With the possibility of religious charter schools growing– as well as their ability to discriminate however they wish– Josh Cowen asks what states might do to head off this “outsourcing discrimination.”
To recap: charter schools are public schools authorized and managed by third-party organizations, but state law varies when it comes to who those authorizers and management groups can be. Authorizers hold the charter and are responsible for the school’s ultimate results. Management groups often handle the day-to-day, including (usually) hiring staff and implementing a curriculum. Some organizations are school districts themselves operating a school outside of their normal governance structures. Others are universities, libraries, or other educational entities.
In some states, traditional school districts can and do still provide governance, regardless of whether they run the day-to-day operations of the school.
Most states allow independent, non-profit organizations to manage charter schools, while some states even allow these management organizations to include for-profit companies. What they cannot be, at least for now, are churches or faith-based institutions.
The simple reason is that charter schools are statutorily designated as public schools, and public schools must remain non-religious. At least officially.
A number of legal cases in multiple states seek to remove this barrier by forcing states to permit religious organizations to manage charter schools. The idea behind their claim is that because states allow groups such as a non-religious non-profit to run charter schools, prohibiting a church or a synagogue from doing so amounts to religious discrimination.