Page A4From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 1 October 2026
You are being invited to watch your governor decide, and to take the deciding for the story. Opt in, the phrase is. In — as though the state had been standing outside something, and outside were a place one could stay. The rules are out, and they came from Treasury: not the schools people, the revenue people. And the warning out of Florida, from someone who has the same design running at home? It does not say the thing was abused. It does not say anyone broke it. It calls the result wreckage, and asks the blue-state governors to look before they accept a single dollar. Wreckage, mind you — not fraud, not theft. A thing drawn up and quite finished. You are thinking the religion question buys a season. On the 25th of September a federal judge in Oklahoma, a Reagan appointee, held that the state may not keep a Jewish school out of its charter program, more than a year after the Supreme Court declined to settle whether taxpayers fund religious schools. Declined. The question sat; the money did not wait on it. So they ask you to watch a governor choose ... and a choice is not a veto. Decline the dollars and the rules are still the rules. You were not asked.
The gap in the fence was left there. The fox waits for dusk.
“They spend a decade telling you the public school down the street has to cut buses and a reading teacher, and then Treasury — Treasury, the money shop — writes the rulebook that sends federal dollars to private and religious schools. The guy in Florida who has lived under this thing is begging blue-state governors to look at it first, and he uses the word wreckage. That's not a glitch in the program, that's the program, and your kid's school is the part that pays for it.”
“Nobody is forcing anybody — governors can just say no, so where exactly is the outrage here? And look, it's parents' money going where parents want it, which is not the same as taking it from public schools, and I never said it was. Did I say that? That doesn't sound like me. One op-ed from Florida is one person's opinion; a federal judge in Oklahoma, meanwhile, is the law.”
The receipts
Teachers spent an average of $895 of their own money on classroom supplies last school year AdoptAClassroom.org 2025 Teacher Spending Survey
Treasury releases rules for nation’s first federal school voucher programWith the arrival of the long-awaited rules, Democratic governors are under more pressure to say whether they will opt in.
Before you accept a single federal voucher dollar, look at what's happened in my state.
· Federal court allows Jewish charter school to move forward in Oklahoma from the morgue, 25 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.