The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority seemed poised Wednesday to hand school choice advocates a major victory, and potentially a large expansion of …
The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority seemed poised Wednesday to hand school choice advocates a major victory, and potentially a large expansion of state programs required to fund religious education. The handwriting on the wall came during a nearly two hour argument involving a challenge brought by two Maine families to the state’s unusual way of providing public education. Maine is a state so rural that a majority of its school districts do not have a high school. The way the state has dealt with that problem is to contract with existing high schools to accept students from districts with no high school, and in addition, to pay the same amount to non-sectarian private schools to pick up the slack. What the state will not do is pay the same tuition for students attending religious schools. School choice advocates have long sought ways to promote equal treatment for religious schools with taxpayer funds, and they had a willing audience in the court’s six conservatives, five of whom attended religious schools. All signaled that they too view Maine’s refusal to fund religious schools as unconstitutional. The court’s liberals noted that in the past, the court has held that states may, if they wish, have voucher programs that allow parents to send their kids to religious schools, but that in this case, school choice advocates are asking the court contend that the state must treat religious schools the same way it treats non-sectarian private schools. Justice Stephen Breyer suggested that the beliefs taught in a religious school seem to conflict with the state human rights law: „No gay students, no gay teachers, the man is superior to the woman, and a few other things like that.
