Deadlocked Supreme Court rejects bid for religious charter school in Oklahoma

WASHINGTON — An evenly divided Supreme Court rejected a plan Thursday to allow Oklahoma to use government money to run the nation’s first religious charter school, which would teach a curriculum infused by Catholic doctrine.

In a tie, the court split 4-4 over the Oklahoma plan, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett recusing herself from the case, and the decision provided no reasoning.

That deadlock means that an earlier ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court will be allowed to stand. The state court blocked a proposal for the Oklahoma school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which was to be operated by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa and aimed to incorporate Catholic teachings into every aspect of its activities.

Because there was no majority in the case, the court’s decision sets no nationwide precedent on the larger question of whether the First Amendment permits states to sponsor and finance religious charter schools.

The decision did not include a tally of how each justice voted, stating only that the lower court ruling was “affirmed by an equally divided court.” Barrett did not explain her recusal, though she is close friends with an adviser to the school.

Across the country, charter schools are public schools that are run independently, sometimes by nonprofits. St. Isidore had sought to challenge their status as public schools, arguing that it would instead be a private school, in contract with the government.

The question is likely to come before the court again in the coming years, giving the justices the opportunity to weigh in again in a more definitive way. The court’s conservative supermajority has often been receptive to allowing religion a greater role in public life.

Proponents of expanded school choice and religious charter education did not concede defeat. Critics, too, agreed the court would likely revisit the issue.

Legal experts speculated that the 4-4 tie likely resulted from Chief Justice John Roberts joining Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley law school and a First Amendment scholar, said that such a move would be “significant” because the chief justice wrote the majority opinion in recent cases that appeared to lower the wall separating church and state.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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