Supreme Court considers endorsing country's first religious public charter school

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

63% : The first is whether charter schools are public schools that are effectively instruments of the state or entirely private bodies that just happen to receive state funding.
56% : Public school advocates see both as broad assaults on traditional public schools.
54% : The campaign to authorize religious public charter schools dovetails with the school choice movement, which supports parents' being able to use taxpayer funds to send their children to private school.
49% : Drummond said in court papers that such a ruling would bring charter school laws nationwide into question and give "special status" to religious charter schools, because, unlike secular schools, they may not have to comply with certain laws that apply to charter schools if they conflict with religious beliefs.
49% : " A win for St. Isidore could also have unintended consequences, lawyers for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools warned in a friend-of-the-court brief.
48% : The second question is, assuming charter schools are private entities, whether it is a form of religious discrimination under the Free Exercise Clause to bar religious schools from a state charter school program that other entities can participate in.
47% : The case could also have repercussions at the federal level, where a program that provides funds to charter schools prohibits money from going to sectarian schools.
46% : Lawyers for St. Isidore, who are defending the proposal along with the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board, have a narrow interpretation of the Establishment Clause and say barring religious entities from applying to run charter schools would run afoul of the Free Exercise Clause.
43% : Drummond countered in his own briefing that charter schools in Oklahoma are like all other public schools, meaning the state can require them not to be sectarian.
43% : All 46 states that allow public charter schools do not allow religious entities to participate, so a ruling in favor of St. Isidore would open the doors to other states' either changing their laws to allow religious schools or facing lawsuits that would require them.
42% : If they are "state actors" in legal terms, then the state, wary of violating the Establishment Clause, is free to require that charter schools be secular.
36% : They noted, for example, that many charter schools would risk losing vital state funding if the court concluded they are not public schools given that the state bans public money going to any private schools, whether they are religious or not.

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