If charter schools are religious, what does it mean for public education?

The First Amendment’s First Amendment does not violate the First Amendment, but it does violate the Second Amendment. Reply to the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett

Representing the Trump administration and the religious groups, Solicitor General John Sauer maintained that allowing religious charter schools to co-exist with non-religious schools does not violate the U.S. Constitution, because “the decision whether or not to go to the religious school … lies in the hands of the parents.”

The 1994 federal law creating the charter school program specifically states that non-sectarian schools must be part of the program. She wanted to know if the federal law was unconstitutional. McGinley essentially said that it is.

St. Isidore appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and on Wednesday the school’s lawyer, James Campbell, will tell the justices that by excluding religious schools from the charter system, the state is discriminating against religious adherents.

The First Amendment bars any establishment of religion, and there is absolutely no question that St. Isidore would be influenced by the Catholic faith. The school would be part of the evangelizing missions of the church, teaching the faith to students and requiring them to attend mass.

Opposing St. Isidore is the Republican Attorney General of Oklahoma, Gentner Drummond, who argues: “Religious liberty is really the freedom to worship. It is not taxpayer-funded, state-sponsored religious indoctrination.”

He says the drafters of the federal and state constitutions understood how best to protect religious freedom, by preventing the state from sponsoring any religion.

Drummond adds that if the Catholic Church, in the garb of charter schools, can get millions of dollars in public funding for their overtly religious mission, there will be many unintended consequences. If the Catholic church is free to indoctrinate charter students in Catholic doctrine, he says, “substitute satanic beliefs, Wiccan, Muslim, Sharia, Jewish — whatever you want to substitute.”

That said, there is one practical fly in the judicial ointment of this case. With the court evenly divided on some of the religious questions, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a fervent advocate of religious rights, has been removed from the case.

The reason for that is that Nicole and her husband remain at Notre Dame as faculty fellows.

Does the Oklahoma Supreme Court Really Have a Charter School?” Justice Kavanaugh, a conservative conservative, and her opponent’s lawyer, wondered how the legislature could act on the charter school contract

A tie vote on the court is possible because Justice Barrett won’t be on the bench. Proponents of charter schools will have to look for another case if that is adopted by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh strongly telegraphed his views, at one point declaring: “All the religious school is saying is, ‘Don’t exclude us on account of our religion.’ … That seems like discrimination against religion when you have a program open to all comers.

What, he asked, would teachers be able to teach if religious schools were added to public charter schools? How would the nation’s disability rights laws apply for children? What would the curriculum be if a religious school barred the teaching of evolution? Is it possible to have a gay teacher? The questions, he said, are infinite, and could tie up school districts in litigation for years.

The court’s three Liberals were skeptical of the idea that a Catholic school can be included in a public charter program funded by the government.

Justice Elena Kagan said that the charter school system was enacted to increase flexibility in the way that the state can create better schools if they focus more on the arts, math and science.

She said that states, when they created their charter school systems, “did not want to start funding every religious school in the country. Now you’re saying to the state, “Yes, you have to fund the Yeshiva.” yes, you have to go fund the [madrasas]; yes, you have to go fund” countless other religious groups because you have established a school system that includes religious charter schools.

The contract that St. Isidore negotiated with the state was modified to incorporate church autonomy principles, as she put it. Lawyer Michael McGinley, representing St. Isidore, acknowledged that the school struck certain provisions in the standard charter school contract.

Kagan followed up, asking, “What if you had wanted to strike out other provisions…because the kind of religious education that you thought… were inconsistent with” the church’s mission. McGinley acknowledged that was “part of the contracting process.”

Changing that long-held constitutional norm could have vastly different consequences in different states across the nation. Some states, for instance, might find that “our traditions are not to allow the teaching of religion in our public schools.”