Zelman v. Simmons-Harris

Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002), was a 5–4 decision of the United States Supreme Court that upheld an Ohio program that used school vouchers . The Court decided that the program did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment , as long as parents using the program were allowed to choose among a range of secular and religious schools.

The decision was said to be "the most important ruling on religion and the schools in the 40 years since the court declared organized prayer in the public schools to be unconstitutional" by Linda Greenhouse of the _New York Times _. Then-president George W. Bush said the case was "just as historic" as _Brown v. Board of Education _. The _Wall Street Journal _ editorial page said, "The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday struck the great blow for equal public education since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. In the process, it also stripped away the last Constitutional and moral fig leaf from those who want to keep minority kids trapped in failing public schools."

Moderate Justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor and conservative Justices William Rehnquist , Antonin Scalia , and Clarence Thomas combined to form the majority.

Contents

• 1 Background

• 2 First Amendment

• 3 Majority opinion

• 4 Concurring opinions

  • 4.1 O'Connor

  • 4.2 Thomas

• 5 Dissenting opinions

  • 5.1 Stevens

  • 5.2 Souter

• 6 Private choice test

• 7 Blaine Amendments

• 8 See also

• 9 References

• 10 External links

Background

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The public schools in many of the poorer parts of Cleveland were deemed failures, and the legislature enacted the Pilot Project Scholarship Program in an effort to address the problem. Ohio had been running the program, which allowed parents of qualified students in the Cleveland School District , from the 1996–97 school year, to use public money to pay for tuition at private schools in the program, which included religious schools.

Of the 56 private schools that participated in the program, 46 were sectarian. The program aimed to improve the low educational performance of the students in the school district.

The program provided tuition vouchers for up to $2,250 a year to some parents of students in the school district to attend participating public or private schools in the city and neighboring suburbs. The program also allocated tutorial aid for students who remained in public schools. At the time the case was heard, approximately 4,000 of Cleveland's 57,000 elementary-age public school pupils took part in the program.

The vouchers were distributed to parents according to their financial needs. The parents chose where to enroll their children. Since the number of students applying to the program exceeded the number of vouchers available, recipients were chosen by lottery from among the eligible families. In the 1999–2000 school year, 82% of the participating private schools had a religious affiliation. None of the adjacent suburban public schools joined the program. 96% of the students receiving vouchers chose to enroll in religiously affiliated schools and 60% were from low-income families, at or below the poverty line .

Participating schools were not permitted to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, or ethnic background. They were also not allowed to "advocate or foster unlawful behavior or teach hatred of any person or group on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion."

The lawsuit was initiated when a group of Ohio taxpayers filed an action against Susan Zelman, the superintendent of public education in Ohio, arguing that the program violated the Establishment Clause . Simmons-Harris, along with other residents of the Cleveland area, argued that the government "could not pay tuition for students to attend religious school". Represented by the Institute for Justice , a group of parents of students who participated in the program intervened in the lawsuit to defend the program.

The local federal district court, in addition to the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit , ruled in favor of Simmons-Harris. Zelman and the intervening parents continued the case and appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States , which sustained the voucher program.

First Amendment

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The First Amendment protects the rights to freedom of religion and to freedom of expression from government interference. The First Amendment comes into play because the taxpayers of Ohio said that the program was a violation of the Establishment Clause, one of the two clauses of the First Amendment . The Establishment Clause guarantees freedom of religion and strictly prohibits the government from passing any legislation to establish an official religion or preferring one religion over another; it thus enforces the "separation of church and state."

The program, which operated on the private choice of parents, provided no incentive for parents to choose religious private, secular private, or public schools. Nevertheless, the taxpayers did not want their money to pay for the children who wanted religious schooling.

Majority opinion

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Chief Justice Rehnquist delivered the majority opinion , which held that the school voucher program was not in violation of the Establishment Clause. The ruling recognized that the voucher program did not encourage families to choose religious schools, but was instead religiously neutral, and that it operated on the private choice of parents.

Rehnquist's decision determined that the program in question aimed at secular assistance for the poor, low-performing children, who would otherwise have no options in a failing school district. He wrote in the decision that the program had been "enacted for the valid secular purpose of providing educational assistance to poor children in a demonstrably failing public school system."

In determining whether the school voucher program encouraged or inhibited religion directly, the court noted that whether the aid went to parents or to private schools was a relevant factor in how it ruled. According to the precedent of the time, including _Mueller v. Allen _ (1983), aid can constitutionally be given to parents but not to schools. The Court found that because the aid went to parents, who then determined how to spend it, the program did not violate the Establishment Clause .

Addressing the fact that at the time the lawsuit was filed, approximately 96% of scholarship recipients used the voucher to attend a

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