A religious public school. As Americans, our brains can’t really grasp this contradiction in terms. It’s a legal absurdity, a “constitutional oxymoron.” But Oklahoma is working to make it a reality.
Earlier this year, Oklahoma officials approved a religious public school. This Catholic charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School, intends to discriminate based on sexual orientation, gender identity and religion in admissions and employment. It has also asserted a right to discriminate against students with disabilities. Such discrimination is as antithetical to public schools, as is indoctrinating students into the Catholic religion, which the school will also do—it advertises itself as a “place of evangelization” that “participates in the evangelizing mission of the Church.”
Many people don’t know what a charter school is, adding an additional layer of confusion to the issue. Charter schools are, in fact, public schools—albeit ones that are often managed by a non-public entity. The Oklahoma Charter Schools Act clearly says that a “charter school” is “a public school established by contract with” the government. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers agree on a similar definition.
Discrimination. Indoctrination. And all on the taxpayers’ dime. That’s why, on July 31, advocates of public education and the separation of church and state sued state officials to stop this public school from discriminating against and indoctrinating children.
Discrimination. Indoctrination. And all on the taxpayers’ dime.
St. Isidore is so far out of legal bounds that the Oklahoma Attorney General chastised the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board for approving the Catholic school’s application (the Attorney General’s office is also expected to sue). To defend the indefensible, the rogue board turned to the Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, a $100 million Christian Nationalist legal outfit that specializes in advancing conservative Christian causes. The organization excels at manipulating and muddying the narrative around its cases. In the “gay wedding cake” case out of Colorado, for example, it turned a case about a business discriminating against a loving couple because they were gay into a case about the big, bad government persecuting a Christian artist.
St. Isidore’s funding will hit an estimated $26 million over the first five years, unless this lawsuit succeeds. One of the most common arguments I’ve heard in favor of St. Isidore is that the Supreme Court precluded the lawsuit through Carson v. Makin (2022), a case involving taxpayer funds flowing to two Christian schools in Maine. But that ignores what the ruling actually allowed, which is that if a state funds non-religious education at private non-religious schools, it must fund religious education at private Christian schools as well. Even the Court’s conservative supermajority didn’t argue that states must fund a parallel system of private education, only that if they do so, they cannot exclude religious schools.
What’s happening in Oklahoma is different. The distinction can be illustrated by thinking about how to resolve the issues in the two cases without a lawsuit. Carson v. Makin could have been resolved by abolishing the Maine program that directed taxpayer funds to private education and instead focusing state funds on improving, strengthening and expanding public education. Not only would this better the lives of students and their families, but there would have been no case for the conservative justices to wade into.
Oklahoma should absolutely adopt this plan. After all, the Oklahoma Constitution requires the state to establish and maintain “a system of public schools, which shall be open to all the children of the state and free from sectarian control.” But that wouldn’t resolve the issue at the core of this case. If Oklahoma taxpayers decided to put all their taxpayer funds into the public school system, St. Isidore would still exist because it’s part of the public school system. And that’s the central problem.
We’re not talking about a parallel system that’s been desperate to get taxpayer funds for decades; we’re talking about a hostile takeover of public schools.
That’s what this case is really about. Since Brown v. Board of Education ended the segregation of public schools, Christian Nationalists have been on a mission to undermine public schools and privatize all education. Now, they’re simply trying to conquer and co-opt the public schools. And they won’t stop with Oklahoma.