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The late Dr. Jerry Falwell once wrote, “I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!”1 His angst, and that of many of his supporters in other right-wing groups and in political circles, can be summarized as deciding that if you can't control what is taught in publicly funded schools, perhaps it would be best to simply get rid of them.

On my speaking tours, I often discuss the destructive ways alternatives to public school funding would operate. School vouchers and other forms of aid to private (and primarily religious) schools were a hot topic when I spoke to a Unitarian Fellowship in South Carolina in February 2013. (South Carolina's proposals were defeated—but this discussion merely illustrates how these proposals would operate.)

The goal of many in the Catholic hierarchy and their friends in the Protestant Religious Right is an affirmative demand for funds for their missions and ministries, including their parochial schools. In South Carolina, there has been a great deal of money given from out of the state by individuals and foundations that are trying to gin up enthusiasm for school vouchers or tuition tax credits (most accurately characterized as “back door vouchers”), which would indisputably primarily assist religious schools. Legislation to give tax credits for private school tuition and the cost of “home schooling” has also been introduced. The efforts in South Carolina would allow tax deductions for tuition spent at private schools and for certain costs of home schooling. In addition, it would create a program where corporations could give financial assistance to private school students instead of paying as much in taxes. The corporations would actually give the money to specific charities, which would then dole out the funds. All this is done in the name of “educational choice,” a corruption of language.

The evidence on the lack of success of these programs is also mounting. The latest studies in Milwaukee (home of the oldest voucher program), Cleveland (the subject of the Supreme Court case that allowed them), and the voucher program forced on the residents of the District of Columbia all show that students in voucher schools do no better on academic tests than students in public school, and in DC students don't even express any greater sense of safety or satisfaction in those private schools. We know a 5 member majority of the Supreme Court of the United States got it wrong when it ruled that vouchers were not a way to promote religion, but it also helps to look at this data and see they were equally wrong about the presumed value of the vouchers.

These days, a real hero of the antivoucher movement is the woman who is often considered the “godmother” of the movement: Dianne Ravitch, an academic researcher in New York. About a year ago, she wrote a book in which she described the failures of vouchers (and of their kissing cousins, tuition tax credits), conceding that much of her life's work was erroneous. When asked by the New York Times why she altered her position, she quoted the great economist John Maynard Keynes: “when the facts change, I change my mind.” Hers is an act of rare and substantial courage. And yes, for the first time in history a national public opinion poll shows that 63 percent of Americans now oppose school vouchers.2

How could it be otherwise? In that Milwaukee program, 90 percent of the students in the voucher program who go to private schools are not proficient in the state test in reading and math; the public schools there (viewed as some of the worst in the nation) are doing better.

But what is so fraudulent about calling it “educational choice” is that any choice for students and parents is almost always hypothetical and only the institutions getting the “vouchers” and “scholarships” are exercising any real choice.

In Washington, DC, many of the roughly fifty schools that receive voucher aid for students are not even accredited and others are in so-called “unconventional” spaces, like a K–12 school run by one family out of a storefront. The school chose to accept the money; in some cities these schools actually hire young people to pass out DVDs about how great a particular school is, choosing to spend money on misleading promotional materials rather than certified instructors. Some home schooling parents actually “teach” their children primarily through the showing of Christian DVDs—perhaps funding under the proposed bill in South Carolina could allow them to upgrade to 4K, super-high-definition television with THX-certified Dolby 7.1 Surround Sound.

These schools get another kind of “choice”: which students to accept and, later, those to retain. In our public schools, we deal with all kinds of children, those with special needs and even ones with disciplinary problems. Private schools have the luxury of dumping “problem kids” right back into the public schools if they don't feel like dealing with them: just a simple “refund” of unused voucher aid and that child is out. Even where there is a system for requiring nondiscriminatory admissions based on race, gender, religion, there is one other big choice problem for parents. In DC, the voucher can be worth up to $6,000, but the private schools presidents send their children to, like Sidwell Friends, cost $34,000. So choice, without that extra $28,000, is not much choice at all.

