Untangling Parochial Schools

The nation's Catholic parochial schools have been closing during the past five years at an average rate of one per day, economic victims of inflation and a declining supply of nuns and priests available to teach for low salaries. Strangely enough, the schools' plight has converted many traditional opponents of state aid for church schools into devout advocates. The reasons have nothing to do with religious persuasion, but only with hard economic fact. The parochial schools once educated as many as 6,000,000 children, about 11% of the nation's school-age students, at comparatively little cost to the taxpayer. But the recent closing of nearly 2,000 parochial schools has thrown some 1,200,000 parochial pupils into the already overburdened public system, and if the trend continues, many of the remaining 4,400,000 may follow.

One result has been a spate of new state laws providing financial aid to parochial schools--among the most comprehensive those of Rhode Island and Pennsylvania. As one Pennsylvania legislator explained: "It costs us $850 to educate a child in the public schools, but we could keep a child in the [Catholic] schools for only $37 a year in state aid." But the new measures--tediously dubbed "parochiaid"--have raised a troublesome question. Do they purchase parochial school survival at the price of violating the First Amendment's command to make "no law respecting an establishment of religion"?

Three Pence. James Madison, who drafted the First Amendment, had no doubt about his intent. It was to strike down any support out of the public purse to any religious institution. Referring to the three penny tax on-tea that precipitated the American Revolution, he argued: "Who does not see that the same authority, which can force a citizen to contribute three pence only of his property for the support of any one establishment, may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever?"

Last week the Supreme Court vigorously reasserted the U.S.'s historic barrier between church and state. By a resounding eight-man majority, it declared unconstitutional the ambitious aid programs of both Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. The decision (Lemon v. Kurtzman) struck many legal observers as a sign that a number of other current aid schemes would come in for close scrutiny. In its probable impact on schools, Lemon is likely to be surpassed only by the court's historic decisions on racial desegregation. It seemed certain to accelerate the end of the comprehensive parochial school as millions of U.S. Catholics have known it.

Principle v. Present. The decision put the court in opposition to a large body of popular opinion, setting constitutional principles against the urgencies of the moment. President Nixon endorsed parochiaid a year ago, when he warned Congress that if most nonpublic schools closed, by the end of the 1970s public schools would have to increase their present $30 billion annual expenses by $4 billion and come up with an additional $5 billion for new facilities. Deserting the traditional conservative Protestant position, Evangelist Billy Graham urged Government aid to unsegregated "religious-oriented" schools to help counterbalance the "materialistic, atheistic teaching" in public ones. Some Jewish groups adopted similar stands. Opposition came chiefly from the National Education Association, the nation's largest professional teachers' organization. Fearful for their jobs and salaries, the teachers argued that the cost of absorbing parochial-school students would be far less than the amount of state money that parochiaid would eventually drain from public schools.

Labs and Gyms. Proponents of parochiaid were further encouraged however, by Supreme Court decisions over the past 24 years that sometimes suggested the constitutional question was not whether Government should help, but how. In the 1947 Ever son case, the court decided that states could reimburse parents for the cost of sending their children to parochial school by bus (24 states now do so). In 1968, in Board of Education v. Allen, the court upheld a New York plan for lending textbooks on secular topics to parochial schools. Religious schools serve a double purpose, the court said, furthering the public's need for educated citizens as well as religious ends. State aid is permissible as long as its "primary effect" is not to "advance" religion but merely to help all children benefit equally from state programs. Other decisions have held that states can provide school lunches and public-health programs.

In a separate case involving religious colleges, last week the court once again approved aid for such secular purposes. In a 5-to-4 decision, it upheld a 1963 federal law backed by President John F. Kennedy that included the nation's church-related colleges in a program of grants and loans for building such campus facilities as laboratories, libraries and gyms. Yet the court reached quite another conclusion on plans aiding elementary and secondary schools.

The three-year-old Pennsylvania plan was the forerunner of similar schemes in Connecticut, Ohio, New Jersey and Louisiana and is under consideration in nine other states. It used cigarette-tax revenues to reimburse nonpublic schools (most of them Roman Catholic) for the costs of teachers' salaries and textbooks in the secular subjects of math, physical sciences, modern languages and physical education. The Rhode Island arrangement paid up to 15% salary supplements to teachers in similar fields.

Seven Years. The difference between this and the federal aid program for colleges, Chief Justice Burger's opinion reasoned, lies in the court's belief that parochial schoolteachers are less likely than professors at religious colleges to keep religion out of their secular courses. ("Give me a child for the first seven years," says a Jesuit maxim, "and you may do what you like with him afterwards.") Even with the best of intentions, a dedicated layman "teaching in a school affiliated with his or her faith and operated to inculcate its tenets, will inevitably experience great difficulty in remaining religiously neutral." Moreover, Burger argued, schools have fewer built-in counterweights to inadvertent indoctrination. Among other things, "impressionable" school-age pupils are less likely than college students to challenge their instructors.

