Abstract
The Establishment Clause, School Choice, and the Future of Catholic Education
Highlights
Catholic school enrollment in the United States has dropped considerably over the last 50 years, causing many schools to close (Walch, 2003)
Diocesan officials and Catholic school leaders have been compelled to create and implement innovative policies and practices— i.e., tuition assistance programs, marketing plans, alternative governance and finance structures, fundraising, foundations, etc.—in order to remain a viable and impactful option within the U.S education system (Goldschmidt & Walsh, 2011). Not all of these programs have sustained the test of time; much of the ongoing struggle to survive occurs in inner-city Catholic schools serving mainly low-income students of color (DeFiore, Convey, & Schuttloffel, 2009). That such schools struggle most should come as no surprise, as tuition is typically the largest funding source for most Catholic schools and those in the inner-city have significantly discounted tuition rates compared to schools in wealthy neighborhoods (McDonald & Schultz, 2013), resulting in less annual revenue
The Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESA) program “allows parents of children with disabilities to withdraw their children from district or charter schools and receive a portion of their public funding deposited into an account with defined, but multiple, uses...” (Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, 2013, p. 13)
Summary
The Establishment Clause, School Choice, and the Future of Catholic Education. This article reviews several recent court cases at the federal and state levels related to school choice initiatives in the United States. The article sheds light on the enduring question of whether these programs are unlawful bonds between church and state. The review includes details about choice programs that exist (or have existed in the past) in the states where the cases originated: Ohio, Washington, Indiana, Arizona, and Colorado. The article examines relevant, large-scale evaluations of choice programs and concludes with a discussion of the place of Catholic education in the school choice movement. Keywords School choice, Supreme Court cases, Lower Court cases, school choice evaluation research
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