Finally, the school often “chooses” whether to follow the dictates of civil rights statutes. For example, Title IX of the federal civil rights act has allowed thousands of female high school students to be engaged in athletics on equal par with men, opening all kinds of new doors of opportunity for women in seeking scholarships for higher education and economic advancement. Many private schools do not follow this mandate because legislation exempts them from such a requirement.

Many of the facts, however, seemed ignored when the Supreme Court had examined the constitutionality of vouchers in 2002.

VOUCHER VENDETTA: A HEATED DEBATE AT THE HIGH COURT3

Wednesday, February 20, 2002, was the day when the constitutionality of the Cleveland voucher program—now with 99 percent of voucher recipients in private religious schools—was argued before the United States Supreme Court.

A piece of paper worth $2,250 can sure cause a ruckus. It is because that piece of paper has something to do with religion that the feelings are so strong. Claims of “ultimate truth” often have that effect. When one group thinks it has it and wants everybody else to pay for it, you have a recipe for conflict.

In Cleveland, the largest amount of voucher funding goes to the Roman Catholic school system. Like most other inner-city parishes, Cleveland was having trouble attracting enough Catholics to send their children to the schools there. Many parents moved to the suburbs and found religious or public schools there. Most of the inner-city schools now have very high minority enrollments, and most of those students are not Catholic. This voucher program was designed as a government bailout for those schools.

Here's the problem: Our constitutional system never envisioned having taxpayers pay to keep religious institutions from failing. If the sermons are bad at the local Baptist church and people start going elsewhere, Baptists wouldn't expect the local governing body to give them some tax funds to make up the shortfall in the collection plate. Why, then, should religious schools get a comparable helping hand from government?

Voucher advocates would say my analogy is unfair. Besides being promoters of the faith, these religious schools are good schools, they argue. It turns out, however, that they aren't better than the public schools in terms of academic performance for children with academic troubles. Even if they were, the right question is how to make sure the public schools do the best job possible. You can't blame the victim for looking pale when you are bleeding him yourself.

Cleveland public schools do not have funds to implement tested and successful programs for “at risk” students because the state has blessed the siphoning off of $11 million from the public school budget. Ohio has also resolutely failed to comply with court orders to fund suburban and inner-city schools more comparably and has supported many other financial benefits for private schools throughout the state. Instead of making hard choices, the state chose a gimmick—vouchers.

I had a chance to be reviled by a number of the parents whose kids are in the Cleveland voucher program at a debate at the libertarian Cato Institute the afternoon before the argument. One mother complained that her daughter had been threatened at a public school. She was delighted to get a voucher to put her daughter in a private school.

Of course, no parent should tolerate such activity at any school, but possibly protecting one child and leaving your neighbor's kids vulnerable can't be the final answer either. At the end of the day, of course, you have to be able to say you did everything possible for your family. I said to that mother, though, I think you have to say you did something for other peoples’ families too.

In education, that means demanding that public schools work and fighting any group, individual, or political force that says otherwise. In some places, that might even mean spending more to make the system work. If that is what it takes, we're past due paying the bill.

After a somewhat lackluster oral argument, I had the distinct feeling that my side was going to lose—and that is, in fact, what happened on June 27, 2002. I discussed the consequences of this decision at a rally in Florida, as that state took up legislation to direct state funds to even more private schools.

There is one major similarity between decisions of the United States Supreme Court and baseball games: the side with one more vote or one more run wins.4 Late in June, the Supreme Court let the “other side” win. The good news is that one game is not the whole season, and it certainly isn't next season. Frankly, taxpayer-funded vouchers for private religious academies are as miserable and as useless and as unconscionable and as dangerous to kids today as they were an hour before the Supreme Court issued its ruling!

