Linda Jacobson, The 74

This coming school year, the Fairfield, Texas, school district, about halfway between Dallas and Houston, will roll out a new K-5 reading program that includes multiple biblical references.

But the staff, hoping to avoid debates over families’ religious beliefs, has chopped roughly 30 sections out of the curriculum, including a kindergarten lesson on the Golden Rule featuring Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and several excerpts about a Christian prayer the governor of Plymouth Colony said at the first Thanksgiving.

The district’s elementary teachers “went through the materials looking for things that may be controversial,” said Superintendent Joe Craig. They didn’t feel those parts of the curriculum “were in line with what we wanted the lesson to focus on.”

Fairfield’s process reflects the kind of selective approach that many districts have taken toward Bluebonnet Learning — the state-developed materials that prominently feature the Bible and Christianity. With feedback from 300 teachers, Fort Worth, the fifth largest district in the state, adopted the phonics portion of the curriculum, but turned down the units with religious material. Some districts ordered just a few books, likely for review purposes, while the Houston and Dallas districts opted to keep what they currently use.

Texas has spent roughly $100 million — and counting — to develop and promote its own reading curriculum. But some observers say they wouldn’t be surprised if districts aren’t rushing to pick it up, considering the State Board of Education approved it by a one-vote margin.

“They may be reluctant to bring that same controversy into their districts, especially in communities with families of diverse religious backgrounds,” said Eve Myers, a consultant with HillCo Partners, a political consulting and lobbying firm that is tracking adoption of the program. “It’s potentially a distraction from their focus on the budget, student achievement, school safety and all the other pressing issues they must address.”

Texas has over 1,200 districts and about 600 charter schools with elementary grades. Of the state’s 20 largest districts, only Conroe, north of Houston, intends to use the program this fall. A state purchasing system shows that between May and late July, 144 districts and charters, mostly mid-sized or small, ordered the materials.

State board members have asked for the total number of districts using Bluebonnet. “That’s the question we would all like to know,” said Pam Little, a board member who voted against the reading program last November.

Other districts could be using the online version of the materials, but whether students would have actual books, and spend less time on screens, was a major debate last year during the board’s consideration of the program.

State leaders and conservative advocates say the religious content reflects a classical and appropriate way to teach literacy skills along with history and culture. Others like the emphasis on cursive writing and challenging vocabulary. In an interview with The 74 last year, State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath said a phonics-based curriculum that also builds students’ background knowledge can help the state recover from declines in reading skills due to the pandemic.

But the program sparked a statewide debate over whether political leaders are forcing Christianity into public schools. Bluebonnet makes its debut in the classroom at the same time schools will be required, under a new state law, to display the 10 Commandments. Gov. Greg Abbott also signed legislation in June that allows districts to offer a daily, voluntary period of time to pray and read the Bible or other religious texts. Under a similar 2023 law, districts can hire chaplains to volunteer as counselors, but most districts aren’t participating.

“There is definitely a disconnect between the radical far right agenda … and what school boards who are accountable to local families and students are actually going to do,” said Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Interfaith Alliance, a national group that advocates for church-state separation. Texas, he said, is “taking away the rights of clergy and parents to lead religious instruction.”

‘Hard on the teacher’

In the 73,000-student Conroe school district, Dayren Carlisle, a curriculum director, said leaders picked Bluebonnet because teachers were previously working with a patchwork of materials. They often spent “arduous hours preparing for reading and writing instruction,” she told The 74 in an email. Bluebonnet provides a coherent set of lessons that meet state standards, she said.

But parent Christine Yates advocated against it.

“I don’t think religious-based instruction belongs in any type of public school setting,” said Yates, whose children will be in second and fourth grade this fall. Her family doesn’t attend church and she’s concerned that the lessons dealing with faith are just “borrowing trouble.”

Becky Sherrill, a former Conroe teacher, sympathizes with educators who will have to navigate parent’s requests to opt their children out of the lessons. It’s a right that many parents might be more likely to exercise this fall because of a June U.S. Supreme Court opinion in favor of religious families who want their children exempted from hearing stories with LGBTQ themes.

