Along with the cases I described in a previous post, I had my “Religion and Politics” students this semester read about the issue of public funding for religious schools. This was the original issue at hand when the establishment clause was incorporated in Everson (1947); the key has always been that the money go to the PARENTS who can choose to spend the money for their children however they want. Everson said “no aid” was directly going to a religious school in that case, but the extremely secularist precedents that followed disallowed indirect aid as well. That is, until the exceptions to this rule were finally recognized and indirect aid was confirmed to be allowed in Zelman.
On this topic, read the following cases:
-Nyquist (1973)
-Witters (1986)
-Zelman v Simmons Harris (2002)
-Trinity Lutheran (2017)
-Espinoza v. Montana (2022)
-Carson v Makin (2022)
Why was there a need for the cases after Zelman, a student asked? Well, note that the cases before are about the "establishment" clause, and the later cases are about "free exercise."
The cases before Zelman considered whether religious schools getting government funding was -allowed- when every other type of school would get that funding.
The cases after Zelman are dealing with discriminatory Blaine amendments in various states, and whether the funding should therefore be -required- when every other type of school was getting the funding. The most recent case striking down a Blaine amendment of this sort, Carson v. Makin, John O. McGinnis argues will have important lasting effects, in part because it rejects the notion that the court must allow "play in the joints" for the government to regulate between the free exercise clause and the establishment clause. What we have instead now is more school choice for parents.
Which brings us to this most recent development in OK; indeed, it’s “Time for Religious Charter Schools,” ending the double taxation of American Catholic parents for education.
This issue interests me greatly. We raised 7 kids in our current home. The youngest is 18. We homeschooled them all until high school (two were homeschooled in HS too). Anyway, we sent them to a very expensive, but extremely small and super traditional Catholic HS. It has a classical curriculum with quite rigorous standards. They take no public funds by choice (at least they didn’t at the time my son graduated in 2019). That’s, perhaps, a part of why tuition there is higher than at other Catholic HS. But it always upset us greatly that we had to pay school property taxes even though we NEVER used the public schools. I understand that even childless property owners must pay school taxes to support the public schools. What we wanted was a voucher, so that our school taxes could be repurposed to help with tuition. We were VERY fortunate that the kids’ grandmother volunteered to pay the tuition; otherwise, we never could have pulled it off.
In that case, I would have just done homeschooling for them, except for one boy who planned (and is) to study physics engineering in college. He needed that small, wonderful school to properly prepare him.
I was shocked when several years ago, I learned that many Catholic schools took public funds, so we’re beholden to the provider when it comes to curriculum, etc.