But you all knew that. Here's some other news: they are still just as unconstitutional as well, if by unconstitutional we mean inconsistent with the premise of our nation that religious institutions and the ministries they establish (like schools) must make it on their own, without subsidy from government taxpayers.

I live in a simple world; I think it is the real one. Since this is a rally, I have made up some signs. This gentleman has a sign with the word STATE TREASURY on it. I go to him and I can get a sign that reads VOUCHER. I have some of the people in the front row with other signs that read: GROCERY STORE; ELITE PRIVATE SCHOOL; RELIGIOUS SCHOOL. I'm going to go into the audience. Can I cash in my voucher to buy groceries? Of course not. These are “education” vouchers. Can I cash it in at the ELITE private school? Yes, but only if I have another $6,000 in cash to pay the growing tuition. I can only use it at this RELIGIOUS SCHOOL. In the back is a guy with one other paper: FLY BY NIGHT PRIVATE SCHOOL. I can also use my voucher there, but he's not too sure that the school will get enough kids to stay open past Thanksgiving. If not, he says he'll be happy to dump them back into the public school system.

Now, tell me this. How is it not a direct payment to the treasury of this religious school for me to take my voucher there and have them cash it in for up to $4,000 of taxpayer funds? Why is this any different from the treasury just handing them the money directly? They get it and can use it for any purpose, including buying Bibles, crucifixes, prayer rugs, creationist biology textbooks, sex ed courses that never mention condoms, hymnals, religion teachers, chapel services, and anything and everything religious.

Those five members of the Supreme Court found a nonsensical distinction; that doesn't mean that Florida state legislators or state supreme court judges are required to play the semantic games that Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia did to reach the result they desired. Indeed, the first court that looked at vouchers after the Supreme Court decision was a Florida court—and it ruled that the state constitution barred what the US Supreme Court had permitted. More on that later.

Many of you may have seen Clint Bolick, the “godfather” of modern vouchers, on CNN with me after the decision was announced saying, “This is the most important educational decision since Brown v. Board of Education”5 He's right, if you're trying to reverse Brown, and cause even more segregation than we have now.

Of course, he meant it would “open opportunities.” The problem with his approach is that vouchers are not now, have never been, and will never become, a tool for civil rights protections. The whole voucher movement started right after Brown precisely as a way to continue to fund segregationist schools in the south. That's right, while Bolick and other voucher advocates claim that their top priority is the future of inner-city children, the fact remains that vouchers were used to prop up segregationist academies forty years ago when white families didn't want their kids going to school with African America kids. At that time, courts saw through the charade and struck vouchers down. Regrettably, five Supreme Court justices weren't as wise on June 27th.

I don't mind telling you that I find the comparison between the voucher ruling and Brown v. Board of Education offensive and disingenuous. Voucher proponents use bumper-sticker slogans and poll-tested rhetoric to say they care deeply about the education of children in poverty. Call me a cynic, but I find their claims incredibly hard to believe. It is wrong, they argue, for poor families to be denied the same educational opportunities as wealthy children. Oh really? What about poor children getting the same access to healthcare as wealthy children? Or perhaps the same access to quality housing? Or quality nutrition? Or quality transportation? What about giving poor families vouchers to get the same political influence as wealthy families? For some reason, despite all their talk about desperately caring for families in need, their silence on these issues is deafening.

Now, even people who worked to get voucher schemes passed in their communities are beginning to have second thoughts.

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, some of the same advocates who lobbied aggressively for vouchers in 1995 are expressing frustration with the program because it did not turn out to help the poorest of the poor, as had been promised. Making matters worse, there are several expansion efforts for the voucher scheme under consideration—and all of them are aimed at the suburban middle class, which now wants to find ways for the state to pay all or part of the tuition those folks are already paying themselves.

A study from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University6, released just a day before the shameful Supreme Court action, found that the most segregated schools in the country were private, religious schools. In fact, the same research found that most students in Catholic and other religious schools encounter a “heavily segregated educational experience.” When one looks at the history, the reasons become clear. Public schools have taken specific and deliberate steps to desegregate over the last half century. Schools run by religious ministries have not. The practical reality is that voucher programs will actually promulgate—not alleviate—racial segregation.