“It’s hard on the teacher. It’s already so hard at Christmas or even with birthdays,” Sherrill said, referring to Jehovah’s Witnesses she has had as students. “You can’t give some kids cupcakes because they don’t celebrate birthdays.”

She’s already homeschooling her middle school son and has pulled her daughter, a fifth grader, out of the district as well, largely because of Bluebonnet and the 10 Commandments law.

At a May board meeting, Carlisle explained to the board how teachers will field requests from parents who want to opt their children out of the lessons.

“If a parent were to complain about this… we would have to find a completely different text,” she said.

But that didn’t sit well with Tiffany Baumann Nelson, one of three conservative school board members, who call themselves Mama Bears, elected in 2022.

“There is no religion in this curriculum,” she argued. “They’re all historical references, and so in my opinion, there should be no alternative or modifications.”

Whether districts are removing biblical material or parents are opting their children out of the lessons, Little, the state board member, worries students could miss literacy skills they are supposed to learn.

“Say an East Asian religious parent has decided they don’t want their child to have [a Bible story]. Is that child going to miss skill development?” she asked.

Accommodating parents’ requests will also be a burden on district staff. “What is the cost involved in the manpower time for these districts to go through and eliminate the religious content? There was no need for the controversy that the religious content is going to start.”

‘Reviewed it and loved it’

The state board narrowly approved the new program last fall after the Texas Education Agency spent roughly $84 million to adapt an existing reading curriculum, from the company Amplify. Renamed Bluebonnet, after the state flower, the Texas version includes highlights of Jesus’ ministry and offers an evangelical view of early American history. Lessons for example, include the parable of the Prodigal Son, an art history unit based on the creation story from Genesis and scriptural references to the motto on the Liberty Bell.

The agency, which would not provide a list of all districts that have ordered the program, paid multiple companies and content experts to craft and review the lessons, including the far-right Texas Public Policy Foundation. Hillsdale College, a Christian school in Michigan, volunteered to work on units related to America’s founding, and a Christian media company, co-founded by Mike Huckabee, U.S. ambassador to Israel, contributed illustrations. But Texas officials refused to identify who wrote the biblical passages.

In response to backlash, officials added more references to Islam and Hinduism and removed some texts that were offensive to Jews, but the final version still references Christianity more than other religions.

“We reviewed it and loved it,” said Cindi Castilla, president of the Texas Eagle Forum, a conservative organization. She pushed for state board approval of the curriculum last year, saying that there is “richness in biblical literature” and that Bible stories teach children character traits and the origins of the legal system.

Since then, she examined the final version with retired educators who have experience teaching a classical curriculum and thinks it will strengthen students’ cursive and phonics skills. That’s why Gina Eubank wishes her grandchildren’s school districts — Katy, near Houston, and Belton, near Waco — had adopted the materials.

“I watched … fourth- and sixth-grade honor students write a thank you note and was shocked by what I saw — the lack of legible handwriting and the horrific spelling,” she said.

‘Promote, market and advertise’

Districts on the fence about Bluebonnet can reconsider their decision next year. To make it more enticing, lawmakers added financial incentives — up to $60 per student for districts that use state-approved materials. That was likely one reason why the 27,000-student Lubbock schools adopted it, said Clinton Gill, a former math and science teacher in the district who now works for the Texas State Teachers Association.

At the same time, he thinks district leaders assume students will stand a better chance of performing well on the state test if officials match it up to a curriculum the state developed. Adopting Bluebonnet “also helps the district not have to hire staff to write curriculum when they get it from the state for free.”

The per-student bonus isn’t the only way the state aims to ensure Bluebonnet becomes the preferred choice. In December, the month after the board approved it, the Texas Education Agency quickly made Bluebonnet available to order. Materials from other publishers weren’t available until May.

“It seems that Bluebonnet Learning had an advantage,” Little told Morath, the commissioner, during a June meeting. She said she heard complaints from publishers over the issue.

Morath called the delay a “one-time exacerbated problem” because the state had to add new language to contracts with publishers before making their materials available to districts. While the time lapse should be shorter next year, he said there would always be some gap.

In the current state budget, lawmakers authorized Morath to contract with businesses to “promote, market and advertise” Bluebonnet. A separate appropriations bill provides $243 million to districts to help with implementation costs, like coaching for teachers.

