Edward Cardinal Egan, the New York Post reported yesterday, is, along with other New York bishops, charging the Empire State’s politicians with violating poor parents’ “fundamental” rights by foreclosing the option of sending their children to parochial school as an alternative to the often-decrepit — especially in New York City — public school system. This charge, the Post reports, was leveled in a 10-page pastoral letter titled “Every Parent, Every Child,” which blasts state politicians for being in the pocket of the teachers unions and trapping students in “government schools [that] parents would otherwise avoid because their academic performance is questionable or even failing.” The Post reports that Cardinal Egan and the bishops call for taxpayer-funded vouchers or tax credits for parochial schools. They also call, according to the report, for public funding enabling special-education students to attend religious schools, state aid for remedial instruction or tutoring for parochial-school students who score poorly on state exam, and government funding for educational resources such as computers and instructional materials at parochial schools.

No doubt the call for vouchers is embarked on at this time because of the Supreme Court’s ruling this summer in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, which held that state aid to parochial schools is constitutional so long as voucher programs are neutral between religious and secular schools. Instituting vouchers at New York would live up to the promise of Zelman, but it would also require the state to face up to its Blaine Amendment, passed in 1894 during a fever of nativist sentiment. The amendment forbids New York, or any subdivision thereof, from using its property or credit or any public money — directly or indirectly — to aid or maintain any school under the control of any religious denomination. A number of goals outlined in the letter short of making way for vouchers have in part already received a boost from the state’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who in his “Report on Non-Public Education” in May of this year found that religious and secular non-public schools could receive a host of benefits from the state without violating the state constitution.