Michigan, California, and a handful of other states announced a lawsuit against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday, alleging that one of the department’s policies requiring coronavirus relief funds to benefit both public and private school students is a willful misinterpretation of the law.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel insisted in the lawsuit that Congress only intended its CARES package relief to benefit public school students and low-income students who attend private schools. By requiring the states to share funds with all private schools, DeVos has tipped “the scales in favor of private schools at the great expense of our public schools,” Nessel said in a statement.
Nessel’s primary concern, however, is that “students who have privileges and resources already available to them,” otherwise known as students who attend private schools, according to Nessel, will benefit from government funds when they don’t need it.
Not only is this kind of thinking discriminatory, it’s also flat-out wrong.
Every single school in Michigan, both public and private, had to shut its doors because of the coronavirus pandemic. Every single student in each of the states suing DeVos has had to endure distance learning for the past few months and will likely continue doing so over the next school year. And that means that every single school and student has experienced a loss of some kind due to an unforeseeable, uncontrollable event. Thus, education funds meant to relieve those losses should apply to everyone.
Nessel does not have the right to pick and choose which students she thinks deserve help. Indeed, a recent Supreme Court case made it clear that taxpayer-funded programs are fair game for all schools. So, it’s very likely that she and the other state attorneys general will lose this case. But even so, this lawsuit reveals how little Nessel and the rest think of teachers, administrators, and parents who choose not to educate their students under the umbrella of the state. After all, that’s what this is all about.
