Supreme Court could spark religious charter schools -- or new charter limits

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

66% : Last year, nearly 3.9 million attended charter schools nationally, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, more than double the number in 2010.
65% : For nearly 15 years, he was president of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, the organizations that oversee charter schools.
62% : For years, charter schools, which are independently run but publicly funded, have enjoyed bipartisan support, and they rapidly spread across the country.
58% : "Charter schools will have to become true public schools.
56% : " Others worry about maintaining their exemption from antidiscrimination laws, which allows them to hire and fire teachers and other employees based on their religion.
52% : The idea of religious public schools, considered far-fetched not long ago, now stands on the precipice of reality.
52% : Religious leaders, politicians and public policy observers predict an explosion of government-funded religious schools if the court sides with the Catholic Church officials in Oklahoma whose proposed school is at the center of the case.
52% : The idea is terrifying to those who fear the line between church and state will be dangerously eroded, but it's exciting to others, who see the case as a bulwark for religious liberty and an opportunity for families who want a religious education for their children.
52% : " The funding will be enormously tempting for certain religious schools -- especially those in states that do not have private school voucher programs, which help parents pay tuition, according to educators and experts who work with private religious schools.
51% : "This is a sweeping change to the operational structure of charter schools.
50% : Existing private religious schools might convert to charter school status to replace tuition with taxpayer funding.
50% : " Charter school opponents are ready to push for new limits -- including a cap on new schools and requirements that charter schools be run by school districts, rather than nonprofit organizations, said Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, which has been highly critical of charters.
47% : For conservatives, charters represented competition for traditional public schools; for liberals, they were a way to support school choice within the public system.
45% : " At the same time, he said, many religious schools will balk at the regulations that come with government funding.
45% : "Nobody really knows whether religious charter schools would be allowed to continue to practice their religion if they are charter schools," Richmond said.
44% : They say the funding that charter schools rely on might unravel, and that charter school skeptics could use the prospect of religious schools to persuade lawmakers to impose new rules on all charters to keep religious ones out.
43% : "This is like relitigating the question of charter schools altogether," she said.
42% : They have questions about the trade-offs involved in taking public money but say that robust public funding will be too tempting for many school leaders to pass up.
42% : Charter schools, like other public schools, must be open to students of all religions, with lotteries allocating seats if demand exceeds supply.
39% : At the same time, other experts predict the opposite: a collapse of bipartisan support for charter schools and fewer options, at least in some states.
38% : But she worries that conservative states might push for voucher systems to replace charter schools and that liberal states might no longer allow new charter schools because they do not want to fund religion.
31% : " The threat to charter schools Some of the fiercest opponents of the proposition of religious charter schools are the advocates for charter schools -- but their concerns are not about what the new schools would and would not be allowed to do.
22% : At the same time, she worries that charter schools -- if they are no longer considered public schools -- will lose access to teacher retirement pension systems and borrowing authority.
21% : If the Supreme Court rules that charter schools are not really public schools, that could jeopardize funding across the country because states provide funding through the per-pupil formula only to public schools, said Starlee Coleman, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy group.
18% : The school, backed by the Trump administration, argues that denying it access to the program amounts to an infringement on religious liberty.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.