Zelman v. Simmons-Harris

Summary

In 1995 a federal court placed the Cleveland City School District, which enrolled more than 75,000 mostly low-income children, under state control after findings of a crisis of magnitude; the district had met none of eighteen state performance standards. Ohio responded with several programs, including community (charter) schools, magnet schools and a Pilot Project Scholarship Program. The scholarship program gave tuition aid, up to $2,250 for the poorest families, which parents could use at participating private schools, religious or secular, or at public schools in adjacent districts, and it gave tutoring grants to students who stayed in the public schools. Checks were made out to parents, who endorsed them to the school they chose. In the 1999-2000 school year 46 of the 56 participating private schools were religious, and 96 percent of scholarship students attended them; no suburban public district took part. Ohio taxpayers, among them Doris Simmons-Harris, sued Susan Tave Zelman, the state superintendent, and the lower federal courts held that the program advanced religion. The question was whether the program violated the Establishment Clause. The respondents argued that it channeled public money to religious schools that used it for religious education, that families had few realistic secular alternatives, and that the program was functionally like aid struck down in Committee for Public Education v. Nyquist (1973). Ohio argued that the program was neutral, served the secular purpose of rescuing children from failing schools, and directed aid to religious schools only through parents' independent choices among many public and private options. On 27 June 2002 the Court reversed, five to four. Chief Justice Rehnquist, relying on Mueller v. Allen, Witters and Zobrest, held that a neutral program giving aid directly to a broad class of individuals, who then direct it to religious schools by their own genuine and independent choice, is one of true private choice that does not offend the Establishment Clause. He counted all the options open to Cleveland parents, including community and magnet schools, rather than the scholarship schools alone. Justice Thomas, concurring, quoted Frederick Douglass on education and emancipation and argued that the Fourteenth Amendment should not be used to block states from helping poor urban children. Justice Souter, for four justices, argued that the decision could not be reconciled with Everson's rule against tax support for religious teaching and that neutrality and choice were illusory on these facts. Justice Breyer, joined by Stevens and Souter, stressed the risk of religiously based social conflict. The library text gives Rehnquist's opinion with excerpts from Thomas, Souter and Breyer; Justice O'Connor's concurrence and Justice Stevens's dissent are not included, and notes are omitted. Later decisions, including Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) and Carson v. Makin (2022), held that a state offering aid to private schools may not exclude religious schools because they are religious.

Top Lessons

• Whose choice directs the money?

  Rehnquist's opinion turns on the path by which aid reaches a religious school. When the government gives aid to parents who then choose among many schools, the decision to support religious education belongs to the parents, not the state. Souter answered that the form of a payment should not hide its substance, especially when most participating schools were religious.

• Measuring genuine options

  The opinions disagree about what alternatives Cleveland parents really had. The majority counted community schools, magnet schools and tutoring alongside the scholarship schools, while the dissent focused on the scholarship schools, nearly all religious. The case shows how the frame of comparison can shape a constitutional result.

• Education and opportunity

  Thomas began with Frederick Douglass's words that education means emancipation and argued that poor urban families want the best education for their children wherever it is offered. The dissenters did not dispute the crisis in Cleveland but held that constitutional limits apply most clearly in hard and sympathetic cases.

• Religion and social peace

  Breyer recalled the nineteenth-century conflicts between Protestant and Catholic communities over public schools and argued that funding religious schools could reopen such divisions. Supporters of the program responded that excluding religious schools from neutral aid can itself treat religious families unequally.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The opinions address tuition scholarships for Cleveland schoolchildren and raise no questions of medicine or health.