New York passed a statute allowing nonpublic schools to be reimbursed for the costs incurred in administering and reporting results of state-mandated test scores. The funds given to the schools were audited to ensure that the money was only used to cover the costs of compliance with the state standards. This statute was challenged on the grounds that it unconstitutionally aided religious schools.
The Court permitted New York’s plan to reimburse nonpublic schools for the costs resulting from offering and recording the results of state-mandated tests.
| Majority Opinion: (Justice White) |
The standards set forth in Wolman are controlling in this case. In this case, the reimbursement of nonpublic schools clearly has a secular agenda, “[T]o provide educational opportunity of a quality which will prepare [New York] citizens for the challenges of American life in the last decades of the twentieth century.” The tests themselves involve secular academic subjects rather than religious topics. The nonpublic school has no control over the subject matter of the tests. The recording and reporting of the test results are administrative and not part of the educative role carried out by the nonpublic schools. “The reimbursement process, furthermore, is straightforward and susceptible to the routinization that characterizes most reimbursement schemes. On its face, therefore, the New York plan suggests no excessive entanglement, and we are not prepared to read into the plan as an inevitability the bad faith upon which any future excessive entanglement would be predicated.”
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Dissenting Opinion: (Justice Blackmun:)
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An application of the three parts of the Lemon Test (Lemon) displays that this statute is unconstitutional. For, while it passes the first part, the statute both advances religion and establishes an overwhelming government entanglement with religion by permitting direct funds to be given to private religious schools. Previously decided cases do not weigh in favor of declaring the statute constitutional because they did not involve the constitutional affirmation of direct cash aid as is in question here. "The Courts holding today goes further in approving state assistance to sectarian schools than the Court has gone in past decisions."
The Court refused to set forth a litmus test to be used to assess whether other reimbursement schemes violated the Establishment Clause. Rather, they stressed the importance of looking at each case separately to determine its effects.
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Last modified: 02/16/01
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