In 2025, a divided U.S. Supreme Court preserved an Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that blocked the application for what could have become the country’s first religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. Although that felt like a win for many of us, the decision resolved one case, but not the underlying question: Can religious schools be public charter schools? 

Our position on this question has not changed, and we think it is worth restating plainly: NACSA opposes the chartering of religious schools. 

But, since then, new efforts have surfaced in Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Colorado.

• A Jewish foundation asked Oklahoma’s charter board to authorize a Hebrew and religious studies virtual school after its initial application was denied.
• A proposed religious academy in Tennessee is suing, on the theory that filing a conventional charter application would be futile under state law.
• A federal court in Oklahoma heard arguments on whether the state’s ban on sectarian charter schools violates the Free Exercise Clause.

Each of these efforts is built on the same wager: that a full, nine-member Supreme Court, without a recusal, will eventually provide a different outcome. 

Here is why that outcome would be detrimental to public charter schools, and ultimately, students and families. 

Charter schools are public schools 

This is not a matter of preference or branding. It is how charter laws are written in every state that has them. Charter schools are created by state authorizing statutes, funded with public dollars, open to all students without tuition or selective admission, held accountable to the same state assessments and accountability frameworks as other public schools, and subject to closure by the state if they fail to perform. Additionally, in most states, private schools are explicitly barred from converting into or operating as charter schools, because a charter school is a different type of legal entity. 

Authorizers do not merely license charter schools and step back. They approve them, evaluate them continuously against academic and operational performance standards, and hold the power to revoke their charters and close them. A private religious school that never sought this relationship remains free to teach whatever it wishes. A charter school cannot, because the moment it becomes a charter school, it becomes an instrument of the state’s obligation to provide a public education. 

What religious chartering would require of authorizers 

Think for a moment about what authorizing a religious charter school would look like.  

If states are required to charter religious schools, then authorizers—the school boards, state agencies, and independent commissions that do this work in nearly every state—would have to evaluate religious curricula for quality and rigor, monitor religious instruction for fidelity to a school’s stated mission, and make merit-based decisions to approve some religious educational programs and deny others. 

There is no version of that process that avoids government entanglement with religious doctrine. An authorizer that could approve a Catholic school’s curriculum but questions a different applicant’s plan for religious instruction would be making a judgment about religion, whether intended or not. An authorizer that could deny a religious charter application on ordinary academic or operational grounds could expect to be sued for discriminating against that applicant’s faith. We would be asking authorizers, most of whom are local school board members and state education officials—with no training or standing to adjudicate religious questions—to do something the First Amendment exists specifically to keep the state from doing. 

This is not a hypothetical harm to be weighed against the benefits of more schooling options. It would be the direct, foreseeable result of putting religious education inside a public chartering system built for evaluation and enforcement. 

This is not an argument against religious education 

NACSA represents authorizers and is not an opponent of faith-based schooling. Private religious schools do vital work, and nothing about our position asks states to put an end to that work. States are free to support families who choose private religious education through other means, and many already do. What states should not do is convert the public chartering process into a religious one. The Supreme Court has already recognized that a state which chooses to offer a strictly secular public education does not thereby violate the Free Exercise Clause. Oklahoma made that choice. So has every other state whose charter laws require nonsectarian instruction. 

Why this fight matters now 

The deadlock in the St. Isidore case bought time, not resolution. With a new round of applications and lawsuits already underway, and with advocates openly hoping for a differently composed Court, the question is likely headed back to the Supreme Court in the next case cycle. When it arrives, it will not be an abstract dispute about legal categories. It will be a decision about whether the more than 9,000 school districts, state boards, and other authorizers across this country can be forced to become the evaluators, and the enforcers, of religious doctrine in schools that answer to the state. 

We do not think that is a job an authorizer should be asked to do, and we do not think it is one the Constitution allows. NACSA said so to the U.S. Supreme Court before and we are saying it again now. The question has not gone away, and neither has our answer. 

You can read NACSA’s amicus brief in the Oklahoma case here.