RELIGION IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution provides: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" (U.S. Constitution, 1787, Amendment 1). Under the Tenth Amendment, educational policy is primarily the responsibility of the states, but the Supreme Court has held that the above constitutional guarantees apply to the states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The First Amendment establishment clause relates to preventing the government from supporting or aiding religion. The free exercise clause was designed to protect citizens against government interference with religious practices. The two clauses are inter-related. As Cochran, Mayer, Carr & Cayer point out, the interpretation of either of these clauses, if expanded "

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ct of the aid is to benefit the pupil in the attainment of a secular education, a spillover effect of some benefit to a religious institution does not in itself rule that legislation unconstitutional" (1995, p. 424). The Court has used the neutrality doctrine recently to retreat from its early decisions which seemed to require total secularization of the public schools. For example, in Zobrest v. Catalina Foothills School District, 113B S.Ct. 2462 (1993), the Court validated as constitutional the provision by a school district of the services of a sign language interpreter to a hearing impaired instructor as a Catholic school. Tax exemption to all educational and non-profit institutions was upheld in Walz v. Tax Commission, 397 U.S. 664 (1970) as was the appropriation of public funds to reimburse non-public schools for state-mandated objective testing (Committee for Public Education v. Regan, 444 U.S. 646 (1980). Public school funding which benefits religious schools is more likely to pass muster when it is indirect. A current issue on which the Court has not yet ruled is whether school voucher systems under which public funds would be made available to allow parents to send their children to schools of their choice. The standard
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Approximate Word count = 2166
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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