By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Oral arguments in the case of Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer were heard by the Supreme Court on April 19. The indications are that we will get the court’s decision sometime in June. It could mark a new plateau in the effort to get the taxpayer assistance needed for the survival of our Catholic schools.
As things stand now, as a result of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris in 2002, it is legal for local governments to provide vouchers for students in religious schools — if those governments decide to do so. This is why there are vouchers in some parts of the country, and not in others. The court decided in Zelman that voucher programs set up by states or local municipalities do not violate the First Amendment’s no establishment of religion clause, so long as students are free to choose among sectarian and nonsectarian options.
The issue in Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer is different. If the Supreme Court decides in favor of Trinity Lutheran Church, government officials in Columbus, Mo., will be required to provide financial assistance to a school run by a religious group — whether or not the government wants to do so. The court will be dealing with whether specifically excluding religious groups from public-aid programs violates the First Amendment.
The specifics of the case: Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Mo., operates a child-care center and a preschool. The school applied to a state grant program that helps nonprofit institutions pay for the installation of rubberized playground surfaces. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources denied Trinity Lutheran’s application, contending it had to do so because of a provision in the Missouri state constitution that bars the state from providing funds to religious entities.
Trinity Lutheran sued in federal district court, arguing that its exclusion was a violation of free-exercise and equal-protection rights. The district court rejected Trinity Lutheran’s claims, ruling that to do otherwise would raise “anti-establishment concerns.”
The case was taken to the Supreme Court. This means that the Supreme Court will decide whether financial assistance from a local government to provide for the installation of a rubberized playground surface at a church school amounts to the establishment of a religion; or if it is merely giving support to children of that state who happen to attend a church school. And more specifically, whether a state or local government has the right to decide against a religious group that seeks such assistance on the basis of concerns about the establishment of religion.
High stakes, indeed. If the Supreme Court decides in favor of Trinity Lutheran, it could have profound implications for school choice all around the country. Schools run by religious groups will be given an opening to demand access to tax dollars allocated to educational purposes in the states where they operate, rather than waiting for local governments to take the initiative in providing such assistance.
It will be interesting to see what the response will be from the opponents of state-aid to parochial schools, if Trinity Lutheran wins this case. They will not sit back and resign themselves to a new status quo that makes vouchers widely available in all parts of the country. They will mobilize to shape public resistance to such a change.
An early salvo in such a campaign was launched in an article entitled “How School Choice Turns Education Into a Commodity” in the April 17 issue of The Atlantic. The author is Jason Blakely, an assistant professor of political philosophy at Pepperdine University.
Blakely describes the effort to make “educational funding ‘portable’,” such as through vouchers, as part of a “neo-liberal theory of education” that argues our “closed education system” denies the country of “the benefits of start-ups, ventures, and innovation” that characterize a market economy that has improved “every other area of life.” Blakely writes of those who believe that “as long as education remains a closed system, we will never see the education equivalents of Google, Facebook, Amazon, PayPal, Wikipedia, or Uber.”
He sees this as simplistic thinking, a reflection of a “decades-long political struggle between two models of freedom — one based on market choice and the other based on democratic participation.” The problem with free markets, says Blakely, is that they “always have winners and losers,” the “creative destruction” described by the economist Joseph Schumpeter. Blakely argues it is unjust to subject public education “to the forces of creative destruction. What happens to a community when its public schools are defunded or closed because they could not ‘compete’ in a marketized environment?”
Blakely contends that voucher programs do not favor the poor, but “those who already have the education, wealth, and wherewithal to plan, coordinate, and execute moving their children to the optimal educational setting. This means the big beneficiaries of school choice are often the rich. Market competition in the context of schools thus opens the possibility for a vicious cycle in which weak and low-performing communities are punished for their failings and wealthy communities receive greater and greater funding advantages.”
Blakely urges us to keep in mind that “education is not simply another commodity to buy and sell on a market. It is a shared good. Free societies need educated members to intelligently and critically deliberate over public life, select representatives, and help guide policy decisions. Market freedom is thus in tension with the freedom of democratic participation.”
If you are scratching your head, you are not alone. So am I. It is hard to imagine a system that does more to contribute “to the growing inequalities and diminishment of the middle and lower classes” than the current public school monopoly that leaves millions of inner-city minority families and struggling blue-collar families with no way to escape the dangerous and dysfunctional public schools in their neighborhoods.
A voucher system would provide a way out for those families. Professors of education and liberals in the media do not send their children to the failing, crime-ridden schools that parents in favor of vouchers are trying to escape. If they use the public schools at all, they are the public schools in the tony suburbs outside Washington, Boston, New York, and our other large cities. I would say that that is a symptom of what Blakely calls the “growing inequalities” of life in this country.
We know what Blakely’s response would be to the above observation. We have heard it for decades: that we should spend more time and energy in improving the failed public schools, rather than spending it on vouchers or tax credits for families who will use that financial aid to abandon the public schools, making them even worse.
It is not an illogical proposition — on paper. But how much more would we have to spend on the current public school system to make it safe and educationally productive? Would even a 50 percent increase in funding from the taxpayers do the trick? How about 100 percent?
The push for vouchers comes from parents who have heard that song before, and are determined not to have their children sacrificed while another experiment in more government spending is played out. They have lost faith with the education establishment that Jason Blakely represents. They don’t think giving it more money will solve anything.
It is hard not to sympathize with those parents.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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