Summer’s here–time to skip out on homework. If you missed some of the latest, here are a few big stories from the past week:

Can a very religious Joe Biden win the religious vote? At WaPo.

• Nope. The failed history of white conservative anti-racism helps explain why, here at ILYBYGTH.

The death of charter schools, at WaPo.

much of the movement’s potency was a product of promises, rather than results. . . . Today, however, the grand promises of the charter movement remain unfulfilled, and so the costs of charters are being evaluated in a new light.

Handwriting on the wall for charter schools, here at ILYBYGTH:

• Unions are back in.
• The Democratic Party is out.
• Only a few stubborn journalists don’t know it.
• Charters are repeating the centuries-old pattern of over-promising and under-delivering.
• How toxic Devosite has made the idea of charter schools politically uninhabitable.

How conservative politics are killing white churches, at RNS.

Washington Post editors chastise Bernie and the Democrats for abandoning charter schools.

• Bad advice. Why? Queen Betsy has changed the educational landscape. Here at ILYBYGTH.
• Charter schools DON’T offer the best path out of segregation and educational inequality. Why the California NAACP supports a moratorium on new charters, at SJMN.

Prof. Miles introduces his new book, Religious Identity in US Politics, at RIP.

More powerfully than gender, and equally influential as race, religious identity shapes public approval of and trust in elected officials. At a time when it seems that partisanship, polarization, and conflict decisively diminish public evaluations of elected officials, religious identity motivates individuals to express trust in and approval of opposing partisans who share an identity.

Joe Biden announces his ed policy. At Politico.

• Is it any good? Peter Greene says meh, at Forbes.

The best parts look a lot like the Bernie Sanders education plan; the worst parts are echoes of the Obama years.

• Rick Hess says yes, at TH.

It’s true that Jimmy Carter’s 1976 campaign featured a pledge to create the U.S. Department of Education and that Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 run featured education as part of his “War on Poverty,” but the dollars and reach of these proposals — however significant at the time — are dwarfed by what Biden is contemplating, much less what Sanders or Warren have in mind.

Still not a lot of “out” atheists in politics. Ryan Burge asks why not, at RIP.