The Country’s First Religious Charter School Is Put on Hold https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/politics-current-affairs/2024/07/the-countrys-first-religious-charter-school-is-put-on-hold/

July 31, 2024 | Michael A. Helfand
About the author: Michael A. Helfand is an associate professor at Pepperdine University School of Law and associate director of Pepperdine’s Diane and Guilford Glazer Institute for Jewish Studies.

Last month, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled against the creation of what would have been America’s first religious charter school. The school’s Catholic founders had hoped that recent federal Supreme Court rulings would help their case. Michael A. Helfand explains the underlying question:

Charter schools come in all shapes and sizes, varying in their structure and definition across jurisdictions. But typically, they are privately operated public schools. So, can they be religious? Answering the question has become a bit of a constitutional Rorschach test: should we view prohibiting religious charter schools as prohibiting discrimination against the private religious entities seeking to operate them? Or should we view allowing religious charter schools as pushing even the new, more limited demands of church-state separation too far by allowing public schools to be religious?

Sorting through these constitutional issues, Helfand explains, doesn’t merely involve interpretation of the First Amendment, but also what jurists call the “state-action doctrine,” which one legal scholar has termed a “conceptual disaster area.” Ultimately, he concludes, only a Supreme Court decision can settle these issues—and there’s no telling how the court might rule.

Read more on Public Discourse: https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/07/95456/