Last year’s budget included $10 million for regional education service centers to do similar work for districts adopting Bluebonnet. The centers are expected to meet targets for increasing the number of districts using the materials in their region to stay eligible for future funding.

Some leaders in the state say that top-down pressure could alter the relationship the centers have traditionally had with school systems in their regions. They help districts, especially smaller ones with fewer central office staff, stay in compliance with state regulations or work on school improvement.

The service centers have always been a “hub of knowledge,” said Martha Salazar-Zamora, superintendent of the Tomball Independent School District, north of Houston. Expecting districts to sell Bluebonnet, she said, “has been more of a strategic push.”

She doesn’t doubt that Bluebonnet will boost reading scores for some students, but Tomball is already rated a high-performing district in the state’s accountability system. Another reason why she didn’t consider the program is because a Spanish version is not yet available. Her district, where about 35% of students are English learners, has a Spanish-English dual language program.

“I love anything that helps kids,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s the right tool for every district.”

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.

This story was co-published with The Guardian.

In 2020, when Amy Coney Barrett came before the Senate for confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, one of her closest friends told a story on TV about their year together working as law clerks in the nation’s capital.

“That last day when you leave the court, you think, ‘Wow, that’s about the coolest thing that’s ever going to happen to me,’” said Nicole Stelle Garnett. She assisted Justice Clarence Thomas during the 1998 term, the same year Barrett worked under Justice Antonin Scalia. “Now, to see my friend testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, to walk back up the steps 21 years later is really, really something.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Notre Dame University Professor Nicole Stelle Garnett met as Supreme Court law clerks in the late 1990s. (Nicole Stelle Garnett)

Fast forward another five years. Garnett, now a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, is about to have her own Supreme Court moment.

On April 30, the court will consider a legal question that has defined her career: Can explicitly religious organizations operate charter schools? At the center of the dispute is St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, an online school in Oklahoma that planned to serve about 200 students this year before the state supreme court ruled the decision to approve it violated the constitutional provision separating church and state.

“This could be an earthquake for American public education,” said Samuel Abrams, who directs the International Partnership for the Study of Educational Privatization at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As the country experiences a rise in Christian nationalism, a favorable ruling could invite the encroachment of religion not only into education but other areas of civic life that have traditionally been non-sectarian. “If the Supreme Court rules in favor of overturning that decision, the church-stage cleavage will disappear. That’s a dramatic development for the First Amendment.”

In a sign of the case’s gravity, the Trump administration filed a brief in support of St. Isidore last week, arguing that “a state may not put schools, parents or students to the choice of forgoing religious exercise or forgoing government funds.”

But Barrett, who handed President Donald Trump a conservative 6-3 supermajority when she was confirmed to the court, won’t be on the bench to hear it. She recused herself, leaving no explanation for sitting out what could be the most significant legal decision to affect schools in decades.

Observers believe the reason is her friendship with Garnett, who was an early legal adviser to the school. While she’s not officially on the case and hasn’t joined any legal briefs in support of it, Nicole and her husband Richard Garnett, also a Notre Dame law professor, are both faculty fellows with the university’s Religious Liberty Clinic, which represents St. Isidore.

In a deep irony, the longtime friendship between the two women, forged in Catholic faith and a conservative approach to jurisprudence, now threatens to tip the scales away from a cause Garnett has spent her career defending,

The recusal increases the chances that the vote could end in a 4-4 tie, which would leave the Oklahoma court’s decision intact. That outcome would prohibit St. Isidore from receiving public funds and likely send proponents of religious charters looking for a new test case.

Justices typically do not offer reasons for recusing themselves. A spokesperson for the Supreme Court said Barrett had no comment on the matter.

“I feel bad for Nicole,” said Josh Blackman, an associate professor at the South Texas College of Law in Houston. “This is her life’s work, and it might go to a 4-4 decision.”

Blackman, a proponent of religious charter schools, has known the Garnetts for years. “Amy knows what Nicole did for this case,” he said. “The case is so significant because it’s an application of both [the Garnetts’] Catholic faith and their views on constitutional law.”

