SB 70 also raises serious Constitutional problems, since it would provide government financial assistance for religious training. Because the term is so loosely drawn, SB 70 favors religious organizations large enough and powerful enough to assemble enough students to operate a viable school. One of the charters approved in Texas under their law is a catholic school that was in financial trouble and needed the public dollars to stay afloat. It is now a charter school operating in a building connected to the catholic church. When I inquired of the Texas DOE as to how they knew it was now a non-sectarian public school, the response was that there was not a cross to be found in the building.
Nonpublic schools tend to be denominationally homogenous.
A school's pervasively religious flavor, faculty, and program will act to limit applications automatically. Further, nonpublic schools tend to use religious criteria in faculty hiring, taxing all citizens to support religious segregation and discrimination. SB 70 would shift increasing numbers of teachers into positions where they would be tested on religious and ideological orthodoxy and expose children more and more to indoctrination rather than open education. This mingling of politics and religion creates political division along religious lines, one of the principal evils against which the First Amendment was intended to protect. SB 70 extends the length of the charter to seven years as opposed to the five under current law.