School Choice and the Week’s Other Supreme Court Decision
June 26, 2022 The Supreme Court has been in the news, and while the Dobbs decision is undeniably the biggest, there is another with relevance to school choice nationwide and in Ohio. On Tuesday, June 21, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Carson v. Makin that Maine's town tuitioning programs violated the Constitution by excluding schools that provide religious instruction from being eligible for selection by students in the publicly funded programs. Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the majority opinion , stating broadly that when state and local governments choose to subsidize private schools, they must allow participating families to use those funds to pay for religious schools. The exclusion of religious schools from participating in Maine's state tuition assistance program was a violation of the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause rights of students who might want to choose such schools. A short and clear summary from the Cato Institute, which filed an amicus br...