Now, the war is not over. You know that those of us against vouchers all over the United States are going to be heading to many statehouses next session and insisting that no new voucher plans are adopted. Our goal nationally should be to see that not a single new voucher program starts anywhere. When Clint Bolick heard me say that outside the Supreme Court this summer, he said it was “sour grapes.” No, that is an affirmation that we know snake oil when we see it; we aren't going to sit back and let the voucher weed strangle the vitality of genuine school reform around the country.

Can we win? Of course we can. In fact, we have been winning the voucher argument for decades. In twenty-three state referenda in the past twenty years vouchers, and some of their kissin’ cousins like tax credits, have been defeated every single time.

Dr. James Witte studied the Milwaukee voucher program for five years. After he concluded that the plan produced no statistically significant changes in most subjects for most grade levels7, the Wisconsin legislature could have said, “Whoa, maybe we made a mistake here.” Instead, in a move that would be laugh-out-loud funny if it weren't so pathetic, lawmakers reacted to the report by cutting off the funds to continue the testing of students so nobody would know if there was any improvement. This even turns free marketism on its head: Create an expensive government program with taxpayer money, and when the data suggests the program isn't working, hide the data and make sure consumers don't get any similar data in the future.

Voucher supporters were already being forced to acknowledge the very day of the Supreme Court decision that the battle wasn't even over in the courts. The Supreme Court's ruling dealt specifically, and exclusively, with the legality of vouchers under the US Constitution. The decision, however, has nothing to do with whether vouchers may violate provisions of state constitutions. In fact, thirty-six state constitutions—including, of course, yours—have very clear prohibitions against use of public funds for any religious purpose.

Americans United, the PTA of Florida, and teachers groups were already litigating in Florida under that kind of provision in its state constitution to terminate your inaptly named “Opportunity Scholarship Program.” The Supreme Court's ruling on the Cleveland program has no bearing on whether Florida's voucher plan violates the state constitution. On August 5, Circuit Judge P. Kevin Davey ruled that Article I, Section 3 of the Florida Constitution said, “The language utilized in this provision is clear and unambiguous.” And it is: “No revenue of the state or any political subdivision or agency thereof shall ever be taken from the public treasury directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect, or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.” Pretty clear, and very wise. I don't see how your Supreme Court, when it hears the appeal, can rule any differently from Judge Davey.

There are a few more lawsuit-ready issues. Under current law, a private religious school that receives no taxpayer subsidies can hire or fire teachers based on their religious affiliation or belief. In one case, a Catholic school fired a single but pregnant mother, and a federal court upheld their right to do so under a “religious” exemption in the Civil Rights Act of l964. I believe that if that school is now the beneficiary of tax dollars (even if the court accepts the fiction of this intermediary) it can't do that anymore. We'd love to help someone in that situation.

Or, how about a student with disabilities? Public schools in my state have to find ways to accommodate disabilities. Special-needs children can require up to 30 percent of the budget in some school systems. Right now, religious schools don't have to take any disabled students—and very few do. A journalist went out to Milwaukee a few years ago and interviewed the principal of a well-run private high school, with fine science facilities. He noted to her that the labs were all on the second floor and that there was no elevator in the building. He wondered how a student in a wheelchair would be able to use them. Without any venal purpose, she just said, “Somebody like that really wouldn't be comfortable here.” If a school like that gets a voucher that I helped to pay for, the “comfortable” argument just does not cut it. You will be required to alter your facilities and be able to serve all if all of us are paying for it! No voucher-receiving entity ought to be able to treat a single student like a second-class citizen.

There is no quick fix for that minority of public schools that are not meeting the needs of their students.

