Marcia Coyle:
Well, first of all, St. — the board, the Oklahoma State Charter School Board, is the entity that brought the case to the Supreme Court and St. Isidore with it as well.
And they claim that Oklahoma charter schools are run — operated by private organizations. And so is St. Isidore run by a private organization, the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa — the city of Tulsa. And because of that, the argument goes, they fit within a trio of recent cases by the Supreme Court that say if you hold out a public benefit to private organizations, you can’t discriminate just because an organization is religious.
So that is their argument. And there was considerable pushback not only from the state attorney general, who is the one who sought the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that this is an illegal contract, but, for example, Justice Kagan was looking at charter schools and said they seem like public schools.
They’re free. They’re open to everyone. The state supervises the curriculum. They have to meet certain standards that can be audited and the state can even close them. And Justice Jackson also pushed back at the state board, basically saying, I don’t think you’re looking for this public benefit that everybody has.
I think you’re looking for a public benefit that no one has, because she explained in their contract with the state board they X’ed out the requirement that curriculum be secular. They amended the requirement that there be no discrimination in order to accommodate church autonomy interests.
And she said that — no charter school has that. So there was considerable pushback from the liberal side of the court. The — Oklahoma’s attorney general was saying that while it’s true that private organizations operate the charter schools, these are public schools. They have always been public schools. The public understands them to be public schools. And they’re over — there’s a lot of supervision by the state.
That’s what they are. They are public schools.
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