Those who have been following the Brexit debacle in the UK will be familiar with the terms Leavers and Remainers. Leavers are the faction who want Britain to leave the European Union, where it has prospered for decades. Remainers are the faction who want Britain to stay. West Virginia has its own version of Leavers. Our Leavers, led by Senator Patricia Rucker of Jefferson County, want to set up a system of charter schools that would permit parents to remove their children from public school. But the evidence does not show that students at charter schools perform better. Worse yet, the Leavers want the rest of us to pay for this scheme with our tax money, draining funds from already underfunded public schools.

Senator Rucker was appointed by the Republican leadership in the West Virginia Senate to be Chair of the Senate Education Committee. This Committee has first crack at any legislation affecting our public schools. She is an odd choice for this role. Her education views have been described as “extremist and in many ways anti-public education.”

Senator Rucker has five children, all of whom have been home schooled. At the very least, this shows some sort of distaste on her part for public schools. For this and other reasons the Charleston Gazette-Mail, West Virginia’s largest and most influential newspaper, declared that she was a poor choice for Education Committee Chair.

The Republican members of Senator Rucker’s Committee recently advanced SB 451, known as the Omnibus Education Bill. This 133-page Bill covers many topics, including teacher pay raises. It contains a complicated charter school provision and a provision for Education Savings Accounts into which the state would deposit money for parents to spend on private school education for their children, including religious schools and home schooling.

The Bill was passed out of the Education Committee to the floor of the Senate, from where it was scheduled to be referred to the Finance Committee. But the Republican leadership somehow forgot that they did not have the votes on Finance.  As a result, they quickly resorted to parliamentary hard-ball by declaring the full Senate a Committee of the Whole and bypassing the Finance Committee. This has been done only four times in state history. A revised Bill will probably pass the Senate and move to the House in the week beginning February 4, 2019.

Since the late Nineteenth Century, American public education has produced legions of well-educated students who have gone on to productive lives. Our system has been the envy of the world. Recently, our system of public education has been weakened by poor funding and low teacher pay.

It has also been undermined by conservative ideologues like Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos pushing alternatives to public school, such as charter schools, mostly in the name of parent choice. But there are already private schools in West Virginia – Jefferson has two and Berkeley has five. And there are over 11,000 home school students in West Virginia. So it cannot be a desire for alternatives to public school that is driving the Leavers.

Private schools charge tuition for attendance. These private schools are not the charter schools contemplated in SB 451, although private schools could qualify if they successfully complete the application process. Unlike private schools, SB 451 prohibits charter schools from charging tuition or fees.  Instead, they would be funded by a portion of the tax money that would otherwise fund public schools.

One issue that is not addressed in the text of SB 451 is whether private religious schools may qualify as public charter schools. An applicant for a charter must be a 501(c)(3) organization, but religious schools can possess that tax designation. Although there is a provision entitled “Prohibitions” in SB 451, it does not include a prohibition on a religious course of instruction. So SB 451 has the potential to allow public religious charter schools.

Charter schools would carve students and revenues from public schools and would recruit public school teachers. There is no way that public schools can be as strong after this bleeding. Charter schools might benefit students who attend them, but would harm students who don’t. This was precisely the issue raised by teachers in the recent strike in Los Angeles. That strike resulted in a moratorium on new charter schools.

Moreover, there is plenty of evidence that charter schools don’t deliver superior student performance. In a 2011 study of 36 charter middle schools in 15 states, the researchers compared charter school performance with local public schools. They found that charter schools showed some positive achievement results versus disadvantaged public schools but some negative results versus the more advantaged schools.  On average, however, charter middle schools in the study were neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement.

Despite high-sounding language about improving student achievement, the oversight and accountability under the Bill would be weak. HB 451 requires the authorizing School Board to supervise the performance of charter schools, but only allows it to terminate a charter school for failure to perform after five years of performance or lack thereof.

The second major initiative proposed by the Leavers is the creation of Education Savings Accounts (ESA), in use in only five states. These would be different than the vouchers that have been tried in 15 states over the last two decades. Vouchers are usually issued to parents and submitted by them to qualified private or charter schools in partial payment of the tuition. Money flows from the government to the qualified schools when they present the vouchers for payment. With an ESA, the money flows directly to the parents of a qualifying student. The amount would be 75% of the state’s share of per pupil spending — $3,172 in 2018-2019.

