Oklahoma v. Drummond is a critical case, testing whether longheld Establishment Clause principles in the public school context will endure under the current Supreme Court’s trend away from protecting the institutional separation of church and state.

In oral argument in the case of Mahmoud v. Taylor, the U.S. Supreme Court probed the issue of whether and to what extent parents of young schoolchildren enjoy a right under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to opt their students out of curricular activities that conflict with their religious beliefs.

If the Court holds that states can or even must accept religious schools as charter schools, it would upend decades of Establishment Clause jurisprudence. As BJC's brief says, “The state may not directly fund religious instruction. That line has long preserved both faith and freedom. It should be respected here.”