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At Supreme Court, charter schools trapped in tug-of-war between church and state

The Supreme Court’s review of an Oklahoma charter school could drastically change public education in the U.S.

/ April 25, 2025
A cross sits in the window of an empty classroom at Quigley Catholic High School in Baden, Pa., Monday, June 8, 2020. Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik recently announced the school’s closure, saying the decision was based on declining enrollment, unsustainable cost projections and insufficient funds to assure its long-term viability. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski)

WASHINGTON (CN) — Next week, the most pro-religion Supreme Court in history will consider if the Catholic Church can open the nation’s first religious charter school in Oklahoma. 

St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School — named after the patron saint of the internet — would give K-12 students across Oklahoma access to a virtual religious education on the taxpayers’ dime. But St. Isidore has never opened, after the Oklahoma Supreme Court said that publicly funded religious education violates the separation of church and state. 

At the U.S. Supreme Court on April 30, St. Isidore will try to convince the justices that its operation as a charter school — government funded but independently run — poses no Establishment Clause violation. Instead, the school says barring St. Isidore’s operation violates the Free Exercise Clause by excluding the organization simply because of its religious status. 

Even though the case follows a decade of expansion of free exercise rights over Establishment Clause concerns, legal experts said greenlighting St. Isidore’s operation could nonetheless have far-reaching consequences for U.S. schools. 

“A ruling in favor of St. Isidore would drastically change our educational system and drastically undermine our religious freedom of public school students,” said Alex Luchenitser, associate vice president & associate legal director at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. 

The Establishment Clause prohibits government-run religious schools. Whether public funding makes St. Isidore a government entity is at the heart of the case before the justices. 

Religion in public schools 

With the controversial Blaine Amendment 150 years ago, Maine Representative James G. Blaine tried to establish federal prohibitions on using tax dollars for religious schools.

The 1875 proposal failed in Congress, but many states including Oklahoma adopted amendments with similar language. 

Historians disagree about Blaine’s intentions, but his amendment and others like it have been linked to anti-Catholic sentiment of the 19th century. Religious groups tie state prohibitions on taxpayer-funded religious education to this history. 

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops claimed that Oklahoma’s effort to exclude St. Isidore from the charter school program stems from a “shameful pedigree” that persists in hostility to sectarian schools today. 

“Attorney General Drummond claims that private schools must be excluded, lest Muslims be allowed to open schools that teach ‘sharia law,’” the bishops wrote, referring to Republican Oklahoma AG Gentner Drummond. “That slippery-slope argument is precisely the sort of talking point that proponents of Blaine Amendments might have advanced in the nineteenth century.” 

The dispute over no-aid provisions and the Blaine Amendment became a contentious issue at the Supreme Court in 2004.

In Locke v. Davey that year, the justices upheld the constitutionality of Washington state denying college scholarship aid to students pursuing theological courses for careers in the ordained ministry. Despite the urging of amici, the court didn’t connect the state’s law to the Blaine Amendment. 

By 2020, the court was more amenable to amici’s view, however. In Espinoza v. Montana, Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, ruled in favor of two low-income mothers seeking scholarships to keep their kids in a Christian school. Roberts said historical tradition against state support for religious schools — the Blaine Amendment — shouldn’t inform the court’s understanding of the Free Exercise Clause now. 

In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, another Bush appointee, wrote a detailed history of the Blaine amendment and anti-Catholic sentiment. 

St. Isidore hopes the justices will make the same connection in its challenge to Oklahoma's requirement that public schools are “free from sectarian control.” The school said just using “sectarian" demonstrates the amendment’s connection to anti-Catholic bias because at the time, it was a dog whistle. 

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“The State enshrined this bigoted code language into its constitution, reflecting many of its early residents’ ‘pervasive hostility to the Catholic Church and to Catholics in general,’” St. Isidore wrote. 

Oklahoma rejected the idea that its charter school program was a “modern-day vestige of the Blaine Amendments” — which the state condemns. Instead, the state says it followed the federal government's model, which also prohibits religious schools.

Are charter schools public? 

A group of charter schools that educate or support about 189,000 students in 438 schools told the justices that charter schools are public because they are created by the state and operate according to the state’s mission to educate all students. These schools relieve stain on traditional public schools and often cater to at-risk students, the schools said.

“Charter schools are ‘public school[s] … operat[ing] under public supervision and direction,’” the group of charter schools wrote. “In exchange for state funding, they must be open to all students, free, and provide a public education in their classrooms.”

Oklahoma defines its public schools with two core features: paid for by taxpayers, and open to all children in the state. Oklahoma has operated public schools since 1907. It began offering charter school options in 1999. 

The state said charter schools are public schools because they’re funded by state and federal taxes, follow certain state-mandated curriculum requirements and are subject to the same rules as public schools — and because the state can unilaterally shut charter schools down. 

“Because charter schools are part of Oklahoma’s public-school system, the State may require that they be ‘strictly secular,’” Oklahoma wrote. 

While free to all students, St. Isidore argued that charter schools aren’t public schools because private contractors create and run them. Students also aren’t assigned to charter schools like they are to public schools. 

St. Isidore connected its argument to the Supreme Court’s 2021 ruling Carson v. Makin, where the justices held that Maine’s nonsectarian requirement for tuition assistance payments was unconstitutional. Because the public funds for the charter school go to a private company, St. Isidore argued that they’re more like a voucher, just like Makin. 

However, Oklahoma said the two aren’t the same because the funds go directly to the schools — preventing parents from taking the money anywhere they want. 

Since charter schools aim to benefit the entire public school system, they help underserved student populations access the same level of public education as students that live close to public schools. 

“Authorizing states task charter schools with the most important public missions imaginable — making education that works for at-risk students readily accessible to them and then sharing their successes across the public education system,” the amici charter schools said. "Amici schools handle these missions with aplomb, benefiting of their public school students as well as the broader public school system. These are not contributions that states seek from private schools and, given their very different nature, they do not provide them.” 

Stakes are high for public education

St. Isidore says its door would be open to all students regardless of their religious beliefs, but experts said some parents might not want their child to get a religious education. 

“If some of the charter schools become religious, then what you might have are situations where the only nearby school option for a parent that's free is a religious charter school,” Luchenitser said. “Parents would then be pressured or coerced into sending their kids to religious schools and having their kids submit to religious indoctrination. That type of religious coercion is fundamentally contrary to our constitutional values of religious freedom.” 

Public schools serve to expose and educate students on a diverse set of viewpoints, Luchenitser said, whereas religious education is heavily influenced by one viewpoint. 

“You’d have a system where different students are sent to different public schools, and public schools don't provide a universal education that's appropriate for all students and that educates students about the diversity of our society and about values such as the tolerance of different people,” Luchenitser said. 

Follow @KelseyReichmann Bluesky Follow @kelseyreichmann.bsky.social
Categories / Appeals, Courts, Education, First Amendment, National, Religion

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