The parents would agree to spend the money on tuition to a private school or an institution of higher learning, tutoring, textbooks, educational hardware and software, school uniforms, transportation to school and several other things. The West Virginia Treasurer would be tasked with developing rules for determining if funds have been misused. The Treasurer does not currently perform these duties in connection with any similar program.

As with charter schools, the ESA money provided by the state could be spent on defraying the cost of attending a religious school. This would be an unprecedented failure to respect the separation of church and state embedded in our Constitution. It would be wrong.

The revised SB 451 limits the number of ESAs to 2,500, but there is no means test for eligibility.  A substantial number of these ESAs could be created for parents who would otherwise send their children to private school even without an ESA. In that way the ESAs would benefit the wealthy, not those who presently cannot afford private school.

Furthermore, the amount of the state’s contribution to the ESA would be short of the typical West Virginia private school tuition of $4,761, leaving a financial hurdle for low-income parents. Finally, private schools in West Virginia are not evenly distributed. Over half of the state’s private school students attend school in one of five counties. Nineteen counties in the state have no private schools at all.

SB 451 is not only ant-public school, it is anti-public school teacher. Some wags around the Capitol have called the Bill “Mitch Carmichael’s Revenge,” referring to the current Senate President’s annoyance at last year’s teacher’s strike. Not only does SB 451 contain charter school and ESA provisions, which most teachers oppose, it contains a provision making union dues harder to collect and a provision barring teachers for receiving pay even if School Boards close schools during job actions as they did last year.

Clearly the Leavers are in control of the West Virginia Senate and its Education Committee. But SB 451 doesn’t become law unless it is also passed by the House of Delegates and signed by the Governor, who has threatened a veto. There is hope for our public schools.  Our leaders simply need to come to their senses to protect them.

In the 2016 West Virginia Senate election, voters in Jefferson and Berkeley elected Patricia P. Rucker over Stephen Skinner by a margin of 2,773 votes – 6.5% of the votes cast. Rucker is a stay-at-home mom from Harpers Ferry who home schools her five children. Voters in this area are usually moderate, and fringe views on either side of the political spectrum don’t attract much support. But by her activity in the Senate and the attention she has received from national far right political groups, it is clear that Sen. Rucker is no ordinary West Virginian.  Instead she has proven herself to be a leader in libertarian fringe politics to a degree that would shock most of the unsuspecting people who voted for her.

According to Rucker, she and her husband moved to West Virginia “as refugees from socialist Montgomery County [Maryland].” In 2009, she founded a local Tea Party chapter. After several years, that group restructured into a political action committee and began recruiting “liberty-minded” candidates for local office. Because none of these would step forward to challenge Skinner in the 2014 House of Delegates race, Rucker did. Skinner narrowly prevailed, but the two found themselves again opposing one another in the 2016 Senate race.

In connection with her 2016 election victory, the West Virginia Secretary of State reports that Rucker raised over $104,000. Heavily represented among her contributors were political action committees formed by corporations in the energy industry: First Energy PAC, AEP PAC, Arch PAC, Dominion PAC and Noble Energy PAC. She was also financially supported by other right-wing politicians in West Virginia: Peter Onoszko, Michael Folk, Eric Householder, Jill Upson, Elliott Simon and “Mooney for Congress.” The Tea Party group she founded and led – We the People of West Virginia – also donated money to her campaign.

Once in the West Virginia Senate, Rucker began to sponsor a slew of bizarre bills, many of which never got out of committee. A significant number of these bills would benefit people with the narrow interests and views held by Sen. Rucker herself. For example, several of these bills involve home schooling.  One called the “Tim Tebow Act” (SB130) would allow home school children to participate in public school extra-curricular activities like football. People who support this legislation want to pick and choose which aspects of public education their children will enjoy. She also led an effort to have pornography declared a “public health crisis,” claiming that it was hypersexualizing teenagers.

Acting on her own religious beliefs, Sen. Rucker has sponsored several bills attacking abortion. One is the “Life at Conception Act” (SB 405), which would contradict current U.S. law and make medical professionals who perform abortions in the first trimester of pregnancy legally responsible for violating a “right to life” of the fetus.

