Submitted by George N. Spitz, Apr 26, 2007 04:55

President Bush should realize the unfairness of a policy that denies parents sending their children to Religious Schools the same government assistance as Charter Schools. A religious affiliated school faces considerable economic difficulty in meeting expenses as would a nonprofit or for-profit secular charter school receiving virtually no government assistance. St Francis DeSales School on the Upper East Side may be forced to close because the mainly minority parents are having difficulty paying the $3,000 tuition. Charter schools already in existence in New York State are being granted approximately $8,500 annually per pupil, which is deducted from the budget of the local public school district.

Opponents of any form of aid to religious schools cite the "Blaine" Amendment, a relic of a wave of late 19^th Century anti-Catholic bigotry proscribing government assistance to religious schools. "Blaine" was named after James G. Blaine, former Speaker of the US House of Representatives and defeated Republican candidate for President in 1884. After a narrow failure of "Blaine" to pass the US Congress, an amendment with somewhat similar language was adopted at New York State's 1894 Constitutional Convention. Orthodox Jewish, Lutheran and Greek Orthodox Schools were not a factor in that era. Yet Jewish, Lutheran and Greek parents wishing to have their children educated in religious schools suffer from circa 1890 bigotry just as Catholic parents do.

The Blaine Amendment should be repealed primarily because of the hate filled manner in which it was adopted. But United States Supreme Court of the United States decisions dating back to 1925 when a Ku Klux Klan sponsor Oregon law outlawing nonpublic schools, which would have included charter as well as religious schools, was declared unconstitutional should subsume the Blaine Amendment, provided none of the government aid is used for teaching religion. Therefore, deducting from any state grant the cost of such religious instruction as a school offers its pupils will suffice to bring Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox and Jewish schools operating under New York State's Charter School Law within the framework of the U.S. Constitution.

President Bush and Congressman Charles Rangel, who joined the President in praising the Harlem Charter School, might similarly collaborate in seeing that government funding for non-public schools is distributed on a non-discriminatory basis. Both should demand prompt repeal of New York State's Blaine Amendment. There is no place for bigotry in an official document such as the New York State Constitution even though having been subsumed by US Supreme Court decisions, the Blaine Amendment has now is without standing in law.

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