The Supreme Court can remove barriers to educational freedom
'I will always protect Oklahoma's parents and their right to choose what is best for their child, especially when it comes to their education.'
This proud statement adorned Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond's Facebook page during National School Choice Week this year. Indeed, Drummond has put action behind these words, notably by supporting the right of parents to be informed by school officials if their children are struggling with their biological sex. Oklahoma also has one of the strongest parental rights laws in the country — a law that Drummond was elected to uphold.
However, the attorney general has fallen short of his promise in one major case that is set for oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court today — a case with huge ramifications for school choice in all states.
In Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, Drummond suppressed educational freedom by suing to cancel the state's charter school board agreement with St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School.
As a result of this lawsuit — and the Oklahoma Supreme Court's decision against the charter school board — parental rights are being limited when it comes to educational choices for their children.
This comes at a time when laws supporting parental rights are on a major upswing at the state and federal level. There are currently 21 states with parental rights laws on the books. And in January, Sens. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and James Lankford (R-Okla.) and Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), introduced the Families' Rights and Responsibilities Act to protect parents' right to direct the upbringing, education and health care of their children from infringement by the federal government.
Many of our nation's leaders recognize the importance of safeguarding the authority of parents as the primary decision-makers when it comes to how their children are raised — including where they are educated.
Although Oklahoma has strong protections for parental rights, it also has a law on the books that prohibits state funding for 'sectarian purposes.' Drummond's predecessor, John O'Connor, rightly advised the state charter school board that the law was unconstitutional, in light of Supreme Court precedent that allows public funds to go to religious institutions — including a Supreme Court decision that tackled the very issue at the heart of Oklahoma's law: Blaine amendments.
In the 1870s, Rep. James Blaine (R-Maine) launched a nearly successful attempt to amend the U.S. Constitution to keep states from aiding so-called 'sectarian' schools — really just a thinly veiled and bigoted attempt to keep states from funding Catholic schools. Although the amendment fortunately failed, other states took the lead and added Blaine amendments to their state constitutions — Montana being one, Oklahoma another.
Montana's application of its Blaine amendment to prohibit parents from using school choice funds to send their children to religious schools was ruled unconstitutional in 2020 — a ruling that informed the former Oklahoma attorney general's opinion that the charter school board was well within its rights to contract with St. Isidore.
Aside from anti-Catholic bias, the Supreme Court has long stood for the ability of parents to make educational decisions for their kids. In the 1920s, the court struck down a Nebraska law that prohibited schools from teaching German even in schools where parents wanted it (motivated by anti-German sentiments after World War I). The court rightly recognized that law interfered with the interest of parents choosing what education they want for their children — and here we are, more than 100 years later, asking the same question.
Alliance Defending Freedom, where I serve as senior counsel and the director of the Center for Public Policy, will appear on behalf of the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board at the Supreme Court on April 30. We will argue these anti-educational-freedom laws should be left in the history books, along with the others against which the court has ruled.
Oklahoma and other states like it have many pro-family qualities, but in order for them to be consistently pro-family, the court should remove the barriers to parental choice in education.
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