Just recently Sen. Rucker introduced Senate Joint Resolution 12 that would put on the November 2018 ballot a proposed amendment to the West Virginia Constitution declaring that nothing in that Constitution creates a right to abortion. This amendment would prevent the Constitution from being used to argue against further abortion restrictions, such as banning Medicaid funding of abortion, which Rucker is also pushing. After a successful vote in the Senate, the West Virginia ACLU issued a statement saying “25 legislators have chosen to side with misogynists and fundamentalist religious extremists who are hell-bent on imposing their own religious agendas on all West Virginians.”

Her effort to place the proposed amendment on the November 2018 state-wide ballot is also viewed by many as an effort to ensure turnout by religious fundamentalists in an election that appears to be trending badly for Republicans at all levels.

Sen. Rucker has also sponsored the “Taxation With Representation Act” (SB 399) whereby nonresidents of a municipality who work in that municipality and who pay a tax or user fee pursuant to a municipal ordinance would be permitted to vote in municipal elections. In other words, merely paying a user fee would enfranchise any person, who has no other connection or interest in a municipality’s affairs, to select the municipality’s elected officials. Anti-tax fanatics love this kind of thing.  Sen. Rucker has also engaged in blaming the victim. She sponsored a bill (SB60) that would have added work requirements for SNAP benefits (food stamps).

By virtue of her performance as a legislator, Rucker has risen in the esteem of right-wing groups. For example, she was selected to be the State Chair for the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization funded by large corporations and the notorious billionaire Koch brothers. This innocuous-sounding organization is actually a libertarian legislation mill for sympathetic state legislators around the country. According to the group’s website, it works with legislators “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” ALEC creates “model” laws and policies, among which are model state resolutions calling for the U.S. Congress to convene a convention to amend the Constitution under Article V.

An Article V convention by which to advance a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution is the dream of the Koch brothers and all libertarians. In her groundbreaking 2017 book Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean details how a balanced budget amendment would be used to handcuff Congress and ensure that spending would be virtually eliminated for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all other discretionary social spending the libertarians hate. This would be the case despite overwhelming support for these programs by the majority of voters.  Even conservative legal scholars like Justice Antonin Scalia have opposed a constitutional convention because there would be no telling what dangerous proposed amendments would emerge.

Alarmist you say? It could never happen here? Article V states that the Constitution can be amended when two-thirds of the state legislatures apply to Congress to convene a convention and any amendments that that are proposed are ratified by three-fourths of the states.  Two-thirds of the states would be 34 states.  In 2016, West Virginia became the 28th state to apply for a convention. That application (HCR36) is straight out of the ALEC playbook. In the current West Virginia legislative session, two related pieces of legislation have been proposed that double down on this effort.

On January 26, 2018, Rucker and others introduced a Senate Resolution (SCR9) which again calls on Congress to convene a convention, asserting that Congress has abused its power by creating a national debt, that the federal government has ceased to follow the Constitution, and that the states themselves can limit such convention to amendments that “impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit the power and jurisdiction of the federal government, and limit the terms of office for its officials and for members of Congress.”

At the same time a second, breathtakingly anti-democratic companion piece of legislation (SB95) was introduced by Rucker and two other libertarian fringe Senators — Robert Karnes (R-Upshur, 11) and Mark Maynard (R-Wayne, 06). It would prohibit a West Virginia delegate from participating in any convention where the states are represented proportionally by population. In other words, each state may have only one vote regardless of size. This would shift power to rural states and away from large blue states like California and New York. Further, SB95 calls for immediate removal of any West Virginia delegate who votes for an amendment outside the purposes in the state’s application and would subject that delegate to criminal prosecution. Sen. Rucker’s two pieces of legislation seek to rig the rules of a convention to ensure the outcome the libertarian right desires even though the majority of West Virginia voters might want another outcome.

Sen. Patricia Rucker is not simply a benign legislator with a few quirky ideas.  She is on a mission to impose her libertarian and religious fundamentalist views on the rest of us in whatever way she and her like-minded colleagues can manage. Along the way, she will dispense with majority rule democracy as an inconvenience in achieving the end she seeks.