Zelman v. Simmons-Harris
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| Zelman v. Simmons-Harris | ||||||||||||
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 Supreme Court of the United States |
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| Argued February 20, 2002 Decided June 27, 2002 |
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| Holding | ||||||||||||
| The Court ruled that the Ohio program did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because it passed a five part test developed by the Court. | ||||||||||||
| Court membership | ||||||||||||
| Chief Justice: William Rehnquist Associate Justices: John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer |
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| Case opinions | ||||||||||||
| Majority by: Rehnquist Joined by: O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas Concurrence by: O'Connor Concurrence by: Thomas Dissent by: Stevens Dissent by: Souter Joined by: Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer Dissent by: Breyer Joined by: Stevens, Souter |
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| Laws applied | ||||||||||||
| U.S. Const. amend. I | ||||||||||||
Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002), was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court which tested the permissibility of school vouchers in relation to the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
[edit] Facts
In one of its most important church-state cases in a decade, a bitterly divided Court upheld an Ohio school voucher plan and removed any constitutional barriers to similar voucher plans in the future. The public schools in many of the poorer parts of Cleveland were deemed failures, and the legislature enacted the Pilot Project Scholarship Program in an effort to address the problem. The program provided tuition vouchers for up to $2,250 a year to some parents of students in the Cleveland City School District to attend participating public or private schools in the city and neighboring suburbs; it also allocated tutorial aid for students who remained in public school. The vouchers were distributed to parents according to financial need, and the parents chose where to enroll their children. Because the number of students applying to the program greatly exceeded the number of vouchers available, recipients were chosen by lottery from among the eligible families. In the 1999–2000 school year, 82 percent of the participating private schools had a religious affiliation; none of the adjacent suburban public schools joined the program; and 96 percent of the students receiving vouchers were enrolled in religiously affiliated schools
[edit] Result
The Supreme Court ruled that the Ohio program did not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, because it passed a five part test developed by the Court. The decision was 5-4, with moderate justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor and conservative justices William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas in the majority.
The test developed by the Supreme Court in this case can be called the Private Choice Test, and five parts must be passed for a voucher program to be constitutional. The five clauses are: the program must have a valid secular purpose, aid must go to parents and not schools, a broad class of beneficiaries must be covered, it must be neutral with respect to religion, and there must be adequate nonreligious options. The Court found that the program in question passed all of these tests.
Chief Justice Rehnquist, writing for the majority, stated that "The incidental advancement of a religious mission, or the perceived endorsement of a religious message, is reasonably attributable to the individual aid recipients not the government, whose role ends with the disbursement of benefits." They found that, in theory, there is no need for parents to use religious schools, and so long as the law does not especially encourage the use of vouchers for religious schools, the fact that most parents do choose parochial schools is irrelevant. Indeed, the fact that in this case, the funding was given to the parents to disburse as they chose, whereas in Lemon v. Kurtzman the funding at question was given directly to the schools, this was a key part of the Private Choice test. The majority held, therefore, that the intent of the law was the important thing.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Thomas emphasized that voucher programs like the one in this case were essential because "failing urban public schools disproportionately affect minority children most in need of educational opportunity." He stated that vouchers and other forms of publicly funded private school choice are necessary to give families an opportunity to enroll their children in more effective private schools. Otherwise, "the core purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment" would be frustrated.
The dissenting opinions, on the other hand, disagreed with Chief Justice Rehnquist: Justice Stevens wrote "... the voluntary character of the private choice to prefer a parochial education over an education in the public school system seems to me quite irrelevant to the question whether the government's choice to pay for religious indoctrination is constitutionally permissible." Justice Souter's opinion questioned how the Court could keep Everson v. Board of Education on as precedent and decide this case in the way they did, feeling it is contradictory. He also found that religious instruction and secular education could not be separated and this itself violated the Establishment Clause.
