that remains,” the report concludes, “is whether moderate, progressive, and liberal-minded voters and politicians recognize where the runaway charter movement is headed.”
This article was produced by Our Schools. Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.
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