Zelman v. Simmons-Harris

8 Key excerpts on "Zelman v. Simmons-Harris"

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  Encyclopedia of Education Law

  • Charles J. Russo, Charles Russo(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Z ELMAN V . S IMMONS -H ARRIS At issue in Zelman v. Simmons Harris (2002) was the constitutionality of a program from Ohio that pro-vided educational vouchers for children from poor families. Reversing earlier judgments to the contrary, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the program because it offered aid pursuant to neu-tral secular criteria that neither favored nor disfavored religion, was available to religious and secular benefi-ciaries, and was available to parents based on their own independent, private choices. Background of the Case The Supreme Court has generally interpreted the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as preventing direct governmental funding of religious institutions. However, the gov-ernment can provide indirect aid in a variety of ways. For instance, taxpayers can take deductions for donations to churches, and church property is tax-exempt. The federal courts, therefore, have long struggled to draw a line with regard to the types of public financial assistance that may be provided for K–12 education in religiously affiliated nonpublic schools. A key case in this area is Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), wherein the Supreme Court upheld the Ohio Pilot Scholarship Program, a plan that provides vouchers for students from low-income families in Cleveland. School voucher policies had been a point of acad-emic debate ever since Milton Friedman put forward the concept of universal vouchers in 1955. Actual public voucher plans have been much less ambitious than Friedman proposed and have targeted needy students. In addition to Cleveland’s plan, vouchers now exist in Milwaukee and Washington, D.C. (ben-efiting low-income families), as well as Florida and Utah (benefiting special-needs children). Arizona, Florida, Iowa, and Pennsylvania also have policies akin to vouchers, but implemented through a tax credit mechanism.

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  Educational Freedom in Urban America

  Fifty Years After Brown v. Board of Education

  • David Salisbury, Casey Lartigue(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Cato Institute

    (Publisher)

  Zelman and the Future of School Choice Paul E. Peterson

  In the most anticipated decision of its 2002 term, the Supreme Court ruled, in the case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, that the schoolvoucher program in Cleveland, Ohio, did not violate the Constitution’s ban on the ‘‘establishment’’ of religion. Opponents of vouchers—that is, the use of public funds to help low-income families pay tuition at private schools, including religious schools—were predictably disappointed, but pledged to fight on. As Sen. Edward M. Kennedy declared, ‘‘Private school vouchers may pass constitutional muster,’’ but they ‘‘are still bad policy for public schools.’’1

  The policy’s sympathizers, needless to say, saw the ruling in a different light. President Bush used the occasion of the Supreme Court’s decision to issue a full-throated endorsement of vouchers. Zelman, he told a gathering in Cleveland, did more than remove a constitutional cloud; it was a ‘‘historic’’ turning point in how Americans think about education. In 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Court had ruled that the country could not have two sets of schools, ‘‘one for African-Americans and one for whites.’’ Now, he continued, in ruling as it did in the Cleveland case, the Court was affirming a similar principle, proclaiming that ‘‘our nation will not accept one education system for those who can afford to send their children to a school of their choice and one for those who can’t.’’2 Zelman, according to the President, is Brown all over again.

  But is it? That remains the central question as we consider the future of school choice.

  Publicly funded school vouchers got their start in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1990. Established at the urging of local black leaders and Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson (now the Secretary of Health and Human Services), the program was originally restricted to secular private schools and included fewer than a thousand needy students. To accommodate growing demand, religious schools were later allowed to participate, an arrangement declared constitutional in 1998 by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The Milwaukee program now provides a voucher worth up to $5,785 to more than 10,000 students, amounting to more than 15 percent of the school system’s eligible population.

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  From Schoolhouse to Courthouse

  The Judiciary's Role in American Education

  • Joshua Dunn, Martin R. West, Joshua M. Dunn, Martin R. West(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Brookings Institution Press

    (Publisher)

