Kimberly Phillips talks to UConn’s Preston Green, who has been watching the march of private schools and their effects on student rights. What if the courts okay religious charter schools?
As the U.S. Supreme Court mulls whether to provide a pathway for religious charter schools, UConn’s Preston C. Green III says states need to prepare for the almost inevitable probability they will be required to allow such education.
“Reality is my friend, I like to say, and I think one has to accept the reality of the situation,” says Green, the John and Maria Neag Professor of Urban Education in UConn’s Neag School of Education. “Reading the case law, that’s just where the Supreme Court is – not only would certain types of schools be permitted, but also states could not prevent charters from operating because they are religious.”
Much of Green’s recent research has been on ways to classify charter schools as government entities, using things like a 1995 lawsuit involving the National Railroad Passenger Corp. to argue that charter schools are government offshoots and therefore any religious encroachment violates the separation of church and state.
But within the next couple of years, he says he expects the high court to tell states and the communities within them that independently operated charter schools have the right to offer religious education, even if they receive taxpayer dollars to fund their operation.
Green’s latest policy brief says that if it comes to pass, the counter is simple: Put charter school governance under the local school district.
“If they’re not controlled by the government, then religious entities will be allowed to participate in them,” he says. “The reality of the situation is that if you want charter schools to be in the public realm, you’re going to have to take approaches that will enable the court to say that they are governed by the public.”
In “Avoiding the Supreme Court’s Religious Charter-School Trap: Governance Change for the New Legal Era,” published in May by the National Education Policy Center and co-authored with Kevin G. Welner from the University of Colorado Boulder and Carol C. Burris from the Network for Public Education, Green speculates the court will determine that denying a religious charter school is tantamount to discrimination under the First Amendment.
States like Alaska, Kansas, Maryland, and Virginia already have structured their charter schools to be governed by local school districts, and California, Texas, and Wisconsin have a mix of charters governed independently and by public schools, the study says.
While explicitly making charters part of the local school system isn’t such a far-fetched idea, getting buy-in could be difficult, especially from parents who may have chosen to send their children to a charter school just to get away from the public option, Green concedes.