Ohio Catholic Schools' Legacy & Future for School Choice
It is National School Choice Week, and parents nationwide are celebrating a movement that’s gained incredible momentum in recent years. However, the cause for state support of parental school choice is nearly as old as tax-funded schools themselves, including a pioneering history here in Ohio where policy and advocacy raged 170 years ago, with Catholic schools at the fore. This fascinating history is full of lessons still applicable today.
The year was 1853, and with the Diocese of Cleveland having been carved out of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati just six years prior, the Arch still held jurisdiction over most of Ohio's population and land. The Most Reverend John B. Purcell, Archbishop of Cincinnati, became a strong champion and articulate advocate for a plan that would allow Catholic schools to receive a share of state funds for education.
Catholics were still very much a minority, and anti-Catholic sentiment was strong in Ohio and throughout our young nation. As in many other locations, public schools of the 1800’s were de facto Protestant Schools. The majority spoke of resisting “Papal aggression” and the “No Irish Need Apply” signs abounded, especially in the Northeast. In the 1850s, Ohio’s own State Teacher’s Association urged daily use of the King James Bible in the public school classroom. Sentiment against Catholics was so strong that a visit by a Vatican emissary of Pope Pius IX to Cincinnati late in 1853 sparked a riot by an armed mob of more than 500 in which 60 people were arrested and one person was killed.
Earlier that same year a proposed Ohio bill would have forced parents to send their children to public school or pay a penalty, effectively dooming the growing parochial school system. Archbishop Purcell and the state’s Catholics did not take the challenge lying down. They opposed the law and countered with a proposal to end the injustice of the “double tax” of being assessed taxes for public (common) schools, then having to fund Catholic schools lest Catholic children face discrimination in the state-funded system.
In his history of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, Roger Fortin (p. 114-115) wrote,
“During this same period, Cincinnati Catholics, like some of their contemporaries in the East and Midwest, particularly in New York and Detroit, also petitioned the legislature for a share of the school fund. Consistently arguing that true education had to be based on religion, the Archdiocese wanted each religious group to have its own schools. … Arguing the parents had the right to educate their own children and should be free to send their children to any school they chose, the local church presented its own plan for state aid to parochial schools. The proposal was a primitive form of the voucher system in which payments would be made to the school on the basis of the number of pupils enrolled.”
In what may feel like a familiar move today, opponents painted Bishop Purcell as anti-American, and accused Catholic supporters of trying to destroy public education. The opposition was unashamedly against pluralism, not against the teaching of (Protestant) Christian religion in tax-funded schools, but specifically opposed to supporting similar instruction of the “sectarian” Catholic religion, or anything outside the mainstream opinion of faith and values.
In a pastoral letter that spring, Archbishop Purcell addressed both the potential new law and the plan for state aid to parochial schools. “Because we have asked for our share of the School Fund, we have been charged with a conspiracy to put down the Common (public) Schools,” he wrote. “And because we contend for the sacred rights of parents to select teachers for their children, uncontrolled by the despotic influence of the state, we are said to be enemies of freedom!” Perhaps most ironic was this accusation against freedom, a fundamental American right, when the Catholic position merely sought the sort of religious freedom the majority already enjoyed in the de facto Protestant public schools.
It would be more than a century, but Archbishop Purcell’s vision of public support aiding parochial school students began to be realized when Ohio funding things like transportation and textbooks in the 1960s, finally providing a share of the services that their taxes paid to provide to those who had chosen religious schools for their children. Another half century later, in the 1990s, for the first time “the school fund” - the state operating moneys - would go to families in the form of state scholarships (or "vouchers") in Cleveland’s Scholarship Program, which would be affirmed by the Supreme Court in 2002’s Zelman v. Simmons Harris. This would be the basis for the later Autism Scholarship, Jon Peterson Special Needs Scholarship, and the EdChoice scholarships.
Much has changed since 1853 in todays public schools, which are no longer de facto Protestant institutions. But while they have become more intentional about stopping religious expression or practice at the schoolhouse door, it is a myth to believe that public schools (or any schools for that matter) are values-neutral. And, particularly when it comes to human anthropology and the dignity of the human person, some district schools’ values are contrary to those that parents, Catholic and otherwise, desire for their children. While much has changed, this fundamental nature of the disagreement is the same 170 years later.
The idea of parental school choice - and specifically tax dollars following pupils - is not new. In fact it has been the official stance of the Catholic Church since at least the Second Vatican Council. Today, Ohio’s five school choice scholarships, new tax credit scholarships, and even its charter school, home school, and inter-district open enrollment can all trace their progress back to these early days. Ohio's strong landscape of school choice programs today stands on the shoulders of such valiant efforts. And despite Ohio’s leading programs, the need for such options remains as urgent as ever.
That there should be challenges, such as the current lawsuit over EdChoice, is unsurprising, as the status quo does not change easily. But our collective advocacy makes it possible to continue the steps in the journey, upholding the ideals of pluralism, religious liberty, and the Ohio Constitution's Article I, Section 7, which states, "...it shall be the duty of the general assembly to pass suitable laws to protect every religious denomination in the peaceable enjoyment of its own mode of public worship, and to encourage schools and the means of instruction."
Ohio is poised to take further steps in the state's biennial budget process this spring. Stay tuned and be ready to engage with members of Ohio's General Assembly to let your voice be heard in favor of parental school choice!