Nicole Stelle Garnett and Justice Amy Coney Barrett taught together at the University of Notre Dame for nearly 17 years. (Don and Melinda Crawford/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

‘A heady experience’

The friendship between Garnett and Barrett developed long before the legal clash over St. Isidore. When Trump nominated Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Garnett relayed how the two first met at a coffee shop the spring before they became high court clerks in the late 1990s.

“I walked away thinking I had just met a remarkable woman,” she wrote in a commentary for USA Today.

There weren’t too many high-profile cases that year, Garnett said. But one stands out — a complaint that a Chicago ordinance against gang loitering violated members’ due process rights. The court ruled against the city, but Barrett and Garnett performed research for dissenters Scalia and Thomas. Thomas said the local law allowed police officers to do their jobs and Scalia called it a “small price to pay” to keep the streets safe.

“It’s a heady experience and really hard work,” Garnett told The 74. “But we all liked each other. We socialized together.”

When Trump nominated Barrett in 2017 to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, all 34 clerks from the Supreme Court class of ‘99 — Democrats, Republicans and independents — wrote a letter of support to the Senate judiciary committee.

But none knew Barrett like Garnett. Their personal and professional lives have been intertwined for more than two decades.

When Garnett was pregnant with her first child during their year as clerks, Barrett and the other young attorneys threw her a baby shower in the court’s dining room for justices’ spouses. Barrett is godmother to the Garnetts’ third child. After their clerkship, Richard Garnett helped recruit Barrett to the boutique Washington law firm where he worked. (He later recruited Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the court’s three liberals, to the same firm.)

Before Barrett cast her vote for the majority in the 2022 decision that struck down Roe v. Wade, the New Yorker published a profile that described the newest justice as a “product of a Christian legal movement” shifting the court further to the right. The article irked Garnett’s daughter, Maggie, who said it dismissed “a mentor and maternal figure in my life” as a “cold, impenetrable” mouthpiece for conservatives. In a robust defense, she wrote that the article portrayed Barrett as “an almost robotic product of her male mentors … rather than as an accomplished and talented jurist in her own right.”

At Notre Dame, Garnett and Barrett overlapped as faculty members for roughly 17 years. Aside from her focus on religious liberty and education, Garnett also teaches property law. Barrett’s courses focused on constitutional law and the federal courts.

“She became a lifelong friend,” Garnett said. “She lived around the corner from us and we raised our kids together.”

And when Trump introduced the mother of seven to the nation, Garnett was seated in the Rose Garden along with senators, White House officials and other dignitaries.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett was President Donald Trump’s third Supreme Court nominee in four years. Nicole Garnett, her friend and former University of Notre Dame colleague, was in the Rose Garden Sept. 26, 2020 when Trump announced Barrett as his choice to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Given their intersecting interests, it’s very likely that school vouchers came up in conversation. Until 2017, Barrett served as a trustee at Trinity School at Greenlawn, a classical Christian academy in South Bend, Indiana, that participates in the state’s private school choice program.

Garnett, meanwhile, was honing legal arguments in favor of expanding such programs. Before joining the faculty at Notre Dame, she worked as a staff attorney for the Institute for Justice, a right-leaning law firm that has led efforts to open school choice programs to religious schools. In one case, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld the expansion of Milwaukee’s voucher program to include faith-based schools.

While at the institute, Garnett also worked on Bagley v. Raymond, which challenged Maine’s exclusion of religious schools from a private school choice program. The state won that case, but lost when a subsequent case about the program, Carson v. Makin, came before the Supreme Court. In Carson, Barrett joined the other five conservative justices in ruling that it was unconstitutional to keep those schools out.

Garnett, who didn’t work on Carson, said she cried when the family at its center won.

But even with this victory, Garnett viewed aspects of school choice as unfriendly to religious freedom. She found it troubling that to keep their doors open, many Catholic schools in Indiana were converting to charters, which required them to remove all evidence of their faith.

Nicole Stelle Garnett, a Notre Dame University law professor, wrote in 2012 that charters did not provide enough choice and that allowing religious schools to become charters would expand options for families. (Notre Dame Law School)

“Religion has been stripped from the schools’ curricula and religious iconography from their walls,” she wrote in a 2012 paper. “There is little doubt that the declining enrollments in Catholic schools are at least partially attributable to the rise of charter schools.”

