Taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for religious schools Opinion from The Washington Post By Kate Cohen Contributing columnist June 27, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT The Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board’s recent decision to allow a Catholic archdiocese to operate a public school is both illegal and unconstitutional. I’m not exaggerating — I’m just reading. A charter school “shall be nonsectarian in its programs, admission policies, employment practices, and all other operations,” Oklahoma law states. Public schools “shall be open to all the children of the state and free from sectarian control,” the Oklahoma constitution declares. Publicly funding a Catholic school so clearly flouts both of these provisions that the state attorney general, Republican Gentner Drummond, accused board members who voted to do so of violating their oath of office and promised to take legal action once a contract with the school is signed. To Drummond — to anyone concerned about the integrity of the public school system — the board’s vote was obviously out of bounds. But it’s actually in line with an increasingly successful effort by the religious right and its enablers on the Supreme Court to dismantle what Thomas Jefferson described as the “wall of separation between Church & State.” In education, that effort began at least 40 years ago, with Mueller v. Allen, which ruled that the deduction Minnesota gave taxpayers for private-school expenses had to apply to parochial-school expenses as well. In 2002, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (Cleveland’s voucher program); in 2020, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (Montana’s tax credit program); and in 2022, Carson v. Makin (Maine’s tuition reimbursement program) found that states cannot exclude religious schools from programs that subsidize private education. So: What’s wrong with that? Proponents of using public funds for religious education argue that the government doesn’t thereby favor any particular religion or even religion in general — it simply lets parents choose. Religious freedom, right? Well, as Drummond said in an interview on Tulsa public radio: “The day will turn where we’re gonna get applicants from maybe a fringe Islamic group that says, ‘We want to teach sharia law and to only young men, and we want to indoctrinate them …’ which would be anathema to a lot of Oklahomans. Or a satanic organization that says, ‘We want state funding so that we can teach the attributes of Satan.’” But you don’t have to slip down this particular slope to understand the danger of a state-funded Christian school. You can just spare a thought for gay kids. Because our nation persistently defers to religion, we have given religious institutions, including parochial schools, the right to ignore anti-discrimination laws and employment protections. They can expel students for being gay and fire teachers for getting sick. They can decline to offer admittance to transgender students and reproductive health care to their employees. Actions that would be illegal in secular settings are fine under the guise of sincerely held religious belief. In other words, when the government funds religious education, it is often underwriting the very discrimination it has banned. That’s bad enough. But there’s another problem: Mixing church and state in public schools means that instead of funding education, the government is funding miseducation. Don’t take it from me — take it from studies that have shown that greater exposure to religion makes children less capable of distinguishing fact from fiction. Public education should provide children with basic instruction in facts and skills. The details might change over time, as science evolves and history comes into better focus. But when curriculums change, they change (or should, Florida) in the direction of more accurately teaching students to understand the world around them and to navigate within it. The St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School will be run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, with a curriculum determined by the Catholic Church. For fun, let’s assume that teaching from a Catholic perspective would not affect the factual reliability of biology or health or history class. Even so, the school will still teach, in its theology curriculum, that God is the source of truth, beauty and human beings; that He provided a path to salvation through Jesus, who suffered, died and was resurrected; and that “human persons are destined for eternal life” but that “an individual may reject God’s invitation” and “end up in hell.” Those aren’t facts, and they shouldn’t be taught as if they were, alongside the formula for finding the circumference of a circle, the date of the Emancipation Proclamation and the life cycle of a butterfly. Perhaps familiarity or faith has made Christian doctrine seem factual — or at least, factuesque. But imagine granting a public-school charter to a school that planned to teach, as part of its K-12 curriculum, that when we die, our souls end up inside the television characters of our choice unless we have behaved abominably in life — and then they end up on C-SPAN. Should the state of Oklahoma — should Oklahoma taxpayers — be paying for children to learn that? Of course not. If parents want to erase the line between religious doctrine and verifiable fact, no U.S. government, state or federal, has the right to stop them. But no government concerned with educating children should be paying for the eraser. ###
