Oklahoma Has Approved The First Religious Charter School. What Will This Mean For The Future?
At Forbes, I wrote a wrap-up of the news from Oklahoma, where officials approved the nation’s first religious charter school.
Earlier this year, Oklahoma State Attorney General Gentner Drummond issued an opinion about the prospect of the state approving a church-run charter school. He was reversing the opinion of his predecessor, saying that previous opinion “misuses the concept of religious liberty by employing it as a means to justify state-funded religion. If allowed to remain in force, I fear the opinion will be used as a basis for taxpayer-funded religious schools.”
This week, the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board ignored him and approved the St. Isidore of Seville virtual charter, a cyber school that was proposed by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City in collaboration with the Diocese of Tulsa. It was in anticipation of this application that the virtual charter board asked the previous AG for an opinion in the first place.
As an AP report notes, “Archdiocese officials have been unequivocal that the school will promote the Catholic faith and operate according to church doctrine, including its views on sexual orientation and gender identity.”
The argument in favor of the approval rests on a couple of points. One is the belief, expressed by the Chancellor of Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Michael Scaperlanda, that “charter schools are not public actors and not state actors.” In other words, they are not really public schools and therefor not held to public school rules. It’s a question that the Supreme Court may choose to decide if it takes up Peltier v. Charter Day School, a case involving a charter school dress code, in which the charter school asserts that it is not subject to non-discrimination rules because it is not a public school.
The argument also rests on Carson v. Makin, the case in which the Supreme Court told Maine that if it funded non-religious choices, it must fund religious ones as well.