Oklahoma’s Religious Charter School Aims to Break Church-State Separation

Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt, a big fan of religious charter schools. Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Charter public schools are privately operated and publicly funded schools charging no tuition and open to all. They typically have a performance contract or “charter” with a public body specifying their educational objectives and expectations. In other words, they are truly “public” except for their independence from school districts and many of their regulations. As such, charter schools get a lot of flack from both ends of the ideological spectrum. Liberal defenders of traditional public schools view charters as an undermining force and particularly resent their exemption from collective-bargaining agreements benefiting teachers and other school personnel. Conservatives increasingly view charters as an obstacle to the full privatization of public education, with public money being controlled by parents who can use it for any kind of private schools or even homeschooling.

Thanks to the highly decentralized nature of K–12 education in this country, the nature and quality of charter schools varies a lot depending on the laws and rules prevailing in any one jurisdiction. Some charter schools are clearly undersupervised; others may be overregulated. But in Republican-controlled Oklahoma, a legally iffy experiment is underway that would destroy the public nature of charter schools by authorizing a fully state-funded religious school, as the New York Times explains:

After a nearly three-hour meeting, and despite concerns raised by its legal counsel, the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved the school in a 3-to-2 vote, including a yes vote from a member who was appointed on [June 2] …

The online school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, is to be run by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa, with religious teachings embedded in the curriculum.

This move represents an overt attack on the principle of church-state separation in public education and would all but eliminate the walls that have traditionally separated charter schools from private sectarian schools. It was sharply criticized by the National Association of Charter School Operators, and also by Oklahoma’s Republican attorney general Gentner Drummond, as the Associated Press reports:

“The approval of any publicly funded religious school is contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interest of taxpayers,” Drummond said in a statement shortly after the board’s vote. “It’s extremely disappointing that board members violated their oath in order to fund religious schools with our tax dollars. In doing so, these members have exposed themselves and the state to potential legal action that could be costly.”

“Potential legal action” is precisely the object of this precedent-breaking initiative, strongly backed by Oklahoma’s very conservative governor Kevin Stitt. The U.S. Supreme Court has recently held that state subsidy programs for private schools cannot exclude religious schools categorically. Stitt and other religious conservatives now hope to convince the Supreme Court to abolish any restrictions on the use of public dollars by sectarian schools.

If this shocks you, be aware that it has become gospel truth among many conservative Evangelicals that church-state separation is a constitutional and historical myth. Roman Catholics have never fully accepted a strict “wall of separation” either, particularly in education. So the leap Stitt and others are trying to make isn’t at all unimaginable given the current makeup and trajectory of the Supreme Court.

Should the Oklahoma arrangement pass muster in the courts, conservatives would probably soon dispense with vouchers, scholarships, and other roundabout ways of subsidizing religious schools (though they presumably would still need such expedients to subsidize homeschooling), and just begin directly setting up religious “charter schools” that aren’t really public in any respect other than funding. Such a development would also show that the “wall of separation” between church and state has crumbled into dust.