The Supreme Court split evenly Thursday in a high-profile challenge over the nation’s first religious charter school, leaving in place a ruling from Oklahoma’s top court that found the proposed Catholic school unconstitutional.
Charter schools – privately run but publicly funded – serve 3.8 million students in the US, offering an alternative to traditional public schools that are intended to be more innovative and less bound by state regulations. The concept took off in the 1990s and, by the 2023 school year, there were some 8,000 charter schools operating nationwide.
The law in Oklahoma, as in most states, deems the schools to be public.