“Our treasury rifled; our credit shaken; the poor laborer asking vainly for his honest wages day after day; the rich official reveling in disreputable gains; an enormous debt heaped upon us we know not how; our schools decaying, our teachers cowering before their Catholic masters . . .”
Harper’s Weekly magazine offered that apocalyptic vision in an 1871 article against Catholic parochial schools in New York City. It was illustrated with an infamous Thomas Nast cartoon, “The American River Ganges,” which pictured cardinals as alligators crawling ashore as children cowered.
I thought of the Harper’s diatribe while reading Timothy Cardinal Dolan’s reaction to the failure of the final budget deal to include an educational investment tax credit designed to provide a bit of relief to parents who send their children to religious schools. Catholic schools, he wrote in The Post, have been “kicked to the curb.”
The cardinal described himself as “angry.” His reaction is widely shared in the Jewish community. The budget message, the Orthodox newspaper Hamodia quoted Assemblyman Dov Hikind as saying, is that “education is important for all children in New York state, unless you attend a yeshiva or a parochial school.”
One reason people are so upset is the long-simmering realization that, on a net basis, religious schools save New York taxpayers billions. If they didn’t exist, New Yorkers would have to pay a fortune.
This is well understood in Albany. So the Legislature favored the education investment tax credit by an easy majority.
The proposed credit is tiny compared to the estimated $22 billion for pre-k through grade 12 in the state’s education budget. It would start at $180 million in the first year and then $225 million and $300 million. However modest in comparative cost, it would be a help, particularly to families of limited means with pupils in religious day schools.
Plus, the idea has a distinguished lineage. It grew out of a blue ribbon panel chaired 20 years ago by ex-Gov. Hugh Carey. The panel’s assignment was the crisis in Catholic schools. It recommended two proposals designed to bring some financial relief to families who were, in effect, paying for education twice.
One, for learning-technology grants, did become law and is helping fund modern systems. It is specifically open to both public schools and private schools of all denominations.
The second recommendation was for the kinds of education investment tax credits that just failed to make the budget.
There have been several efforts to win these tax credits over the years, but hopes were particularly high this season. One reason is that Gov. Cuomo showed such leadership on the charter-school crisis; he also showed himself to be a wily operator against Mayor de Blasio’s bid to use pre-K education to tax the rich.
Cardinal Dolan, moreover, thought he had a promise. Yet the measure was dropped, even while the governor came through on charter schools.
The sources I’ve spoken with suggest that blame can be widely assigned, but there is a sense the teachers’ union worked through Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to kill it.
Tempers are certainly running hot. One Democrat, Sen. Simcha Felder, was reported by the Jewish news site jpudates.com as being so “furious” at the betrayal on the tax credit that he’s considering endorsing a Republican, Rob Astorino of Westchester, for governor.
More broadly, I detect a sense that it’s time to start addressing the legal legacy of the kind of bigotry that was turned on Catholic education in the 19th century. That is the so-called Blaine amendments, named for a one-time speaker of the US House, James Blaine, a Republican of Maine known as the Plumed Knight.
In 1875, Blaine pushed for an amendment to the US Constitution so that tax money raised in any state for public schools could never be controlled by any religious sect. The amendment died in the Senate, but Blaine’s followers got similar amendments passed in at least 36 states, including New York. (The tax-credit law was written to get around Blaine’s restrictions, which greatly complicate any effort to boost faith-based schools.)
Isn’t it time to repeal Blaine’s bigotry?
After all, our treasury is rifled, but not by the religious schools. Our credit is shaken, but not by the priests, rabbis and imams. The poor laborer is strangled by public employees who have a better deal than he could ever get — and a quarter of a trillion dollars in unfunded state pension obligations. Isn’t it time to make it easier for religious schools to help educate our children?