  Persistent Conflicts III part I n the highest profile decision of its 2002 term, the Supreme Court ruled in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that Cleveland’s fledgling school voucher pro-gram did not, in permitting low-income parents to use government funds to send their children to parochial schools, violate the First Amendment’s ban on the establishment of religion. 1 Proponents of private school choice, led by Pres-ident George W. Bush, hailed the ruling as the Court’s most important educa-tion decision since Brown v. Board of Education. 2 Indeed, the president saw a direct connection between the two decisions. In Brown, the Court had ordered that the nation no longer operate two school systems, one for white children and another for blacks. In the Cleveland case, Bush said, the Court had affirmed that “our nation will not accept one education system for those who can afford to send their children to a school of their choice and another for those who can’t.” 3 Yet for all of the fanfare, Zelman was hardly the final judicial intervention in the debate over school choice. This is not because it is a narrow or ambiguous decision. Despite the 5-4 split among the justices, the majority opinion provides unusually clear guidance on how to design a school voucher program in order to survive a challenge under the U.S. Constitution. Nor was the policy question at School Choice Litigation after Zelman martin r. west 8 167 I would like to thank Jessica Goldberg for her assistance in preparing this chapter and Clint Bolick and Jonathan Zimmerman for insightful comments. stake unimportant. Because the inclusion of religious schools is vital to the growth of private school choice programs, uncertainty about its constitutional-ity was a major obstacle to their expansion. An adverse decision binding across all fifty states would have been devastating to the school voucher movement, at least in the short run.

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  The Wiley Handbook of Educational Policy

  • Rosemary Papa, Shadow W. J. Armfield, Rosemary Papa, Shadow W. J. Armfield(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  ( School District of City of Grand Rapids v. Ball at 3217) 9 Global Privatization of Education 198 Forty‐one schools in the Grand Rapids School District were participating in the two programs and 40 were religious schools. The Supreme Court ruled the programs had the “‘primary principal’ effect of advancing religion and, therefore, violated dictates of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.” Here again Agostini reversed the Grand Rapids decision saying that providing these services to religious schools did not violate the Establishment Clause; yet, another example illustrating how the Supreme Court had reinterpreted the Establishment Clause so as to provide public funding to church schools ( School District of City of Grand Rapids v. Ball at 3216). The U.S. Supreme Court in 1997 stated: “We therefore concluded that our Establishment Clause law has significantly changed” since 1985 ( Agostini v. Felton at 2017). The final blow came in the Zelman case where the Supreme Court allowed public money in the form of vouchers to support religious schools and opined that this did not violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. This is significant as it relates to the privatization movement in the United States since 96% of the students who benefited from the State of Ohio’s voucher program in Zelman came from “religiously affiliated schools,” with the majority of those students being enrolled in Catholic schools ( Zelman v. Simmons‐Harris at 2460). 5 The Indiana School Voucher program is another example of the impact of the Zelman decision. In 2016–2017, Indiana students receiving vouchers attended the following schools: 154 Catholic Schools (58.3%), 60 Evangelical Christian (22.7%), and 38 Lutheran Schools (14.4%). In addition, there were four Islamic schools, three Seventh‐Day Adventist schools, two Jewish schools and one (1) Presbyterian school.

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  Religious Charter Schools

  • Lawrence D. Weinberg(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Information Age Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The application of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), the recent Supreme Court voucher decision, to charter schools, is often overstated, ignoring that charter schools are public schools and are state actors with very different constitutional requirements than private schools. Moreover, a religion-based charter school is not only a private faith-based school that is now formed under a charter rather than as a private school, but rather it is a school formed by parents who chartered it for religious rea-sons. MOZERT V. HAWKINS, PARENTS’ RIGHTS, AND THE STATE A federal appellate court case, Mozert v. Hawkins (1987), illustrates the ten-sions between the state and parents regarding education. Mozert is not important because of its value as legal precedent, as an appellate division case it has considerably less value than a Supreme Court Decision. Mozert , however, is also an excellent springboard to discuss the question of whether religious charter schools are constitutional because it is very likely that the type of parents who sued in that case who would be drawn to charter schools. It is also an example of the discord that sometimes develops between the state and parents over how to direct a child’s education. In 1983, seven families sued the Hawkins County Board of Education arguing that forcing their elementary-school-aged children to read cer-tain stories from the Holt, Rinehart, and Winston reading series (“Holt series”) violated their right to freely exercise their religion. Although the school had initially created an alternative reading program for parents who found the reading objectionable, the school board eliminated that program in November of 1983; this incited the parents to sue. One parent, for example, Vicki Frost, who described herself as a “born again Christian” had a religious objection to any teaching about mental

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  Pluralism and American Public Education

