Has Senator Schumer seen the light on school vouchers? New York parents could almost hope so Monday, after he quizzed the Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers, about Meyer v. Nebraska, a case decided by the high court in 1923. The senator, to be sure, spun Meyer as a privacy case that laid the groundwork for Roe v.Wade. But perhaps now that he has gone to the trouble of digging it up, he will consider some other implications of that case. While he’s at it, we can think of at least one other ruling from that era that also merits a closer look.

The Meyer ruling overturned a Nebraska statute enacted in the wake of World War I that outlawed the teaching of modern foreign languages before the eighth grade. The statute was aimed at immigrants, especially Germans; Robert Meyer was convicted of teaching a 10-year-old boy a Bible story in German in a Lutheran school. For this “crime,” the law prescribed a fine of between $25 and $100 or 30 days in the county jail. The Supreme Court concluded that the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment by unreasonably restricting parental choice in how children should be educated.

By establishing that the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment is broader than “merely freedom from bodily restraint,” Meyer set the stage for the “right to privacy” created in Roe; this is why Senator Schumer mentioned it this week. But if he reads a little further, he will find a text that might cause him to question his assessment, offered at a teachers union conference in 1999 and reported at the time by the New York Post, that “vouchers are daggers that plunge into the heart of what is the American way.”

In Meyer, the court found that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the freedom to, among other things, “acquire useful knowledge” and that “the established doctrine is that this liberty may not be interfered with, under the guise of protecting the public interest, by legislative action which is arbitrary or without reason able relation to some purpose within the competency of the state to effect.”

Lest there be any question about what the court meant by “the competency of the state,” the justices handed down an even more important ruling two years later, Pierce v. Society of Sisters. In Pierce, the court struck down an Oregon law, enacted by referendum with support from the Ku Klux Klan, that prohibited parents from sending their children to any non-public school. The law’s aim was to “Americanize” immigrants by forcing them to attend state schools. But the court would have nothing of that assimilation justification.

In a paragraph explicitly citing Meyer, the court wrote in Pierce that, “The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.” Quote the court: “The child is not the mere creature of the state.” Pierce, just as much as Roe, is a key legacy of the Meyer decision.

At that 1999 conference, Senator Schumer, after his “dagger” metaphor, told his audience that, “Vouchers serve the interests of a few who want to instill their own world point-of-view and religion” and that vouchers would “develop chaos and divide our country on religion and race.” Not only are his fears of Balkanization unfounded, but the Meyer decision he now touts was, in the generation in which it was issued, one of a pair of rulings denying that public schools should exist solely for the purpose of preserving “the American way.” Meyer and Pierce arguably imply that the state’s main interest is ensuring that all children be educated to certain basic standards, but that how or in which school is a secondary issue. Which is why we suggest that once Mr. Schumer has dusted off Meyer he may discover that it’s a dagger in the heart of the movement against school choice.