Court Opinion

ID: 9425445
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:14:41.660948+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:55.612974
License: Public Domain

Mb. Justice White,
joined in part by The Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Rehnquist, dissenting.*
Each of the States regards the education of its young to be a critical matter — so much so that it compels school attendance and provides an educational system at public expense. Any otherwise qualified child is entitled to a free elementary and secondary school education, or at least an education that costs him very little as compared with its cost to the State.
This Court has held, however, that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitu*814tion entitles parents to send their children to nonpublic schools, secular or sectarian, if those schools are sufficiently competent to educate the child in the necessary secular subjects. Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U. S. 510 (1925). About 10%- of the Nation’s children, approximately 5.2 million students, now take this option and are not being educated in public schools at public expense. Under state law these children have a right to a free public education and it would not appear unreasonable if the State, relieved of the expense of educating a child in the public school, contributed to the expense of his education elsewhere. The parents of such children pay taxes, including school taxes. They could receive in return a free education in the public schools. They prefer to send their children, as they have the right to do, to nonpublic schools that furnish the satisfactory equivalent of a public school education but also offer subjects or other assumed advantages not available in public schools. Constitutional considerations aside, it would be understandable if a State gave such parents a call on the public treasury up to the amount it would have cost the State to educate the child in public school, or, to put it another way, up to the amount the parents save the State by not sending their children to public school.
In light of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, this would seem particularly the case where the parent desires his child to attend a school that offers not only secular subjects but religious training as well. A State should put no unnecessary obstacles in the way of religious training for the young. “When the state encourages religious instruction ... it follows the best of our traditions.” Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U. S. 306, 313-314 (1952); Walz v. Tax Comm'n, 397 U. S. 664, 676 (1970). Positing an obligation on the State to educate its children, which every State acknowledges, it should be wholly acceptable for the State to contribute *815to the secular education of children going to sectarian schools rather than to insist that if parents want to provide their children with religious as well as secular education, the State will refuse to contribute anything to their secular training.
Historically, the States of the Union have not furnished public aid for education in private schools. But in the last few years, as private education, particularly the parochial school system, has encountered financial difficulties, with many schools being closed and many more apparently headed in that direction, there has developed a variety of programs seeking to extend at least some aid to private educational institutions. Some States have provided only fringe benefits or auxiliary services. Others attempted more extensive efforts to keep the private school system alive. Some made direct arrangements with private and parochial schools for the purchase of secular educational services furnished by those schools.1 Others provided tuition grants to parents sending their children to private schools, permitted dual enrollments or shared-time arrangements or extended substantial tax benefits in some form.2
*816The dimensions of the situation are not difficult to outline.3 The 5.2 million private elementary and secondary school students in 1972 attended some 3,200 nonsectarian private schools and some 18,000 schools that are church related. Twelve thousand of the latter were Roman Catholic schools and enrolled 4.37 million pupils or 83% of the total nonpublic school membership. Sixty-*817two percent of nonpublic school students are concentrated in eight industrialized, urbanized States: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, California, Ohio, New Jersey, Michigan, and Massachusetts.4 Eighty-three percent of the nonpublic school enrollment is to be found in large metropolitan areas. Nearly one out of five students in cities that are among the Nation’s largest is enrolled in a nonpublic school.5
Nonpublic school enrollment has dropped at the rate of 6% per year for the past five years. Projected to 1980, it is estimated that seven States (the eight mentioned in the text less Massachusetts) will lose 1,416,122 nonpublic school students. Whatever the reasons, there has been, and there probably will continue to be, a movement to the public schools, with the prospect of substantial increases *818in public school budgets that are already under intense attack and with the States and cities that are primarily involved already facing severe financial crises. It is this prospect that has prompted some of these States to attempt, by a variety of devices, to save, or slow the demise of, the nonpublic school system, an educational resource that could deliver quality education at a cost to the public substantially below the per-pupil cost of the public schools.6
*819There are, then, the most profound reasons, in addition to those normally attending the question of the constitutionality of a state statute, for this Court to proceed with the utmost care in deciding these cases. It should not, absent a clear mandate in the Constitution, invalidate these New York and Pennsylvania statutes and thereby not only scuttle state efforts to hold off serious financial problems in their public schools but *820also make it more difficult, if not impossible, for parents to follow the dictates of their conscience and seek a religious as well as secular education for their children.
I am quite unreconciled to the Court’s decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602 (1971). I thought then, and I think now, that the Court’s conclusion there was not required by the First Amendment and is contrary to the long-range interests of the country. I therefore have little difficulty in accepting the New York maintenance grant, which does not and could not, by its terms, approach the actual repair and maintenance cost incurred in connection with the secular education services performed for the State in parochial schools. But, accepting Lemon and the invalidation of the New York maintenance grant, I would, with The Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Rehnquist, sustain the New York and Pennsylvania tuition grant statutes and the New York tax credit provisions.
