A legal battle over a proposed charter school in Oklahoma could unlock a new avenue for religious education—and some of the fiercest opposition is coming from within the existing charter-school movement.
State laws have long barred such schools. Supporters, including conservative lawyers and religious-education advocates, call those laws discriminatory and say they run afoul of recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings. Some observers expect the issue to eventually reach the high court.
If the effort to allow religious charters is successful, it could open up school options for some parents, redirect public money to support religious instruction and upend the charter-school movement and publicly funded education more broadly.
Some charter advocates are wary of this future. They say that charters were always intended to be secular, public schools. A religious charter school, they say, is a contradiction in terms.
“It’s a complete repudiation of the central principles of the chartering idea,” said Joe Nathan, who was a leader in the successful effort to pass the country’s first charter-school law in Minnesota in 1991.