In a broader sense, school vouchers don't make sense, as I stated at my alma mater, Dickinson College in 2001:

Let's look at the general illogic of this idea of vouchers. It makes the curious assumption that if there is a new flow of state or federal money for schools, competitive high-quality facilities will just be popping up all over America's inner cities. Where in South Central Los Angeles, or Harlem, or Detroit is this phenomenon occurring with any other institution? Are there banks opening there? Grocery store chains or department stores? New money might lead to new construction somewhere, but it won't be in the same neighborhoods now missing banks and groceries. It simply won't be viewed as cost effective. This argument that vouchers are to help low-income parents is absolute nonsense. If the pro-voucher moguls didn't want to expand the program to everybody, there would be no pro-voucher movement. Even the chief liberal support of the Milwaukee plan, African-American legislator Polly Williams, has repudiated the way that plan is being implemented, claiming that it is already abandoning the poorest of the poor. You know, yesterday five hundred thousand homeless children, address “not fixed,” attended America's public schools, which probably fed them and counseled them as well. Almost no private schools take even one such child.

I used to do a national syndicated radio show with Pat Buchanan. One day, in discussing a ballot initiative in California, our first caller was a recently retired school principal from a Catholic high school. She asked Pat if he knew what she would have done first with any financial help from the government. Pat failed to answer quickly enough, so she gave him the correct answer: “I would have given myself a raise.” Of course, many private religious school teachers and administrators earn $8,000 a year less than their already underpaid public school counterparts. But if they were paid equitably, tuition costs would by necessity rise, and the value of the voucher would decline accordingly. By the way, although I don't think money is the solution for everything, there is a certain truth to the adage “you get what you pay for.” This country isn't paying for much. Of the sixteen major industrialized nations, the United States ranks tenth in school spending as a percentage of our gross domestic product and an appalling fourteenth in expenditures as a percentage of per capita income. Think about that when you see the next comparison of test scores in Japan and those in the United States.

Speaking of cost effectiveness, that Cleveland program was a pretty strange example of it. One year, a full quarter of the costs of the program were expended on taxicabs to take children from home to school. It was determined that the cost of a cab was about eight times that of a normal school bus. Exacerbating the problem was the fact that about $400,000 were spent on students who never actually took the cabs, but for whom the cab companies billed the city anyway. It may sound petty, but a community probably ought to see an injustice in a program that sends some kids to school in luxury while the school buses may soon be traveling without a tire.

Perhaps the most pernicious argument about vouchers is that if we don't have them, we are consigning children in the worst schools to a perpetual life in squalor. Ladies and gentlemen, the choice is not between vouchers and doing nothing. Secretary of Education Richard Riley pointed out recently that a proposed $7 million worth of “so-called” scholarships for students in DC, the latest euphemism for vouchers, would reach a mere two thousand students, leaving the other seventy-five thousand without any extra funds. His alternative was a wise one: use half of the money to match fifty-eight district schools with proven educational success programs like the Laboratory for Success, developed at Temple University, or the “Success for All” program at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. These are track-record-proven programs to turn around failing inner-city schools. And then with the $3.5 million left, support seventy new after-school programs for seven thousand students. Commonsense and local police tell the same story: it is the hours between 3 and 6 pm that present the greatest danger for children's safety. So please don't let anybody tell you that it is vouchers or nothing changes.

I was speaking in Philadelphia recently and the idea of leaping to vouchers to “fix” education had a particularly bizarre ring. Many of the problems there are those directly addressable through increased funding. A year ago, I was shocked to learn that a state Senator who was visiting Philadelphia schools found a high school that did not have a single computer for student use. She said that a graduating senior told her she didn't feel prepared to get a job without knowing anything about computers. Of course, she was right. Is there no money for computers? No. This state has a “rainy day” fund of over $1.1 billion. Not damp enough when your students can't find one computer? The administration of Governor Tom Ridge had a budget surplus of $777 million dollars last year. Yet the state got an F—which, when I went to Dickinson meant “failure”—in Education Week's “Quality Counts” report for the funding disparities between rich and poor communities. How disparate? The richest school district spends $190,125 more per classroom of twenty-five students than the poorest district. Poor children in the inner cities and rural districts don't stand a chance.

