You knew that when the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a request from Oklahoma to approve a religious charter school, there would be more requests in the pipeline. Oklahoma was rejected by a 4-4 vote only because Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself, because of her friendship with one of the lawyers for the online Catholic school.
Recently, as I reported, Oklahoma returned with a proposal for an online Jewish charter school, a Ben Gamla charter. The entire state of Oklahoma has a population of only 9,000 Jews. They are not requesting a Jewish school, but an entrepreneur connected to a Florida for-profit charter chain is.
Religious charter schools are a big problem for the national charter lobby. They say that charter schools are “public” schools. The advocates for religious charter schools say they are not public schools. They are specifically religious schools.
The 74 reported the latest proposal:
When the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked this year in a case over whether charter schools can be religious, experts said it wouldn’t take long for the question to re-emerge in another lawsuit.
They were right.
In Tennessee, the nonprofit Wilberforce Academy is suing the Knox County Schools in federal court because the district refuses to allow a Christian charter school. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti is on the school’s side. He issued an opinion last month that the state’s ban on religious charter schools likely violates the First Amendment.
“Tennessee’s public charter schools are not government entities for constitutional purposes and may assert free exercise rights,” he wrote to Rep. Michele Carringer, the Knoxville Republican who requested the opinion.
The legal challenge in Tennessee comes as a Florida-based charter school network prepares to submit an application to the Oklahoma Charter School Board for a Jewish virtual charter high school. Peter Deutsch, the former Democratic congressman who founded the Ben Gamla charter schools, began working on the idea long before the case over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School even went to court. The 4-4 tie in May means that an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision blocking the school from receiving state funds still stands.
“The prior decision shows that there’s an open question here that needs to be resolved,” said Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm representing the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation. “We hope the court will get it right this time. We hope the federal courts get it right without having to go to the Supreme Court.”
Idaho also confronted the issue earlier this year. The state’s first charter, Brabeion Academy, initially promoted the school as Christian. But it was approved in August as a nonreligious school and will open as such next fall. Related‘A Day to Exhale’: Supreme Court Deadlocks on Religious Charter Schools — For Now
Deutsch, Skrmetti and other supporters of faith-based charter schools base their argument on three earlier Supreme Court rulings allowing public funds to support sectarian schools. They say that excluding religious organizations from operating faith-based charter schools is discrimination and violates the Constitution. But leaders of the charter sector and public school advocates argue that classifying charter schools as private would threaten funding and civil rights protections for 3.7 million students nationwide…
To Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, the debate is settled, for now. In November, he said his office would “oppose any attempts to undermine the rule of law.”
Americans United, which advocates for maintaining church-state separation, has also issued a warning over the new school. The organization represented parents and advocates in a separate case over the school.
“Religious extremists once again are trying to undermine our country’s promise of church-state separation by forcing Oklahoma taxpayers to fund a religious public school. Not on our watch,” Rachel Laser, president and CEO, said in a press release….
The demand for a Jewish charter school would be much higher in Florida, which has an estimated Jewish population of nearly 762,000, compared with about 9,000 in Oklahoma.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
Like Jericho, the wall between church and state will tumble down. Will either survive the crash?
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I can only hope that the churches don’t survive. Faith beliefs. . . a scourge on humanity for millennia.
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In a country as polarized as this one America should not be sending public dollars to religious schools that discriminate where the public has no control or is even aware of what is being taught. Christian nationalism is a dangerous, divisive movement that would welcome the flow of unaccountable public dollars that can be used to indoctrinate young people. There are lots of religious extremists that are seeking to use public funds to promote their twisted ideology. The right is trying to take the wall between church and state down brick by brick. Religious families should have to fund their children’s religious education as this is a personal choice, and the public should not be compelled to pay for it.
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Give me your money to assist me in inculcating my children in the musings of schizophrenic Bronze Age goat herders. What could go wrong?
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