The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will hear two cases that are likely to revolutionize the relationship between church and state, at least in the context of public schools.

Both cases, known as Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, seek to force state governments to pay for religious public schools. They involve a planned public charter school in Oklahoma, which will be run by two Catholic dioceses. According to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, the school, known as St. Isidore, says it will “derive ‘its original characteristics and its structure as a genuine instrument of the church’ and participate ‘in the evangelizing mission of the church.’”

The state supreme court ruled that it is unlawful for the state to fund a religious public school. In its decision, the state court said that the ruling stemmed both from longstanding federal constitutional principles protecting the separation of church and state and the Oklahoma Constitution, which forbids the use of “public money … for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion.”

It is likely, however, that the US Supreme Court’s Republican majority, which has ruled that states must fund religious education in some contexts, will extend those previous decisions to require Oklahoma to fund this religious school. That would likely mean that nearly every state will have to fund public religious schools similar to St. Isidore, a scenario that would fundamentally alter public education in the United States. While the Court has supported some government funding of private schools in the past, it has never endorsed a public religious school.

The Court said in Carson v. Makin (2022) that states “need not subsidize private education,” and that states may “provide a strictly secular education in its public schools.” But Carson also held that, when a state offers vouchers to help families pay for private education, “it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

In the St. Isidore cases, both the school and Oklahoma’s charter school board essentially ask the Supreme Court to extend Carson to charter schools — which, unlike the private institutions at issue in Carson, are public schools that are subject to significant state control.

As Oklahoma’s Supreme Court explained in its opinion, charter schools in that state are “subject to the same academic standards and expectations as existing public schools.” They “must comply with the same rules that govern public schools on school-year length, bus transportation, student testing, student suspension, and financial reporting and auditing.”

They also must comply with other rules that apply to all public schools in Oklahoma, including the requirement that they must be “equally free and open........

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