It isn’t often that a high-profile Supreme Court case deadlocks 4-4, ending not in a majority decision and dissents but in a one-line declaration that doesn’t even reveal which justices landed on which side of the issue. But that’s how the crucial case of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond this week concluded — at least for now. The result is a positive one: The decision of the Oklahoma Supreme Court barring a publicly-funded religious charter school will stand.
The even split on the high court is the result of the recusal of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. She didn’t give specific reasons for stepping aside, but it’s likely the result of her connections to Notre Dame Law School, whose religious liberty clinic represented the school. Whether or not those ties would’ve biased Barrett, they would’ve compromised the appearance of fairness and integrity — reason enough for the recusal. Good for Barrett for keeping her and the high court’s hands clean.
On the substance of the issue, oral arguments underscored what everyone who knows and appreciates the presence of charter schools should well understand. Namely, the whole point of their creation was to provide more innovative instructional models within the public school system.
In other words, they are schools that are funded by taxpayers, open to all comers, and subject to a wide range of state requirements — one of which is to remain secular and non-sectarian — but that happen to be privately managed, granting them more flexibility in the hiring and firing of staff and in the particulars of instructional design.
Conservative justices on the court made clear in their questioning that they see this limited flexibility as necessarily allowing religious institutions and schools to be able to participate. Disallow a church- or mosque-run school, their logic goes, and that’s government discriminating against religion.
It’s nonsense. If the program in question were a parent-directed voucher, it could well make sense to allow religious and nonreligious private schools alike to be able to participate. But charter schools, which are supposed to be fully funded by the public, only exist because the government created them, and the government created them to spark new models that serve the same essential purpose as other public schools.
To insist that the Constitution requires states to recognize religious charters because they allow secular ones is tantamount to saying the Constitution requires states to underwrite churches because it also chooses to fund secular youth and community centers.
Put differently, it is to eviscerate a First Amendment that not only protects free exercise of religion but that bars government establishment of religion.
The fight against religious charter schools isn’t over. Surely another case will come before the court before too long, and this time no justice will see fit to recuse him or herself. That will mean a majority will have the opportunity to definitively settle the question. The court must see clearly that while the Constitution must protect the existence of religious schools, it cannot force taxpayers and governments to sponsor and fund them.
A ruling blessing religious charters would not only be anti-American; it would lead to a dramatic curtailing of charter school laws in states across the country, definitely setting back a charter school movement that has been one of the best things to happen to big-city families ill-served by traditional public schools.
https://www.nydailynews.com/2025/05/24/no-tax-money-for-religious-schools/