  No One Way to School

  • Ashley Rogers Berner(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  My focus is on the Court’s rulings on religion and education. When we turn to this theme, we find that Court’s rulings have been more generous toward pluralism than many Americans imagine. What are the conditions that enable government funds to flow to private and, especially, religious schools? The two cases most relevant to educational pluralism are Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971) and Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002). Why these two? Lemon established a rigorous constitutional test that the Court still uses; Zelman deployed Lemon to support Cleveland’s voucher program. THE LEMON TEST Before 1971, many states provide textbooks, teachers’ salaries, and tuition reimbursements, to private and religious schools. The Court had looked favorably upon these practices, as long as the underlying law did not set out to advantage religious schools but, rather, to support education generally ( Board of Education v. Allen, 1968). 56 A.R. BERNER In 1971, however, the Court issued Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971). Lemon struck down programs in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island that reimbursed pri- vate schools for textbooks, materials, and teachers’ salaries. Lemon is what most Americans think of when they hear “separation,” for it set out a specific test for constitutionality that still resonates with the Court. Under the “Lemon test,” a constitutionally sound statute “must have a secular purpose, must have a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion, and cannot create an excessive entanglement between church and state.” 31 These criteria—secular purpose, primary effect, no excessive entanglement— are the basis on which the Court has judged state support for non-public schools ever since. The Court’s use of Lemon has not been fully consistent, however; at times, its rulings have nuanced or even reversed previous decisions reached under Lemon’s guidelines.

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  The Supreme Court and American Democracy

  Case Studies on Judicial Review and Public Policy

  • Earl Pollock(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  The plurality’s choice to employ imputations of bigotry and irreligion makes clear that, in rejecting the princi- ple of no aid to a school’s religious mission, the plurality is attacking the most funda- mental assumption underlying the Establishment Clause. Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 530 U.S. 640 (2002) FACTS: Ohio’s Pilot Project Scholarship Program provides tuition aid for certain stu- dents in the Cleveland City School District to attend participating public or private schools of their parents’ choosing and provides tutorial aid for students who choose to remain enrolled in public school. Both religious and nonreligious schools in the dis- trict may participate, as may public schools in adjacent school districts. Tuition aid is 234 The Supreme Court and American Democracy distributed to parents according to financial need, and where the aid is spent depends solely upon where parents choose to enroll their children. In the 1999–2000 school year, 82 percent of the participating private schools had a religious affiliation, none of the adjacent public schools participated, and 96 percent of the students participating in the scholarship program were enrolled in religiously affiliated schools. Sixty percent of the students were from families at or below the pov- erty line. Cleveland schoolchildren also have the option of enrolling in community schools, which are funded under state law but run by their own school boards and receive twice the per-student funding as participating private schools, or magnet schools, which are public schools emphasizing a particular subject area, teaching method, or service, and for which the school district receives the same amount per stu- dent as it does for a student enrolled at a traditional public school. The plaintiffs in the case, Ohio taxpayers, brought suit to enjoin the program on the ground that it violated the Establishment Clause.

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  The Wiley Handbook of Christianity and Education

  • William Jeynes(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Relying on Agostini , the Zelman Court began by conceding the lack of a dispute over the program’s valid secular purpose in providing programming for poor chil-dren in a failing school system, the Court examined whether it had the forbidden effect of advancing or inhibiting religion. The Court upheld the voucher program because as part of the state’s far‐reaching attempt to provide greater educational opportunities in a failing school system, the law allocated aid on the basis of neu-tral secular criteria that neither favored nor disfavored religion, was made available to both religious and secular beneficiaries on a nondiscriminatory basis, and offered assistance directly to a broad class of citizens who directed the aid to reli-gious schools based entirely on their own genuine and independent private choices. The Zelman Court was not concerned by the fact that most of the participating schools were faith‐based because parents chose to send their children to them insofar as surrounding public schools refused to take part in the program. If any-thing, the Court acknowledged that most of the children attended the religiously affiliated non‐public schools, most of which were Roman Catholic, not as a mat-ter of law but because they were unwelcomed in the public schools. The Court concluded that insofar as it was following an unbroken line of its own precedent supporting true private parental choice that provided benefits directly to a wide range of needy private individuals, its only choice was to uphold the voucher program. Generally Available Aid In Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Pauley (2017, Trinity Lutheran ), the Supreme Court reviewed a case from Missouri in which a faith‐based pre‐school was denied the opportunity to participate in a state‐funded program that would have helped it to pay for a new surcae, of recycled rubber tires, in the playground of its preschool.

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