As I said, the progress of public school has not been fully linear. But I like the directions it is going. In the 1950s, segregation was the lawfully sanctioned norm and we bussed students away from their closest school so we could maintain the practice. Now segregation is seen as the sin and constitutional shame it always was. In the 1950s, persons with disabilities were relegated to a hidden corner of the basement, but now, by law, their special needs must be accommodated. In the 1950s, girls were discouraged from bothering with math and science. Now, young women win prestigious awards in every field of study. We are not going back by funding a web of right-wing religious academies that harken back to some new dark age of educational pseudo-reform.

So here are the facts:

Most states are afraid to test voucher students on a regular basis because “school choice” advocates know the results won't be to their liking. When tests are actually administered, however, students at voucher schools normally score worse than their public school peers—particularly in reading and math.

How poorly? Here is the data:

• Louisiana: When it comes to the latest scores for the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP), voucher students did worse than those in public school. In 2014, 44 percent of voucher students passed the tests compared with 69 percent in public schools.8

•  Wisconsin: Of the 272 voucher students enrolled in grades that required testing in 2013–2014, just 33.2 percent scored proficient or better in both reading and math. Unfortunately sixty-one students who should have been tested—almost 25 percent of the pool—opted out of the tests, showing once again how little oversight comes with voucher money. By contrast, 48.6 percent of public school students scored proficient or advanced in math and 36.6 percent scored that in reading.9

•  Cleveland: In the 2009–2010 school year, almost all voucher students tested in third through eighth grades performed worse on reading and math tests than their public school counterparts. None performed better in math, though some performed slightly better in science and reading. 10 The biggest gaps were as follows:

•  Washington, DC: In 2010, test data showed that over four years, students who had received vouchers achieved scores in reading and math that were not better than their public school peers in any statistically significant way. Researchers thus concluded the program had “no significant impact” on student academic achievement.11

Using provisions of state constitutions, we can often win. Thirty-eight states have provisos that indicate, without equivocation, that no state funds may be used, directly or indirectly, to subsidize religious ministries, missions, or clergy. Other states contain language that requires equitable distribution of tax dollars.

State constitutional provisions have been used successfully to terminate a Louisiana voucher program in 2013, Florida's “Opportunity Scholarship” program in 2006, Arizona's “Scholarship for Pupils with Disabilities” program in 2008, and (as of December 2014) put the kibosh on a North Carolina program as well.

Various state constitutional provisions have been unsuccessfully invoked in challenges to an Indiana voucher plan and (so far) a school district program in Colorado's Douglas County.

When one looks at the facts and applies commonsense legal standards, voucher schemes drop like flies. Texas senator Ted Cruz, a new member of the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution stated in December 2014, “When it comes to civil rights, I think there is no civil right more important than the right of every child to access a quality education and…the most compelling civil rights issue of the 21st Century is the need to expand school choice and educational options.”12

Charter schools pose a special kind of problem because they are publicly funded but privately run. From a church-state standpoint, the most common issue with these schools is the use of textbooks that promote creationism and undermine evolution. In many cases, these books promote ideas about God and include scripture to back up their claims. Such texts often provide a distorted or inaccurate view of history as well—at least one textbook used by a chain of charter schools in Texas and Arkansas said the holocaust was caused by ideas about evolution.13

A second problem with charter schools occurs when a private religious school doesn't have the funds to survive on its own, so it makes a deal with a state to reopen as a charter school. Despite receiving taxpayer funds, in many cases these charter schools are located in the same building(s) as their former religious school, employ the same teachers, and are attended by the same students as before. As a result, it is not uncommon for sectarian instruction to continue—but on the public dime. Schools that make this transition must be closely monitored to ensure that the curriculum becomes secular once the school goes public.

