Federal funding of religious schools

The Ambassador Baptist Church Christian School states on its website that the school’s “primary mission and goal … is to train the students in the knowledge of God and the Christian way of life and to provide them with an excellent educational experience…. God’s truth is infused throughout the curriculum and is reinforced in chapel each week.”  New Macedonia Christian Academy boasts about delivering “a high quality Christian education to our students while instilling a strong Christ-centered academic foundation” while the Dupont Park School encourages “each student to develop a personal relationship with God.”

What do these schools have in common? They all receive tax dollars via the D.C. voucher program.

• The D.C. voucher program requires every U.S. taxpayer to fund religious education for D.C. children.
• The founders of the United States designed our constitution to specifically prohibit individual taxpayers from paying for other taxpayer’s religious training.
• When private religious schools are privately funded, religious schools have an undisputed right to include religious content in their curriculum. But once taxpayer dollars enter the equation, it is impossible for the government to avoid funding religious activity or favoring one religious program over another or over non-religious programming.
• Although a narrow majority of the US Supreme Court has upheld vouchers under certain circumstances, it did not rule that they were per se constitutional, as one of the most dearly held principles of religious liberty is that government should not compel any citizen to furnish funds in support of a religion with which he or she disagrees, or even a religion with which he or she does agree. The D.C. voucher program violates this central tenet: it uses taxpayer money to fund primarily religious education. Parents certainly may choose such an education for their children, but no taxpayer should be required to pay for another’s religious education.
• The federal government supports religious training of D.C. students with vouchers offered through the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP).
• Technically, the vouchers distributed via this program may be used for nonreligious schools as well, but in practice secular alternatives are not readily available. Since the vouchers cover the entire cost of most of the religious schools' tuition, there is no question that tax dollars are supporting the religious training components of these schools.
• The federally funded private religious school voucher program in D.C. allows schools to violate many federal, state and local civil rights laws.
• By design, voucher programs aid struggling Christian schools. A July 2009 report by Rutgers University on the D.C. voucher program found that if D.C. vouchers were allocated at the minimum per-pupil cost of non-religious, independent schools rather than the minimum for religious schools, the voucher would have to increase from $7,500 to $24,000. Thus, the report concludes that this difference in price “essentially push[es] students into Christian Association and Catholic schools, pricing out independent (non-religious) schools and Hebrew schools.
• Students are directly affected by this lack of separation of non-religious and religious education and the absence of an opt-out provision to allow students to forgo religious instruction, worship and indoctrination.  More than eight percent of the children who leave their voucher schools do so because “religious activities at the private school make the child uncomfortable,” according to the 2008 U.S. Department of Education Report.

While the Secular Coalition for America takes no position on the use of vouchers for secular private education, we oppose the re-authorization of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, a tuition voucher program in Washington D.C. which has resulted in federally funded religious training of thousands of D.C. children.

For more detail, see our position paper.