EDU 6120 Week 9
“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” - U.S. Constitution, Amendment 1
For writing this week, I wanted to delve into both the case law and results that have informed the debate about religion in public schools. Specifically, this concerns the first sentence of the first amendment (above), and its two clauses, which have become known as the establishment clause and the free exercise clause. These two, somewhat competing notions, rather succinctly define the relationship between religions and the federal government and have been the basis for much case law that impacts public schools – both in terms of the expression of ideas as well as the utilization of space. Whether it is school prayer, posting of the Ten Commandments, public schools giving old free textbooks to private religious school or providing spaces for student-led Bible studies, the US Supreme Court has used this one monumental sentence of James Madison’s to further define the interwoven and complex relationship of religion and public education.
Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) was one such important case in which the Court established the Lemon Test. “Under the ‘Lemon’ test, government can assist religion only if (1) the primary purpose of the assistance is secular, (2) the assistance must neither promote nor inhibit religion, and (3) there is no excessive entanglement between church and state” (USCourts.gov). This often serves as three-pronged litmus test to determine if the particular relationship violates the establishment clause.
Then in Lee v. Weisman (1992), the Courts decided that public schools must discontinue clergy-led prayer at school graduation and other required school gatherings. Simultaneously, the Court decided that during non-instructional hours, schools could be used as meeting places for student-led Bible studies as long as an “open forum” exists for all such student groups. This means that YoungLife would have just as much right to meet after school as the YoungSatanists. With this open forum decision, the Court believed this did not respect or favor one religion over another, thus meeting the establishment clause. And moreover, by providing the public space for student-led religious gatherings, the schools were not actively “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
As a social studies teacher, this is fascinating to me because it provides such immediate and tangible examples for students to witness the impacts that both the U.S. Constitution and U.S. Supreme Court have on our everyday lives. Moreover, it can be a helpful exercise to understand the legal challenges of a constructionist reading of the Constitution. Such a lens limits or restricts judicial interpretation of the Constitution and is requires decisions to be based upon the exact words on the page. Considering the potential for discordancy between the establishment and free exercise clauses, this arena is rife for debate.
And, as much as I would like to spend the week writing about this high-minded debate that pits two clauses of one-fifth of the first amendment again each other, we live in such times where the immediacy of change demands our focus. We don’t have the luxury to daydream blissfully in the wheat fields of Constitutional Law. Instead, we must find shelter from changing political storm as the dark clouds of president-elect Trump’s decision-making looms like poison-filled zeppelins over our heads. These are eerie and ominous times we live in, especially considering Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos as the new Secretary of the Department of Education. Trump’s initial proposal was to discontinue the federal DOE, which at this point, I think I’d honestly prefer.
DeVos, a billionaire with no professional experience in schools, has a noteworthy and troubling CV that includes donating to and advocating for the unsuccessful overhaul of the Detroit public schools. Her monies aided an experiment that doubled down on charter schools, which were also deregulated and faced little accountability despite continuing to fail students. As a helpful metric, we can look at the NAEP (National Assessment of Education Progress) data to compare performance across struggling urban education districts and Detroit ranks lowest in the pack (Washington Post).
Moreover, DeVos, like Trump, supports the idea of school vouchers, which, according to the Washington Post “give families taxpayer dollars to pay for private and religious schools.” Trump and DeVos’ critique of status quo public education is that it is a monopoly that needs to be upended by privatized choice and olde fashioned capitalism. This means public education could resemble a marketplace where students and families take the per pupil allotment (a voucher) and decide what school they would like to attend. The money would follow the student. This could be applied to private schools, home-schooling and even religious schools with the Mueller v. Allen (1983) Supreme Court decision serving as ample precedent. Before even exploring the student and socioeconomic inequity inherent in the voucher system, it is important to consider the irony that “big government reformer” Trump is now encouraging a $20 billion federal system and the massive expansion (in financial power and bureaucratic breadth) to a federal department that only weeks ago he considered terminating.
Yeah, that sounds like smaller government to me. As quoted in the Washington Post American Federation of Teachers, the second largest national education union, President Randi Weingarten said that Trump’s pick [DeVos] “makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on privatizing, defunding and destroying public education in America.” This is not hyperbole. With Trump and DeVos’ proposed reformation of public education - a federally managed pseudo-privatized system of “choice” - we’d see the state and local framework for control (as established by the 10th amendment or reserve clause) and re-established with the ESSA reauthorization in December 2015 begin to evaporate.
According to the famed-Internet science blog and publication IFLS, the US National Education Association, the largest national educators union, criticized DeVos’ voucher proposal saying “These schemes do nothing to help our most vulnerable students while they ignore or exacerbate glaring opportunity gaps. She has consistently pushed a corporate agenda to privatize, de-professionalize and impose cookie-cutter solutions to public education." Sadly, these are not DeVos’ only dubious “qualifications” for the job.
I couldn’t help but notice the parallel between my topic and this emerging news. DeVos, if approved, stands to have great influence over the relationship between public education and private, religious schools – a relationship that the Court has slowly and meticulously defined during the last 100 years. I am hopeful that precedent and our country’s commitment to state and local control of the great experiment of public education will win the day.
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