No one contends that he can discern from the sparse language of the Establishment Clause that a State is forbidden to aid religion in any mapner whatsover or, if it does not mean that, what kind of or how much aid is permissible. And one cannot seriously believe that the history of the First Amendment furnishes unequivocal answers to many of the fundamental issues of church-state relations. In the end, the courts have fashioned answers to these questions a? best they can, the language of the Constitution and its history having left them a wide range of choice among many alternatives. But decision has been unavoidable; and, in choosing, the courts necessarily have carved out what they deemed to be the most desirable national policy governing various aspects of church-state relationships.
The course of these decisions has made it clear that the First Amendment does not bar all state aid to religion, of whatever kind or extent. States do, and *821they may, furnish churches and parochial schools with police and fire protection as well as water and sewage facilities. Also, “[a] 11 of the 50 States provide for tax exemption of places of worship, most of them doing so by constitutional guarantees/’ Walz v. Tax Comm’n, 397 U. S., at 676. This is a multimillion-dollar benefit to religious institutions, see Douglas, J., dissenting, in Walz, supra, at 714, but a benefit that this Court has held is wholly consistent with the First Amendment. Bus transportation may be furnished to students attending parochial schools as well as to those going to public schools. Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U. S. 1 (1947). So, too, the State may furnish school books to such students, Board of Education v. Allen, 392 U. S. 236 (1968), although in doing so they “relieved those churches of an enormous aggregate cost for those books.” Walz, supra, at 671-672. A State may also become the owner of the property of a church-sponsored college and lease it back to the college, all with the purpose and effect of permitting revenue bonds issued in connection with the college’s operation to be tax exempt and working a lower rate of interest and substantial savings to the sectarian institution. Hunt v. McNair, ante, p. 734.
The Court thus has not barred all aid to religion or to religious institutions. Rather, it has attempted to devise a formula that would help identify the kind and degree of aid that is permitted or forbidden by the Establishment Clause. Until 1970, the test for compliance with the Clause was whether there was “a secular legislative purpose and a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion . . .”; given a secular purpose, what is “the primary effect of the enactment?” School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, 374 U. S. 203, 222 (1963); Board of Education v. Allen, supra, at 243. In 1970, a third element surfaced — whether there is “an *822excessive government entanglement with religion.” Walz v. Tax Comm’n, supra, at 674. That element was not fatal to real property tax exemptions for church property but proved to be the crucial element in Lemon v. Kurtzman, supra, where the Court struck down the efforts by the States of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island to stave off financial disaster for their parochial school systems, the saving of which each of these States deemed important to the public interest. In accordance with one formula or the other, the laws in question furnished part of the cost incurred by private schools in furnishing secular education to substantial segments of the children in those States. Conceding a valid secular purpose and not reaching the question of primary effect, the Court concluded that the laws excessively, and therefore fatally, entangled the State with religion. What appeared to be an insoluble dilemma for the States, however, proved no insuperable barrier to the Federal Government in aiding sectarian institutions of higher learning by direct grants for specified facilities, Tilton v. Richardson, 403 U. S. 672 (1971). And Hunt v. McNair, supra, evidences the difficulty in perceiving when the State’s involvement with religion passes the peril point.
But whatever may be the weight and contours of entanglement as a separate constitutional criterion, it is of remote relevance in the cases before us with respect to the validity of tuition grants or tax credits involving or requiring no relationships whatsoever between the State and any church or any church school. So, also, the Court concedes the State’s genuine secular purpose underlying these statutes. It therefore necessarily arrives at the remaining consideration in the threefold test which is apparently accepted from prior cases: Whether the law in question has “a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion.” School District of Aldington Township v. Schempp, supra. While purporting to *823accept the standard stated in this manner, the Court strikes down the New York maintenance law, because its “effect, inevitably, is to subsidize and advance the religious mission of sectarian schools,” and for the same reason invalidates the tuition grants. See ante, at 779-780. But the test is one of “primary” effect not any effect. The Court makes no attempt at that ultimate judgment necessarily entailed by the standard heretofore fashioned in our cases. Indeed, the Court merely invokes the statement in Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U. S., at 16, that no tax can be levied “to support any religious activities . . . .” But admittedly there was no tax levied here for the purpose of supporting religious activities; and the Court appears to accept those cases, including Tilton, that inevitably involved aid of some sort or in some amount to the religious activities of parochial schools. In those cases, the judgment was that as long as the aid to the school could fairly be characterized as supporting the secular educational functions of the school, whatever support to religion resulted from this direct, Tilton v. Richardson, supra, or indirect, Everson v. Board of Education, supra; Board of Education v. Allen, supra; Walz v. Tax Comm’n, supra; Hunt v. McNair, supra, contribution to the school’s overall budget was not violative of the primary-effect test or of the Establishment Clause.
There is no doubt here that Pennsylvania and New York have sought in the challenged laws to keep their parochial schools system alive and capable of providing adequate secular education to substantial numbers of students. This purpose satisfies the Court, even though to rescue schools that would otherwise fail will inevitably enable those schools to continue whatever religious functions they perform. By the same token, it seems to me, preserving the secular functions of these schools is the overriding consequence of these laws and the resulting, *824but incidental, benefit to religion should not invalidate them.
At the very least I would not strike down these statutes on their face. The Court’s opinion emphasizes a particular kind of parochial school, one restricted to students of particular religious beliefs and conditioning attendance on religious study. Concededly, there are many parochial schools that do not impose such restrictions. Where they do not, it is even more difficult for me to understand why the primary effect of these statutes is to advance religion. I do not think it is and therefore dissent from the Court’s judgment invalidating the challenged New York and Pennsylvania statutes.
The Chief Justice and Mb. Justice Rehnquist join this opinion insofar at it relates to the New York and Pennsylvania tuition grant statutes and the New York tax credit statute.

