Washington Post looks at 'school choice' bills, and (#surprise) omits 'equal access' info

For a minute or two, I thought that the Washington Post was going to publish a fair-minded news feature about the complex issues involved in “school choice” legislation.

Alas, it soon became clear that this was another business-as-usual piece that was, for the most part, committed to featuring the voices of activists on one side of the story. The story also avoided a key church-state legal term that is shaping recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings on this subject.

Thus, it’s time — once again — for readers to grab some highlighter pens. Hold that thought.

You can sense what’s going on in the headline: “More states are paying to send children to private and religious schools.”

Ah, but private schools are private schools, too. Some are secular, some are openly religious. Some of the religious schools are on the left, in terms of doctrine, and some are on the right. But they are all “private” schools. Are all private schools created equal? Did the Post team “get” this angle of the story and include some diversity in the sourcing?

The bottom line: What we have here is another one of those “highlighter pen” stories that GetReligion digs into every now and then. What readers need to do is print a copy of the story and then grab three pens with different colors — maybe red, blue and some variation on purple. The goal is to mark quotes representing voices on the cultural left, right and, maybe, even in the middle.

But first, here is how the story opens:

For years, school-choice advocates toted up small victories in their drive to give parents taxpayer money to pay for private school. Now, Republican-led states across the country are leaving the limitations of the past behind them as they consider sweeping new voucher laws that would let every family use public funds to pay for private school.

Another SCOTUS win for 'equal access,' whether most journalists realized this or not

For a decade or more, U.S. Supreme Court justices have been arguing about the separation of church and state. What we keep seeing is a clash between two different forms of “liberalism,” with that term defined into terms of political science instead of partisan politics.

Some justices defend a concept of church-state separation that leans toward the secularism of French Revolution liberalism. The goal is for zero tax dollars to end up in the checkbooks of citizens who teach or practice traditional forms of religious doctrine (while it’s acceptable to support believers whose approach to controversial issues — think sin and salvation — mirror those of modernity).

Then there are justices who back “equal access” concepts articulated by a broad, left-right coalition that existed in the Bill Clinton era. The big idea: Religious beliefs are not a uniquely dangerous form of speech and action and, thus, should be treated in a manner similar to secular beliefs and actions. If states choose to use tax dollars to support secular beliefs and practices, they should do the same for religious beliefs and practices.

At some point, it would be constructive of journalists spotted these “equal access” concepts and traced them to back to their roots in the Clinton era (and earlier). But maybe I am being overly optimistic.

You can see these tensions, kind of, in the Associated Press coverage of the new SCOTUS decision that addressed a Maine law that provided tax funds for parents who chose secular private schools, but not those who chose religious schools. The headline of the main report stated, “Supreme Court: Religious schools must get Maine tuition aid.”

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the majority in this 6-3 ruling. In this story, “liberal” is used to describe the majority.

“Maine’s ‘nonsectarian’ requirement for its otherwise generally available tuition assistance payments violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Regardless of how the benefit and restriction are described, the program operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise,” Roberts wrote.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented. “This Court continues to dismantle the wall of separation between church and state that the Framers fought to build,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote.