The main one is whether religious charter schools will be allowed to prioritize members of their faith when admitting students. (Charter schools generally have to take all comers and hold a lottery if oversubscribed.) Also, will they be allowed to exclude children or families that don’t abide by their values, including LGBTQ students or families? Could they hire only adherents to their religion as teachers and other staff? The Court—if it finds that states must allow religious schools—will need to spell all this out. If not, these questions are likely to be litigated for years to come.
I suspect we’ll see thousands of Catholic and other religious schools turn into charter schools in every corner of the country in the next year or two. But that’s not a foregone conclusion, for a few reasons. For one, some state charter laws make it hard for private schools (even non-religious ones) to “convert” to charter status, though those challenges can probably be overcome. More importantly, states, districts, and authorizers that don’t want religious charter schools might decide to stop approving new charters altogether. Unless the Court rules that such a move itself amounts to religious discrimination, it would be a disaster for the charter school sector—and is what has charter advocacy leaders, who oppose religious charters, understandably worried.
Policymakers and authorizers in red states would likely make their peace with religious charters—if not embrace them outright. Granted, many of those states already provide publicly-funded scholarships or education savings accounts; their religious schools will have to decide whether the extra funding that would come from “going charter” would be worth the hassle in terms of the additional red tape—and fair bit of uncertainty—that would surely follow.
But it would be easy to imagine blue states and their districts and authorizers clamping down on new charter schools altogether, especially given the political left’s antipathy to anything that blurs the line between church and state.
Ironically, then, the Supreme Court might be about to answer the teachers unions’ prayers by critically wounding the most successful education reform initiative in a generation.