Her convictions on the role of religion in public life are both personal and professional. She sent her children to Catholic schools in South Bend and views their mission to serve low-income children as vital to urban communities. She captured her years of scholarship on religious liberty in a line she wrote after Carson: “The Constitution demands government neutrality toward religious believers and institutions. Full stop.”

That view is belied by state laws that prohibit public funds from directly supporting religious schools and that define charters as public schools open to all students. Some critics predict that religious groups running charters would not have to uphold the civil rights protections of LGBTQ students, for example.

Garnett warned that attempts to create religious charters would face litigation for years. But in Oklahoma, Republicans and Catholic church leaders were ready for a fight.

At a time when schools remained shuttered due to COVID, Catholic school leaders in Oklahoma City and Tulsa wanted to expand virtual options and “reach more kids in a big rural state,” she said. A widely-circulated 2020 paper she wrote for the right-wing Manhattan Institute offered a legal path to get there.

“I think that we found each other,” she told The 74. “I didn’t go looking for a client here. It’s very organic how the whole thing unfolded.”

‘Hot ticket’

If other recent school choice cases are any indication, there’s still a good chance the court will overturn the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s opinion. Such a precedent-setting development would have a huge impact on the nation’s educational landscape, said Michael Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

The court could say that “a charter school authorizer can’t turn down an otherwise qualified applicant just because it is religious, or proposes a religious school,” he said. “That would apply immediately to all states with charter laws on the books.”

Garnett dismissed the idea that a victory for St. Isidore will open the floodgates to thousands of religious schools becoming charters. Applicants would still have to meet state criteria for approval, she said.

The ruling “may shed light on other state’s arrangements, but it definitely will not require all states to allow religious charter schools,” she said. “That’s not on the table — and it’s not how the court works.”

But others are not so certain.

“The implications for education and society could be profound,” said Preston Green, a University of Connecticut education professor. “It would mean that the government cannot exclude religious groups from any public benefits program.”

With oral arguments approaching, Notre Dame law students who have worked with Garnett over the past two years have already asked if she can get them a seat in the courtroom for such “a hot ticket,” she said.

She won’t talk about why her friend recused herself from the case, but acknowledged the stakes.

“My hope is that it won’t go to a 4-4,” Garnett said “My hope is that they wouldn’t have granted [a hearing] if they thought it might. But I know you don’t make assumptions about anything.”

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.

In his frenetic first week back at the White House, President Donald Trump allowed immigration raids at schools, sidelined federal employees focused on diversity and ended civil rights investigations into book bans.

But the biggest education story of the week — one that could change public schools forever — broke late Friday afternoon at a building two miles away.

The U.S. Supreme Court, backed by the conservative supermajority Trump secured in his first term, agreed to hear an Oklahoma case over whether the law permits public dollars to flow to an explicitly religious charter school. A decision in favor of the first-of-its kind Catholic school could further entangle the government and religion, dramatically altering the historic balance between church and state.

“The stakes really couldn’t be higher,” said Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina. While there are Catholic schools that have converted into secular charters, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School’s “ultimate goal,” according to its website, is “eternal salvation.”

“The issue,” Black said, “is whether a religious entity can operate a charter school that teaches religion as truth.”

Trump supports Christianity in the classroom and has vowed to bring prayer back to public schools. But he’s just the most recognizable face of a larger movement that has been building toward this moment — one that includes governors and state lawmakers, right-leaning think tanks and wealthy donors. Those donors have not only financed campaigns to seat conservative justices, but also helped fund the years of legal work that ultimately landed the school’s application before the high court.

Some evangelicals believe the courts have long misapplied Thomas Jefferson’s famous words about “a wall of separation between church and state.” Dismissed by most constitutional experts, this view holds that Jefferson’s aim was to keep the federal government from interfering with religious freedom — not to protect the government from the church.

The debate over the school will culminate in oral arguments before the Supreme Court in late April.

Governors in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, who advocate for weaving the Bible into classroom instruction, have long awaited such a case. “Denying St. Isidore a charter solely because they’re religious is flat-out unconstitutional,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt posted on X. “This will be one of the most significant decisions of our lifetime.”

