Religious Justification, Elitist Outcome: Are Religious Schools Being Used to Avoid Integration?

Abstract

Ethnic, racial and socioeconomic segregation continues to challenge education administrators and legal scholars in many liberal countries. It seems that despite ongoing efforts to promote integration, privileged parents find different ways to avoid it, such as attending private schools or buying houses in neighborhoods with good schools. This paper offers a combined empirical and legal research of another such strategy: the resort to religious schools. The research examines the hypothesis that religious education is being utilized in order to create socioeconomically segregated schools in one specific context: that of Israeli Religious State Schools. The paper argues that in the case of Israel’s religious state schools, entitlements stemming from religious arguments induce socioeconomic segregation, and that law plays a primary role in enabling these processes.