How the Maine decision informs CA school choice movement: An interview with CA School Choice Foundation president

Michael Alexander—the California School Choice Foundation president and Californians for School Choice chairman—breaks down what the recent Carson v. Makin ruling on a publicly-funded tuition assistance program means for California. The first of an exclusive series with Opp Now.

Opportunity Now: This month, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that a Maine tuition assistance program that excluded accredited sectarian (religious) schools from participating is unconstitutional. Can you summarize this case for us?

Michael Alexander: Maine is one of our most rural states. Their constitution states that children have a right to a public education, but Maine’s population is so spread out that they don’t have high schools that are geographically accessible to everyone.

In the ‘80s, legislators created a tuition assistance program. Under this program, if a student doesn’t have a high school in their area, they can either travel far to attend another high school or receive tuition assistance to use at an accredited high school of their choice with one exception: they can’t choose a sectarian/religious school.

Recently, Makin took Maine to court to object to this rule. The local courts turned them down, as did an appellate court. However, at the Supreme Court, Justice Roberts said that the state doesn’t have to provide tuition subsidies, but once it does, it can’t discriminate against religious institutions.

ON: What are some implications of this Supreme Court ruling for religiously-affiliated schools in California?

MA: This case absolutely has relevance for California. In fact, I wrote a recent op-ed for my supporters about Carson v. Makin and its findings for our state. I’ll go over my key takeaways.

First, this ruling demonstrates that awarding public money to students to spend at a private entity is okay. In my view, the United States Supreme Court has just given school choice a constitutional seal of approval.

Second, students spending tuition assistance money at sectarian institutions is also not only constitutional, but if a state declines to extend that subsidy to a school due solely because it is faith based, that would interfere with students’ right to practice religion. This affirms the constitutionality and legitimacy of the Educational Freedom Act and other similar approaches to school choice that don’t discriminate against faith-based schools.

The bottom line is that school choice works. School choice accommodates students’ varying, unique life situations and—despite dissent from those like Justice Breyer—has been working well throughout the years.

For further details, my op-ed on this subject that went out June 26, 2022 reads:

In the wake of landmark decisions on abortion and the Second Amendment it is easy to overlook the United States Supreme Court’s equally important decision on school choice in Carson v. Makin. The facts of this case are simple. The State of Maine is one of the most rural states in America. Its school age population is scattered throughout the state making it uneconomical to build public secondary schools. Rather than increasing the funding to build and operate these schools, the Maine legislature enacted a tuition assistance program that paid up to $11,773.92 per student for the 2021-22 school year so that a student could attend a private secondary school.

To be eligible to participate in the program a private school had to meet two basic requirements: (1) It had to be accredited and (2) it had to be nonsectarian. The latter requirement meant that students attending religious schools could not benefit from the same benefit paid to non-religious schools. Several parents, including David Carson, sued alleging unconstitutional religious discrimination. Although they lost at trial and in the lower appellate court, the United States Supreme Court reversed the judgment and remanded the case back to the lower courts for “further proceedings consistent” with the court’s opinion.

In its analysis of the Maine statutes and the First Amendment the court made several important points.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts made it clear that the court was not breaking new ground. He cited several recent cases including another tuition subsidy case, Espinosa v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020). Quoting Espinosa, the court wrote that “a State need not subsidize private education, but once a State decides to do so, they cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” The court continued “[B]y “conditioning the availability of benefits in that manner, Maine’s tuition assistance program – like the one in Trinity Lutheran – “effectively penalizes the free exercise” of religion.”

Read Michael Alexander’s whole op-ed here.

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This is part of an exclusive Opp Now series. Opp Now spoke with the CA School Choice Foundation president about the following education-centered topics:

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