Among the newest contributors to redefinED is Boston University professor Charles Glenn, an expert on educational history and comparative policy who last summer served as a witness in the court challenge to Douglas County's school voucher pilot. His testimony showcased not only the 19th-century American history of providing public educations funds to religious schools and institutions, it notably shined a spotlight on the attacks Catholics faced when Colorado adopted its Blaine Amendment.

In direct examination and in a chapter from his forthcoming book introduced as evidence, Glenn points to the perceived "Catholic menace" in Colorado as the state convened its Constitutional Convention in 1875. The scaremongering of that time led some Catholic leaders to call not only for a Catholic voice in the convention, but a voice for reason and deliberation. And no one made that plea more eloquently than Bishop Joseph Projectus Machebeuf.

Machebeuf, who insisted that Catholics would remain loyal to the State of Colorado and that their rights as citizens should be respected, sent a message to convention delegates urging them to let future legislatures deal with the question of "separate schools and denominational education," not engrave the answer into a constitutional clause. His reason: emotions were running too hot:

... the question itself has never been fully and dispassionately discussed in this country, and can not be said to have been discussed at all in Colorado. We have had, so far as I am informed, nothing said on our side of the question in your honorable body ... So far, both in this country at large and in Colorado, the language of passion has been more often uttered than that of reason ... The present is no time for the exposition of the arguments in favor of denominational schools. But we look forward hopefully to the future. A day shall at last dawn – surely it shall – when the passions of this hour will have subsided; when the exigencies of partisan politics will no longer stand in the way of right and justice, and political and religious equality shall again seem the heritage of the American citizen.

That day has not yet come. Indeed, the hearing during which Glenn testified resulted in a permanent injunction against the Douglas County voucher effort. Glenn writes, "Were he alive today, Bishop Machebeuf would no doubt be surprised and disappointed to learn that (unlike every other Western democracy) the United States still maintains barriers against reasoned deliberation about the merits of schooling that responds to the choices of parents. It is striking how, whether in Massachusetts, or Colorado, or in federal court litigation, opponents of making faith-based schooling available to parents without financial penalty seek to remove this issue from the sphere of democratic decision-making."

An Indiana judge refused to halt the state's new voucher program, concluding that new statutory provisions guaranteeing publicly funded choice of even parochial schools are "religion-neutral" and "for the benefit" of students, not churches. It is a conclusion wholly different from one ruling issued Friday in Colorado, where a district judge weighed similar arguments challenging a Douglas County voucher plan and found that the same choice provided "no meaningful limitations on the use of taxpayer funds to support or promote religion."

From Indiana Superior Court Judge Michael Keele:

The [scholarship program] is religion-neutral and was enacted 'for the benefit' of students, not religious institutions or activities ... It permits taxpayer funds to be paid to religious schools only upon the private, individual choices of parents ...

... [The plaintiffs] would thus threaten long-established, and apparently unquestioned, Indiana traditions of permitting tax dollars to be spent on religious education by way of private, individual choice.

From Colorado District Judge Michael A. Martinez on the Douglas County ruling:

Because the scholarship aid is available to students attending elementary and secondary institutions, and because the religious Private School Partners infuse religious tenets into their educational curriculum, any funds provided to the schools, even if strictly limited to the cost of education, will result in the impermissible aid to Private School Partners to further their missions of religious indoctrination to purportedly 'pubic' school students.

This week, the Denver-based Legal Center for People with Disabilities and Older People filed a federal complaint alleging that a Colorado school district's pilot voucher plan discriminates against children with special needs. The voucher program would provide "only limited services (if any) for students with disabilities" and violates not only the Americans with Disabilities Act, but also Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act protecting civil rights law, reads the complaint to the Justice Department. "Parents of students with disabilities do not have the same choice to participate in this program," the center states.

This, of course, comes just a month after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a similar complaint to the Justice Department alleging that the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, and two schools in particular, also violate both ADA and Section 504 by discriminating against students with disabilities and further segregating Milwaukee students. "Proposed legislation to substantially expand the voucher program, if implemented, will exacerbate the discrimination against and segregation of students with disabilities by permitting more schools to participate in the program," the ACLU states.

The Milwaukee program did indeed expand to Racine, Wis., just as many private school options passed state legislatures during the past several months. Will we be seeing more complaints like these as one strategy to reverse the momentum?