Judicial Defeat of Vouchers Underscores Wisdom of Education Tax Credits Director of Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom says Credits Offer

1 December 2006

Parents seeking the freedom to determine how and where their children will be educated were dealt a blow today by the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to grant cert on a case seeking to overturn the exclusion of religious schools from Maine's "tuitioning" school voucher program.

"Under the federal constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, governments must strive to remain neutral with respect to religion, and clearly parents who choose religious schooling in this case are being denied an opportunity afforded to all other parents," observed Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom. "That is not neutrality."

Created in 1873, Maine's tuitioning program originally allowed families whose towns did not operate their own public high schools to select any public or private school - including religious schools - using funds allocated by the local taxing authority.

The program operated successfully for nearly a century, until it was ruled unconstitutional by then-state Attorney General Joseph Brennan in 1980. The prohibition has remained in place for 26 years, despite a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling finding religious school vouchers to be constitutional.

"The on-going proscription against religious schools is not only legally dubious, but socially divisive, as well," Coulson said. "Parents who wish to send their children to religious schools are taxed to pay for services they cannot themselves use - a recipe for social tension. By offering personal use tax credits (essentially targeted tax cuts) to parents who pay for their own children's education, as well as tax credits for donations to private scholarship organizations, a system of private funding could be created that would ensure universal school choice without compelling anyone to fund schooling to which they objected. Why would anyone oppose such a system, except perhaps because they wish to make it artificially difficult for families to obtain religious schooling, or because they wish to protect the lucrative monopoly enjoyed by the public school employee unions?"

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The Cato Institute is a nonpartisan public policy research foundation dedicated to broadening policy debate consistent with the traditional American principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.

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