As school choice becomes the law of the land, particularly here in Texas, this has raised some fundamental questions on how much choice parents will be allowed to have. Not only are there many different pedagogies and teaching styles parents could conceivably prefer, but there is also a wide array of deeper guiding principles that inform instruction, many of which are explicitly religious.
It’s relatively uncontroversial to argue that parents should have the option to send their kids to a rigorous private preparatory school with hardworking students and well-trained teachers instead of the neighborhood public school suffering from violence among students and poorly trained teachers. It only becomes a problem when that prep school is an independently run charter school—and both explicitly Catholic and designed to evangelize as well as to educate.
After all, this would be an instance of the government funding with taxpayer dollars a religious institution, which seems to violate the widely held understanding of the separation of church and state. Perhaps, as opponents of school choice claim, these programs are really just a vehicle for promoting conservative propaganda and Christian nationalism among younger generations and reducing public schools to underfunded juvenile-detention centers for poor kids.
This is the issue at hand in a case being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, in which St. Isidore of Seville Virtual School is seeking charter school status in order to receive state funding. While the school’s attorneys claim that the school is a relatively tiny, tolerant, altogether harmless alternative schooling option for parents, the judges of the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Oklahoma attorney general, who argued that funding St. Isidore was a flagrant violation of church-state separation.
One could be forgiven for believing that the U.S. Supreme Court had already settled this matter in Carson v. Makin, where a majority of the justices ruled that a state government denying public funding to religious schools amounted to religious discrimination. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “The prohibition on status-based discrimination under the Free Exercise Clause is not a permission to engage in use-based discrimination.”
However, there is an important difference between denying access to funds to a school because of its religious affiliation and funding a school despite its religious affiliation. In the former case, the government puts the religious school at a disadvantage, which is clear discrimination; in the latter case, the government is giving the school an advantage, which could be interpreted as an endorsement of its religious mission.
For that reason, supporters of St. Isidore and the school choice movement overall need to reiterate two essential points about this controversy (which I’ve written about at length here and here). First, they should debunk the myth of nonreligious education. All educational institutions are based on a set of beliefs that easily qualify as religious. Teachers might put up rainbow flags and posters of Nelson Mandela in their classrooms or they might have crucifixes and posters of St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle, but this amounts to the same thing: They’re using imagery and symbols to communicate a certain worldview. Similarly, whether the mission of a school is to train social activists or cultivate devout Christians, there is a still a form of proselytizing that transcends mere reading, writing, and arithmetic, and implicitly assumes a set of idealistic, if not metaphysical, beliefs.
Therefore, it makes little practical difference if a student attends a religious charter school or a secular charter school. Both students are taking the same standardized tests, learning the same academic skills, and taking the same kinds of courses. One might have an additional class on African American studies while the other has one in religious instruction. One might be made up of students whose parents agree with the school’s progressive politics, whereas the other might have students with parents of a more religious and traditionally patriotic outlook. It makes little sense to deem one school good and the other bad because the former is supposedly neutral and the latter is not.
Even though critics might bring might up the possibility of a fundamentalist religious sect radicalizing and misinforming students in a private school, a parallel of an extremist secular ideologue doing the same in a public or private school can also happen. Fortunately, instances like these can be minimized and virtually eliminated through rigorous school and teacher accreditation policies, standardized testing, and ensuring parental rights. Simply banishing all forms of religion in publicly funded schools does nothing to prevent this problem.
As such, any prescription against religious expression in public schools is necessarily counterproductive and blatantly discriminatory. Teachers have been reprimanded and fired for praying in public, having crosses on their wall, and refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns. Is anyone really convinced that this is done in the interest of the students’ well-being and warding off harmful indoctrination? Or do secular authorities merely have contempt for Christians and see them as threats to the system?
Moreover, most religious teachers and students will find a way to live out their faith despite the rules against it. They will pray with their fellow believers, form religious clubs, and engage in conversations about religion with their peers. Sure, the school might be nominally secular, but virtually everyone in it goes to the same churches and shares the same beliefs. Such is the case here in North Texas where public schools often facilitate religious living by bringing believers together for a higher purpose even as their mission statements and mottos are thoroughly sanitized of religious language.
When this reasoning is applied to the case of St. Isidore, it seems clear that the court should rule in its favor, not because it somehow wants to establish the Catholic religion, but because it wants to establish religious freedom and enable fair competition between transparently religious schools and more subtly religious ones. Either the justices can maintain the cumbersome process of policing religious language, adjudicating cases of religious association, and pointlessly sustaining unaccountable public school monopolies, or they can drop the pretense and let schools keep their religious identity so long as they maintain high academic standards and are better able to serve their respective communities with less hassle.
Additionally, this decision could lay the groundwork for robust school choice policies in Oklahoma and beyond, which in turn would benefit families, giving them more options and fostering competition between schools, thereby incentivizing educational reform.
Thus, for the sake of the children as well as for religious liberty, let’s hope St. Isidore is allowed to exist and that many more schooling options can arise—and based on the reports of the hearing, the judges seemed more in agreement with attorneys representing St. Isidore. Since Justice Amy Coney Barrett has recused herself from this case, the deciding vote will almost certainly fall to Chief Justice John Roberts (a 4–4 tie would send the case back to Oklahoma), whose opinions and rulings up to this point strongly suggest he will rule for St. Isidore. Not only would this result in better academic instruction, but it would also allow schools to provide, finally, honest moral and spiritual development to American students who need it now more than ever.