Tuition tax credits are a kind of “kissing cousins” to vouchers. In 2011, the US Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that Arizona taxpayers had no “standing” to challenge the constitutionality of that state's “tax credit scholarship” program. Regrettably, the use here of state constitutions has not been as successful as I had hoped in my too-optimistic take on litigation in New Hampshire.

LOVE YOUR FAITH? THEN PAY FOR IT.14

Some years ago, I lived in New Hampshire. I vividly remember two things about the state: the rock formation known as the “Old Man of the Mountain” and the great public schools my children attended.

Sadly, the rock formation collapsed in 2003—and now it looks like the state's public schools may be headed down the same road. New Hampshire's legislators seem determined to siphon money away from public schools and into the coffers of private religious institutions.

It's too late to save the rock, but we can still rescue the schools. Like a lot of states, New Hampshire has a constitution that bans tax support for sectarian enterprises. It also has a law making it easy for taxpayers to challenge unconstitutional forms of government spending. Both are being put to use by the organization I represent, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has just filed a lawsuit in state court to free taxpayers from being forced to support religion.

New Hampshire has adopted an increasingly popular (but convoluted) tax-credit scheme that works like this:

Corporation A makes a large donation to a “scholarship” program. It then receives a tax credit—sometimes equivalent to the amount it donated, sometimes slightly less—from the state. The money is parceled out to parents who want to send their children to private schools and hand the bill to someone else.

If your head is spinning right about now, you're not alone. I'm always amazed at the shell games some legislators can come up with when they don't want to follow the clear commands of their governing charters.

And, yes, I put “scholarship” in quotation marks for a reason. That word is a euphemism designed to make what's going on in New Hampshire—taxpayer-funded religion—sound warm and fuzzy.

It's neither warm nor fuzzy. Most private schools in America are religious in nature. They're largely free from government oversight. Most of them teach dogma. Fundamentalist academies, for example, substitute creationism for science and base all instruction on a narrow reading of the Bible. Don't even get me started on what they teach about LGBT Americans and the rights of women.

Parents have the right to send their children to these schools. They have no right to expect you to pay for it. They have no right to expect you to subsidize a sectarian worldview with which you may vehemently disagree. In short, they have no right to tax you to pay for their religion.

Yet that's exactly what is happening in New Hampshire and in other states that have adopted tax credit and voucher plans. Private schools that openly admit they exist primarily to spread a certain faith and indoctrinate children in it are receiving tax windfalls. In some cases, Catholic schools that were on the verge of closing received new life thanks to taxpayer-funded vouchers.

Let's call this what it is: a bailout. The government can choose to bail out General Motors; it can't bail out the Catholic Church.

With any luck, this won't be going on in New Hampshire much longer. Americans United and the American Civil Liberties Union argue in their lawsuit that the tax credit plan is just a back-door method to do something that the New Hampshire Constitution plainly forbids: award taxpayer money to religion.

Part I, Article 6, of that document guarantees that “no person shall ever be compelled to pay towards the support of the schools of any sect or denomination.” Furthermore, Part II, Article 83, states that “no money raised by taxation shall ever be granted or applied for the use of the schools or institutions of any religious sect or denomination.”

What part of “no money raised by taxation” did New Hampshire legislators not understand?

For more than two hundred years, religion in America has been voluntarily supported, and it has done quite well under that system. The churches I have been involved with over the years have undertaken many projects designed to spread our beliefs, help the hurting, and draw people to what we do, but we've always been guided by one bedrock principle: If the men and women sitting in the pews can't be persuaded to pay for it, we don't do it.

Regrettably, the New Hampshire Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of this plan in mid-2014, using the somewhat bizarre argument that because the residents of New Hampshire, who were also taxpayers, could not show any “personal” injury, they couldn't challenge the program.15 This result came about in spite of a New Hampshire statute that appeared to broadly grant “standing” to citizens who allege that virtually any actions violated the state constitution.