[This opinion applies also to No. 72-459, Sloan, Treasurer of Pennsylvania, et al. v. Lemon et al., and No. 72-620, Crouter v. Lemon et al., post, p. 825.]

 This kind of program was adopted by Pennsylvania and Rhode Island and was declared invalid in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602 (1971).

 Based on State Aid to Non-Public Schools, a publication of the Department of Special Projects, National Catholic Educational Association, the following summarizes, as of February 1, 1972, the various types of aid to nonpublic schools available in the various States, exclusive of those types of support finally declared unconstitutional by this Court:
Direct Aid Programs:
Parental Grants or Reimbursement Schemes: 5 States (including New York and Pennsylvania).
Dual Enrollment (Shared Time): 9 States.
Tax Credits: 6 States (including New York).
*816Leasing of Nonpublic School Facilities by Public School Systems: 4 States.
Educational Opportunities for Rural Students: 1 State (Alaska).
Innovative Programs: 1 State (Illinois).
Exemption from State Sales Tax for Educational and Janitorial Supplies: 1 State (North Dakota).
Auxiliary Services or Benefits:
Transportation: 24 States plus District of Columbia.
Textbooks and Instructional Materials: 14 States.
Health and Welfare Services (i. e., school physician, nurse, dental
services, hygienist, psychologist, speech therapist, social worker, etc.) : 15 States.
Driver Education: 7 States (applies only to dually enrolled students in South Dakota).
Services for Educationally Disadvantaged Children, Educational Testing, and Miscellaneous (principally aid services for deaf, blind, handicapped, or retarded children; educational testing; remedial programs, etc.): 11 States.
School Lunches: 2 States (New York and Louisiana).
Released Time: 2 States (Michigan and South Dakota).
Vocational Education: 2 States (Ohio and California).
Central Purchasing of Supplies: 2 States (Oregon and Washington).
Participation of Lay Teachers in Non-Public Schools in Public School Teachers Retirement Fund Scheme: 1 State (North Dakota).
A total of 16 States now extend one or more types of direct aid. 33 States, including almost all of the foregoing 16, offer auxiliary services or benefits. At least 19 States have constitutional or statutory barriers to any kind of direct aid to parochial schools.

