Supreme Court Declines Another School-Voucher Case

Refusing to end confusion about the constitutionality of school vouchers, the Supreme Court on Monday turned aside a plea by parochial school students and parents in Vermont who want equal access to tuition aid.

Monday’s order was the latest in a series of high-court refusals to enter the fractious debate over how far government can go in giving students alternatives to the nation’s troubled public schools.

“Across the nation, from Arizona to Florida, states are acting boldly in the best experimental tradition . . . to enact a variety of charter-school, tax-credit, school-choice, and other educational-reform programs,” asserted the Vermont parents who were denied funds to send their children to a Catholic high school.

The U.S. Supreme Court has issued orders since last fall allowing those lower court rulings to stand.

Its actions in all of the cases have been without comment and have broken no new ground.

In Monday’s Vermont dispute, the justices spurned a challenge to a state court decision that equated religious instruction with religious worship and said the state’s tuition policy would violate the Constitution’s guarantee of free exercise only if it somehow impeded students’ observance of their religion.

The Vermont Department of Education told the justices that none of the parents can claim that Catholic church teaching forced them to send their children to a parochial high school.

The Vermont policy is intended to help high school students in rural areas whose local school districts don’t have public high schools.