I head this week to Madrid for the annual meeting of OIDEL, a Geneva-based organization promoting educational freedom around the world. We advocate for policies that allow parents to decide to what school they entrust their children and that allow teachers to decide to which educational project they will dedicate their energy and their passion.

Some on the board are especially concerned about conditions that allow Catholic schools to flourish with integrity (I joke that it is as the "token evangelical" that I was made vice president), a reminder that, were it not for the Catholic Church's insistence on separate schools for its children, there would be no effective choice in many countries for either parents or teachers.

While today school choice on the basis of pedagogical emphasis is spreading, especially in the English-speaking world, the precedent for tolerating "structural pluralism" in education and thus making room for charter schools, academies, and other alternatives is the stubborn resistance of Catholics in scores of countries over many decades to the imposition of a single monopolistic system of education.

It is easy to forget how persuasive has been what I have called "the myth of the common school," the belief that only through sending all children to schools identical in their programs and underlying philosophies could social and national unity be achieved. Horace Mann and his allies were not unique in this conviction; it can be traced in every country that I have studied. In my book on education under communist regimes and in my recent Contrasting Models of State and School, I've shown how dangerous this program is to freedom of conscience and of political life.

Lately my historical research has focused on the conditions of opinion that led to Supreme Court decisions, after World War II, forbidding public funding of faith-based schools. This occurred at the very time when the United States was endorsing international human rights covenants asserting the right of parents to decide about the education of their children.

While my earlier work had shown how fears about the effects of immigration in the 19th century promoted anti-Catholic sentiment, the 1940s and 1950s were a low point in concerns about immigration in which, nevertheless, fears about Catholicism and about Catholic schooling flourished. Why was that?

To summarize what I will spell out in my next book, Challenging the American Model of State and School, American opinion leaders in that period saw the Catholic Church as the great enemy of educational and other dimensions of freedom. It is, on the surface, hard to see how to reconcile this belief with the long struggle by the Catholics for educational freedom, in the United States and in Europe.

Justices Rutledge and Black and other members of the American elite understood educational freedom in an individualistic dimension, as educational experiences that "freed" the student from family and from traditional beliefs and loyalties. The existence of schools answerable to parents rather than to Society, and dedicated to fostering alternatives to the prevailing secular worldview, was thus a threat to educational freedom rather than an expression of it.

Readers of Rousseau's Emile often ask how an education ostensibly designed to create a radically free individual could, instead, produce a young man totally dependent upon his teacher. We might well wonder, similarly, how those receiving an education designed to free them from all external commitments could find a secure footing in convictions, rather than be blown about by every cultural trend, every fashionable opinion.

Two understandings of educational freedom, then: one calls for policies providing for a diversity of schools competing on equal terms and reflecting the educational convictions of parents and the educators they trust. The other calls for a single model of schooling that promotes rootless individualism and calls it freedom.

Every day we see encouraging signs that the persuasive power of this model is waning. One of the most recent is the school board election in Douglas County, Colo., in which the board's policy of providing scholarships for hundreds of its students to attend non-public (including faith-based) schools was a central issue. With over 67,000 votes counted, the three winners were all supporters of the policy. Now we will see whether the appeal of the district court's decision against the policy will allow it to be continued - and set a precedent for real educational freedom.

If there was a central theme that drove last week's conference on school choice at Berkeley, Calif., it was the moral imperative of empowering the parent. Not all its participants agreed on how best to accomplish this goal within public education, but if you surveyed the assembly, it's likely a majority would favor a design of private educational choice that first benefits the poor and disadvantaged.

Yesterday's U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding an Arizona tax credit scholarship program would seem to provide a blueprint for that design, but many advocates for school choice are so jubilant over the court's 5-4 ruling that they're dreaming of bigger plans. "The way forward for the school choice movement is clearer than it has ever been," our friend and Cato Institute scholar Andrew Coulson writes. "Education tax credits ... allow for universal access to the education marketplace without forcing any citizen to subsidize instruction that violates their convictions."

Coulson is no doubt correct about the future legal viability of private options through tax credit programs. But while some of the judicial pressure may be relieved, the political pressure remains. We certainly have seen encouraging political progress on this front, with choice coalitions that now swell with more Democratic members in Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. "To me, a scholarship for poor, struggling schoolchildren is in the greatest tradition of our collective commitment to equal educational opportunity," wrote Bill Heller, the former ranking Democrat on the Florida House Education Council, in the St. Petersburg Times last year.

I'm not sure Heller would write these lines if the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship he's supporting here would be universally accessible to students at all income levels. In fact, the glue that holds these coalitions together is their focus on the poorest among us -- the children who typically need the greatest help. (more…)

UPDATE: From The New York Times on the ruling: The Supreme Court on Monday effectively upheld an Arizona program that aids religious schools, saying in a 5-to-4 decision that the plaintiffs had no standing to challenge it. The program itself is novel and complicated, and allowing it to go forward may be of no particular moment. But by closing the courthouse door to some kinds of suits that claim violations of the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion, the court’s ruling in the case may be quite consequential.

In a 5-4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court said that plaintiffs objecting to an Arizona tax credit scholarship on the grounds that it amounted to government aid of religious schooling have not been harmed by the program and therefore had no right to sue. The decision in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn overturns a ruling by the Ninth Circuit and is significant in the distinction it draws between direct governmental aid and tax credits for contributions to a cause.

We'll have more analyses later, but here are reports from Bloomberg and the ABA Journal, as well as an analysis from Andrew Coulson at the Cato Institute.