In the absolute worst possible example of your tax dollars at work—well, your tax dollars if you live in Oklahoma—the state department of education is planning to buy 55,000 Bibles to put in every school district in the state. Yes, that includes public schools.
This is a terrible enough idea in and of itself, given that whole separation of church and state thing. It’s made worse by the fact that this is all part of a larger push by conservatives to engineer a collapse of public schools.
But first, the Bible.
The state’s Request for Proposal requires Oklahoma to purchase a Bible that has many things that were probably not found in any Bible you’ve happened to come across. The Bible must be the King James Version “for historical accuracy” and must include the Pledge of Allegiance, the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
Yes, as you might have already heard, it’s the Trump Bible. Technically, it’s the God Bless the USA Bible, and it conveniently contains exactly that combination of documents. To be perfectly fair, one other Bible might meet the criteria as well. The “We The People” Bible may also fit the bill, and that one happens to be endorsed by Donald Trump Jr.
Oklahoma buying 55,000 of those $60 Bibles would get Trump a cool $3.3 million, or over 10 times what he’s made so far selling them to pay his ever-increasing legal bills.
Indeed, Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters has asked for $3 million in state money for this boondoggle, which is on top of the $3 million the state had already allocated to put Bibles in public schools. This grift is Walters’ brainchild.
Walters has turned Oklahoma into ground zero for an all-out assault on a pluralistic society. He’s a big fan of Moms for Liberty and was a featured speaker at their conference in 2023.
He put Chaya Raichik, who uses her Libs of TikTok platform to whip people into a frenzy of hatred against LGBTQ+ people and allies, on the state’s Library Media Advisory Committee.
He also pushed for Oklahoma to open the first publicly funded religious charter school in the country, a virtual Catholic school run by the diocese, because he believes that not having Christianity in public schools has “undermined our entire education system.”
Thankfully, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that having a state-funded religious school was unconstitutional. However, in 2022, the United States Supreme Court ruled that states must give taxpayer money to private religious schools if they also give taxpayer money to sectarian private schools.
In another case, the court decided it was just fine if a Washington state football coach at a public school led people, including his students, in a Christian prayer at the 50-yard line after games. So it isn’t far-fetched to think that this current crop of conservatives on the court might find a way to let Oklahoma let a Catholic diocese run a Catholic school with public dollars.
While Oklahoma and Walters are currently in the spotlight over this, Walters is not an outlier. He’s part of a well-oiled machine dedicated to gutting public education and, in Walters, you can see the two prongs of that attack.
First, conservatives very much want that public education money to go to their favorite private interests, such as lining the pockets of Trump. Next, they also very much want to force a very narrow version of Christianity on everyone, a move that just so happens to require public school money to go to private religious schools.
Project 2025, which Trump has scrambled to disavow even though it represents all his preferred policy positions and is stuffed with former Trump officials and staffers, clearly laid out the conservative vision of the future of public education. It would abolish the U.S. Department of Education, returning all education policy and funding to the states. It would take Title I money, which currently goes to schools with high populations of low-income students, and shift it to giving families money to pay for “private learning options.”
It would do basically the same thing with Individuals with Disabilities Education Act funding, giving parents that money to purchase whatever educational materials or support they want. Besides being an obvious giveaway of public money to Christian homeschoolers, these moves would strip huge chunks of funding from public schools, leaving them unable to serve the most vulnerable student populations.
Project 2025 is also pushing for “universal school choice.” This is a fan favorite for Republicans, as universal school choice is just a fancy way of saying vouchers. What conservatives want is a system where whatever amount of funding would normally go for a child to attend a public school can instead be diverted to a private school, a religious school, or homeschooling.
Conservatives have come closest to attaining this vision in Arizona, and the author of the education section of Project 2025 has praised the state as a school choice pioneer.
So what does being a school choice pioneer look like? Arizona gives tax credits to School Tuition Organizations, which are donors who give money to private school scholarships. This has resulted in a shift of hundreds of millions of dollars from public coffers to private groups. The 75,000 students currently receiving vouchers cost the state $700 million.
Meanwhile, public schools in Arizona are being starved of funding. The state ranks 48th in the money it spends per public school pupil. From 2008 to 2019, the state cut per-pupil spending for public schools by 5.7%, while at the same time increasing spending for the voucher and tax credit scheme by 270%.
The school choice project has, as ProPublica put it, blown a hole in the state’s overall budget, with Arizona coming up short $1.4 billion in 2024, much of which is because of the voucher funding.
Trump already allied himself with this vision back in 2017 by naming Betsy DeVos his secretary of education. She pushed for letting religious schools apply for federal charter school grants and has spent her post-Trump career stumping for universal school choice.
A Trump victory in 2024 would likely make it possible for every state to be just like Arizona and to treat taxpayer money as nothing but a slush fund for Trump Bibles, fly-by-night charter schools, and parents who are homeschooling so their children aren’t woke. Entirely collapsing public school funding would be great for them, but terrible for the rest of us.