The policing needed to forestall blatant proselytizing also raised the possibility that the Government might interfere with a school's right to exercise its religion freely. This led Burger to apply an additional test that he first expressed in the court's decision a year ago upholding tax exemptions for church property. In Walz v. Tax Commission of the City of New York, Burger argued that the process of assessing and taxing church-owned property would create an "excessive entanglement" between state and church. Supervisors who monitor teachers in the Pennsylvania and Rhode Island plans might sufficiently restrain pedagogues from advancing religion to meet the Allen test. But ironically, such checks would violate the Walz test by producing "the sort of entanglement that the Constitution forbids"--in this case "dangers of excessive Government direction." The plans would also inevitably cause excessive politicking by churches, since each year state legislatures would have to vote new appropriations. "Political division along religious lines was one of the principal evils against which the First Amendment was intended to protect."

Troublesome Standard? With some pain, Burger conceded that the "line of [church-state] separation, far from being a 'wall,' is a blurred, indistinct and variable barrier." His reasoning was too blurred for Justices William O. Douglas, Hugo Black, Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, who dissented in the college-aid decision. None of them could see why Government support of secular services should be more entangling in schools than colleges. All thought that the court should have banned aid to colleges too; Justice Byron White, the lone supporter of school-level aid, argued that if colleges meet the Allen and Walz tests, schools do also. Their disagreements lead some legal experts to wonder whether the court's "entanglement" standards might prove as troublesome to interpret as its various definitions of obscenity.

Litigation on parochiaid is likely to go on for several years. But lawyers are fairly sure that Lemon's broad principles, plus the anti-aid line-up reflected by the court's near unanimity, will eventually require a drastic rearrangement of Catholic education. For one thing, tuitions will have to go up, and poorer parents will simply be unable to afford the higher fees. In Philadelphia, for instance, the loss of the archdiocese's $19 million in aid under the state program will force the price of a year's tuition at parochial high schools close to $400, up from $130; in Brooklyn, the fee is already $700.

Some Catholics on both left and right are not especially disturbed by restrictions on public aid. They are already unhappy with parochial schools. Conservatives feel the schools are not Catholic enough, liberals that they are too traditionally Catholic. Moreover, the restrictions give ammunition to Catholic educators who would like to see the church get out of secular education altogether and concentrate on quality religious instruction. Indeed, many parochial schools ultimately may subside into a variety of Sunday schools, akin to those of Protestant churches. But many other Catholic spokesmen are not yet willing to concede defeat. They plan to shift their efforts to support of other parochiaid formulas that are still largely untested in the courts.

Perhaps the most promising approach now gathering force is the so-called "voucher" plan. It would give parents certificates or vouchers good for a portion of the cost of educating their children. They could then cash in their tickets at any school that does not practice racial segregation. A law recently enacted in Maryland provides "scholarships" ranging up to $200 a year for a child from a poor family; Minnesota has passed a similar law. Embraced by groups ranging from free-enterprise conservatives to parents with kids in far-out private "free" schools, vouchers might be found constitutional since, like bus fares and textbooks, they would directly benefit individual children, not church school systems.

Another possibility is the 50-year-old arrangement of "shared time" or "dual enrollment." In eight states, parochial schools cut their costs by letting their students enroll in public schools for several periods or a half-day each week. There, publicly paid teachers instruct the kids in industrial arts, home economics, physical education and music, and more recently in math, science and foreign languages as well. Communities like Louisville, Ky., and Pittsfield, Mass., send the public teachers directly into parochial-school buildings.

Doing Right. Shared time has yet to be tested in the Supreme Court. The court has approved "released time," however, a more modest version involving no public money. Under such plans, children get time off from public school to attend religious classes. Although many "Sunday" schools are boring and poorly attended, they need not be. Since Bennington. Vt., closed its Catholic high school in 1967, an ecumenical group of clergymen has used a special center to offer high school level, religiously oriented courses on such topics as "How Do I Know I'm

Doing Right?" and "Biblical Ideas." Under released time, students can take these courses as electives in the high school curriculum.

Whatever demands stringent church-state separation may impose on public schools, enhanced religious education and ecumenical programs like that in Bennington could be a sign that for Catholics, hard times can have their uses. Writing in the Jesuit magazine America, some weeks before the court decision, University of Chicago Education Professor Donald A. Erickson concluded that "the crisis in Catholic schools could prove redemptive. Historic reforms are seldom achieved when the sky is blue and the devil is silent in his cell."

Just which reforms, among the several proposed, might be redemptive is not yet clear. For the immediate future, times will indeed be hard for the Catholic schools and the Catholic community that supports them. Insofar as they fail and turn their pupils over to the public schools, the ordinary taxpayer can expect to see his taxes go up and up.

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