Sectarian school funding

The school-choice argument heard this week by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court contains many familiar themes from cases around the country, but one that the state has yet to properly answer rings as true as a campus chapel bell.

How is it, choice advocates ask, that the government through Pell Grants or the GI Bill has no problem paying student tuitions at religious colleges but draws a hard line at religious high schools? What constitutional distinction is being made between supporting an 18-year-old college freshman but not supporting an 18-year-old high school senior? Chances are that the practice is shaped more by habit than legal theory.

The Maine court does not have to answer that question directly in the current case. Instead it must decide whether the state discriminated against five families from Raymond when it refused to pay for their children’s education at a religious school. Raymond has no high school and, like many Maine towns, sends its students and their state funding to other towns for school, including private schooling — so long as that school isn’t religious.

It wasn’t always that way. As recently as the early 1980s, students without schools in their towns could attend religious schools. In 1980, shortly before a state attorney general’s conclusion that Maine was violating the Constitution’s establishment clause, about 18,000 students used the tuitioning program. Of those, only 211 went to religious schools, and there is little reason to think that number would be larger now. Outside of the discrimination charge, the question is whether Maine will continue to deny this small number of students the ability to choose a school that otherwise meets all state requirements.

That approval itself raises questions. Maine gives its official nod to more than 100 private schools for the purposes of meeting state curriculum and attendance requirements, but declares about 30 of those schools as ineligible for tuition reimbursement because they are sectarian. State government, then, believes it can encourage the educational careers of students at these schools, as long as it doesn’t actually help them attend through tuition reimbursements.

Whether any of this rises to discrimination is up to the courts — eventually the U.S. Supreme Court. But the problem remains that the government practices two, opposing systems for funding religious educations. They can’t both be right.