In spite of
all the culture-war headlines these days, Americans tend to like their children’s public schools, and charters have thrived by lying
low in the broad, confusing middle ground between public and private schools. They
are public schools, in a sense, and therefore they deserve full funding by
taxpayers and the full support of a public school–loving America. But they have
sometimes gotten away with acting like private schools when it has been
convenient, as well, a chimeric quality that has allowed them to occupy a
broadly popular place in the public imagination.
Some
conservatives clearly think the time has come for greater clarity, and they’ve
drawn encouragement from a slew of rulings rendered by the Supreme Court. In
recent cases, the Roberts court has sidestepped many of the liberal norms established
in the 1960s. It has allowed more
public money to flow to religious private schools. It has allowed public school
coaches to pray at football games.
But the
Oklahoma case presents conservatives with only losing possibilities. Say, for
example, that a truculently conservative Scotus majority rules that the
Oklahoma charter school can be religious because it is, in fact, a private
school. By pushing charter schools out of the realm of public education, they
will have effectively crushed the “all things for all people” promise that
conservative charter school proponents have been building for decades. They
will be going against even the staunchest conservatives, like Betsy Devos, who
insisted throughout her tenure, with an ever-increasing crescendo of
implausibility, “Charter schools are public schools.”