 The data in this and the following paragraph of the text are taken from Final Report, President’s Panel on Nonpublic Education, 1972, pp. 5-6, 15-19. See also Hearings on H. R. 16141 and other pending proposals, before the House Committee on Ways and Means, 92d Cong., 2d Sess., 118-119,127-131.

 Nonpublic enrollments in these States are as follows: New York, 789,110; Pennsylvania, 518,435; Illinois, 451,724; California, 398,981; Ohio, 339,435; New Jersey, 298,548; Michigan, 264,089; and Massachusetts, 205,011.

 Enrollments in nonpublic schools in 15 of the country’s largest cities are as follows:
City Nonpublic enrollment Percentage of total
New York 358,594 24.3
Chicago 208,174 27.3
Philadelphia 146,298 33.6
Detroit 58,228 16.5
Los Angeles 43,601 6.3
New Orleans 41,938 27.2
Cleveland 36,922 19.4
Pittsburgh 36,661 19.4
Buffalo 36,623 33.8
Boston 35,237 27.1
Baltimore 33,833 15.0
Cincinnati 32,653 27.4
Milwaukee 32,256 19.8
San Francisco 29,582 23.9
St. Paul 22,267 30.3

 The direct-aid programs for nonpublic schools available in the eight principally affected States listed in n. 4 are as follows:

New York

A. Full tuition and board for deaf and blind children educated at state-approved nonpublic schools.
B. Tuition (up to $2,000) for handicapped children educated at nonpublic schools.
C. Teacher salary payments to nonpublic schools operated by incorporated orphan asylum societies.
D. Omnibus Education Act.
1. Health and safety grants for nonpublic schools qualifying under Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965 as serving areas with high concentrations of poverty families.
2. Tuition assistance grants for parents with taxable incomes under $5,000.
3. Tax credit assistance for parents with incomes from $9,000-$25,000.
E. Mandated Services Act.
1. Reimbursement of nonpublic schools for costs of fulfilling state administrative requirements.

Pennsylvania

A. Dual enrollment.
B. Parent Reimbursement Act.
1. Reimbursement of parents for actual costs of nonpublic education of their children up to $75 for elementary school students and $150 for secondary school students. Illinois
A. Grants to children from poverty families for actual costs of nonpublic education up to amount of state aid child would receive if attending public school.
*819B. Special grants for innovative programs.

California

A. Tax credit assistance for parents with incomes ranging to $19,000. Maximum credit is $125 per child per year in nonpublic school.
Ohio
A. Dual enrollment with respect to vocational training.
B. Tax credit assistance for parents of nonpublic school students up to $90 per child per year.
New Jersey
No direct aid.

Michigan

A. Released time.
B. Dual enrollment.
Recent state constitutional amendment precludes all other forms of direct aid.

Massachusetts

Direct aid is barred by state constitutional provision.
The estimated 1970 population (in thousands) of Catholics in relation to the total population in each of these eight States was as follows:
Total Population Estimated Catholics Catholic/Total
Massachusetts 5,241 2,947 56.2%
New Jersey 7,332 2,898 39.5%
New York 18,361 6,558 35.7%
Pennsylvania 11,871 3,658 30.8%
Illinois 10,751 3,455 32.1%
Michigan 9,433 2,383 25.3%
Ohio 10,612 2,265 21.3%
California 20,250 4,053 20.0%
Source: State Aid to Non-Public Schools, see n. 2, supra.