Exclusion of Religious Schooling from Generally Available School Choice Programs Generally Unconstitutional,

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

62% : To satisfy strict scrutiny, government action "must advance 'interests of the highest order' and must be narrowly tailored in pursuit of those interests."
61% : The nonsectarian requirement ensures that Maine is not pitted against private religious schools in these battles over curriculum or operations, thereby avoiding the social strife resulting from this state-versus-religion confrontation.
59% : As Maine puts it, "[t]he public benefit Maine is offering is a free public education."To start with, the statute does not say anything like that.
59% : And the legislators thought that government payment for this kind of religious education would be antithetical to the religiously neutral education that the Establishment Clause requires in public schools.
58% : To start with the most obvious, private schools are different by definition because they do not have to accept all students....
58% : Moreover, the curriculum taught at participating private schools need not even resemble that taught in the Maine public schools....
57% : Another legislator cautioned that the State would be unable to "reconcile" the curriculum of "private religious schools who teach religion in the classroom" with Maine "standards ... that do not include any sort of religion in them."Nor do the schools want Maine in this role.
55% : Any Establishment Clause concerns arising from providing money to religious schools for the creation of safer play yards are readily distinguishable from those raised by providing money to religious schools through the program at issue here -- a tuition program designed to ensure that all children receive their constitutionally guaranteed right to a free public education.
55% : To play that role effectively, public schools are religiously neutral, neither disparaging nor promoting any one particular system of religious beliefs.
54% : It says that [a school district] without a secondary school of its own "shall pay the tuition ... at the public school or the approved private school of the parent's choice at which the student is accepted."
54% : We accordingly have, as explained above, consistently required public school education to be free from religious affiliation or indoctrination.
53% : They did not want Maine taxpayers to finance, through a tuition program designed to ensure the provision of free public education, schools that would use state money for teaching religious practices.
52% : "A State need not subsidize private education," we concluded, "[b]ut once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious."
52% : But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious."} ...
51% : Forcing Maine to fund schools that provide the sort of religiously integrated education offered by Bangor Christian and Temple Academy creates a similar potential for religious strife as that raised by promoting religion in public schools.
51% : And parents in school districts that have a public secondary school may feel indignant that only some families in the State -- those families in the more rural districts without public schools -- have the opportunity to give their children a Maine-funded religious education.
50% : The First Circuit held that the "nonsectarian" requirement was constitutional because the benefit was properly viewed not as tuition assistance payments to be used at approved private schools, but instead as funding for the "rough equivalent of the public school education that Maine may permissibly require to be secular."
50% : Second, the free public education that Maine insists it is providing through the tuition assistance program is often not free.
50% : The First Amendment begins by forbidding the government from "mak[ing] [any] law respecting an establishment of religion" {[which] seems to bar all government "sponsorship, financial support, [or] active involvement ... in religious activity"}.
49% : Since Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), the Supreme Court has made clear that school choice programs, which financially support parents' sending children to private schools, may include religious schools, without violating the Establishment Clause -- just as university scholarship programs (such as the GI Bill and others) may be used at religious institutions alongside secular institutions without violating the Establishment Clause.
49% : The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools -- so long as the schools are not religious.
49% : And the schools can be single-sex....
49% : Justice Sotomayor largely endorsed Justice Breyer's dissent, but also argued that the Court erred in Trinity Lutheran, the playground resurfacing case (in which Justice Breyer concurred in the judgment); she also added:[T]he Court's decision is especially perverse because the benefit at issue is the public education to which all of Maine's children are entitled under the State Constitution.
49% : As this Court has long recognized, the Establishment Clause requires that public education be secular and neutral as to religion.
48% : Maine's nonsectarian requirement, they believed, furthered the State's antiestablishment interests in not promoting religion in its public school system; the requirement prevented public funds -- funds allocated to ensure that all children receive their constitutional right to a free public education -- from being given to schools that would use the funds to promote religion.
48% : Legislators also recognized that these private schools make religiously based enrollment and hiring decisions.
46% : The differences between private schools eligible to receive tuition assistance under Maine's program and a Maine public school are numerous and important.
45% : [Unlike the religious schools involved in this case], public schools, including those in Maine, seek first and foremost to provide a primarily civic education.
43% : Most private schools are eligible to receive the payments, so long as they are "nonsectarian."
41% : See, e.g., Locke (noting that there are "few areas in which a State's antiestablishment interests come more into play" than state funding of ministers who will "lead [their] congregation[s]" in "religious endeavor[s]").
40% : That "assistance" is available at private schools that charge several times the maximum benefit that Maine is willing to provide.

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