But his state’s GOP attorney general disagrees. Gentner Drummond’s office will argue that both state and federal laws clearly require charter schools to be non-sectarian. That view was summed up by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who said reversing the Oklahoma court’s decision “would drive a dagger into the very idea of public education and strike at the heart of our nation’s democratic foundations.”

One justice who won’t be involved in the decision is Trump’s most recent Supreme Court appointee. Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from deliberating over whether to hear the case. While the court offered no explanation, Barrett is a longtime friend of Nicole Garnett, the Notre Dame University law professor who advised the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa on the charter application. Garnett, who had no comment on Barrett’s recusal, also sits on the board of the Federalist Society, a conservative and libertarian legal organization that has influenced Trump and previous Republican presidents on judicial appointments.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from deciding whether to hear the case. She is a longtime friend of a Notre Dame law professor who advised the Catholic church on the charter application. (Sarah Silbiger-Pool/Getty Images)

But attorneys for the school may not need Barrett’s vote. Four of the other conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch — have all voiced support for greater religious freedom. Over a decade ago, Thomas wrote an opinion suggesting states could establish their own Christian denominations. More recently, in 2022, Gorsuch referred to the “so-called” separation of church and state in a case over whether Boston should fly a Christian flag outside City Hall.

While Chief Justice John Roberts takes a more cautious approach to court precedents, he has sided with the conservative majority in all of its most recent church-state cases. Two of them, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue and Carson v. Makin, focused on choice programs at religious schools.

Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents the state’s charter school board, draws on those cases to conclude that charter schools are inherently private organizations — not “state actors.” By keeping St. Isadore closed, the Alliance argues, Oklahoma is discriminating against religion and denying families more options.

“Oklahoma parents and children are better off with more educational choices, not fewer,” Jim Campbell, the Alliance’s chief legal counsel, said in a statement.

In a brief in support of the charter school, eight GOP-led states said that prohibiting the funding of religious charter schools would compromise their ability to award grants or contracts to other sectarian organizations, like orphanages and groups providing scholarships.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools dismissed that fear and said a charter is not “merely a grant program.”

“The charter school is a state-created public school under Oklahoma law, and its actions are state actions,” the organization wrote in its brief.

Black agreed, saying that the school’s argument “has no grounding in facts or law.”

The court’s decision to take the case left the law professor with an “enormous pit” in his stomach. Black worries the justices don’t fully understand the complexities of public education funding, particularly the differences between charters, vouchers and education savings accounts.

“That leads to either honest errors, misunderstandings or the ability of other people to lead you astray,” he said.

Experts say it’s hard to ignore the strides evangelical Republicans have made at elevating the importance of Christianity in the classroom.

Red states aren’t just passing voucher programs that allow parents to pay tuition at faith-based schools; they’re also incorporating Bible lessons into the curriculum. If the court rules in favor of the school, Preston Green, a University of Connecticut education and law professor, predicts religious organizations would suddenly “clamour” to open faith-based charters.

“We’re on the verge of a new system where religious organizations are going to be among the players” running schools, he said. “How do states deal with that reality?”

In addition to allowing public education funds to support a specific faith, a decision in favor of religious charters could also have a devastating financial impact on traditional districts fighting to prevent enrollment loss, Black said. Oklahoma already offers a tax credit scholarship program for school choice, but it doesn’t always cover the full tuition at a private school. Families who want their child to have a Christian education might be more likely to flock to a religious charter school where the cost is fully covered, he explained.

Robert Franklin, a former member of the state’s charter board, is already thinking about those ramifications. Like public school advocates in other red states, he’s concerned that expanding private school choice will hit rural schools the hardest and leave less funding for traditional schools.

“Oklahoma is a deeply red state,” he said. “I don’t think we have an appetite for raising taxes around here to support schools.”

Franklin has a unique vantage point on the constitutional dispute that began over two years ago. He voted against St. Isidore’s contract in 2023 and says he felt “vindicated” last year when the state’s high court struck it down. But he’s less confident the U.S. Supreme Court will rule the same way.

“It’s a tumultuous moment,” he said. “There are a lot of forces pulling the other direction.”