Education: No to Church-School Aid

Government subsidies to parochial schools are unconstitutional because of the First Amendment ban on any law "respecting an establishment of religion." Yet the U.S. parochial schools educate some 4.3 million children, as much as 33% of the total in cities like Philadelphia and Buffalo. This is a burden the public schools could not easily handle. President Nixon therefore publicly promised last year to find some constitutionally acceptable means of providing parochial-school aid (a promise yet to be fulfilled), and sixteen different states have devised their own systems for circumventing the ban.

Two of them, New York and Pennsylvania, approved tuition reimbursements or...

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