Beginning of the end for religious discrimination in education?

It’s rarely mentioned in media coverage of school choice, but choice programs do something huge: ameliorate government discrimination against religion. It’s a big reason to celebrate the explosion of universal choice programs.

Six states — West Virginia, Arizona, Iowa, Utah, Arkansas, and Florida — have enacted universal choice since 2021, with the latter five having done so in the last year. “Universal” means programs that let funds follow students regardless of a family’s income or the condition of their assigned public school. In some programs universality phases in over a few years, and none provide the full amount that would have been spent on a child in a public school. But all put big dents in the financial penalty families suffer when they choose religious options.

Why can’t public schools treat religious families equally?

Foremost, because public schools are government institutions, and constitutionally, government cannot advance religion. This is for a good reason: If government could push religion, it would have to select one — Methodist? Catholic? Buddhist? — rendering all others second-class. And choosing any religion discriminates against atheists.

Given the fundamental purpose of education — shaping human beings — how to handle religion has been, unsurprisingly, the longest-standing dispute in public schooling, starting from the earliest days of “common schools” in the 1830s and ’40s. “Father of the common school” Horace Mann spent much time fending off charges that uniform government schooling would eject religion. Mann responded that he did not want that, and the key was keeping the Bible in the schools.

It was no solution.

First, interpretations of the Bible are disputed even by people for whom the Bible is considered scripture.

Indeed, there is major disagreement about what should even be in the Bible. Jews typically accept only what Christians call the “Old Testament,” and Protestants and Catholics usually disagree on the “apocryphal” or “deuterocanonical” books. Of course, numerous religions do not accept the Bible at all.

To get sufficient support to create and maintain public schools, public schooling for most of its history embraced lowest-common-denominator Protestantism, with Protestant prayers, hymns, and readings from the King James Bible. But not only was that troubling for some Protestants — especially those committed to denominational dogmas — it was highly problematic for Catholics, who were becoming an increasingly large group about the time of Mann’s crusade.

Catholics could not accept the King James Bible, nor interpretations of scripture other than from the Catholic Church. Many also objected to singing Protestant hymns, and public-school lessons were sometimes overtly anti-Catholic. This led to intense battles in places such as New York City and Philadelphia.

The basic incompatibility of Protestant public schooling and Catholicism is a major reason Catholics had to establish their own schools, which at their peak in 1965 educated roughly 12 percent of all school-aged kids. This after paying taxes for public schools.

But Catholics weren’t the only ones unhappy with religion in public schools. In 1963, in response to cases brought by atheist and Unitarian families, the U.S. Supreme Court declared official public-school prayer and devotional Bible reading unconstitutional.

That was good for atheists and others who preferred education divorced from religion, but it rendered many religious families second-class. This spurred a campaign to return prayer to the public schools, which partially played out in last year’s Supreme Court ruling that a public-school football coach must be allowed to pray at games.

Closely connected to prayer battles have been clashes nationwide over books such as the graphic novel “Gender Queer” in public school libraries, and bathroom access based on one’s gender identity. While often not overtly religious, these battles encompass religious values.

Unfortunately, when religion comes up in the choice debate it is typically to assert that choice violates the “separation of church and state,” or unacceptably lets people choose schools embracing beliefs that liberals, especially, dislike.

The former is just wrong: Rather than government establishing religion, choice keeps government neutral. On the latter point, liberals should openly condemn teachings they find abhorrent. But government favoring their values over others is a fundamental violation of equality under the law.

Government schools cannot be simultaneously secular and religious, Methodist and Buddhist, Jewish and Catholic. For this reason alone, everyone should celebrate the great expansion of school choice.

Neal McCluskey directs the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom and is the author of The Fractured Schoolhouse: Reexamining Education for a Free, Equal, and Harmonious Society