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 tax relief of up to $150 per child (tuition generally ranges from $200 to $750). New York also authorized $28 million a year to its 2,000 non-public schools for the costs of state-required testing and record keeping, plus another $4 million to 280 schools for maintenance and repair of buildings.

Last week the Supreme Court decisively rejected these expedients. Writing for the majority, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., himself a former Richmond school board chairman, declared that the consequence of all such plans was a "special economic benefit" designed to "preserve and support religion-oriented institutions."

"However great our sympathy for the burdens of those who must pay public-school taxes at the same time that they support other schools because of the constraints of 'conscience and discipline' [it may not] justify an eroding of the limitations of the Establishment Clause [of the First Amendment]."

Before adjourning for the summer, the court also handed down two decisions against segregated schooling:

> It prohibited Mississippi from allowing racially discriminatory private schools to participate in the state's free-textbook program. More than 100 of these schools were set up in the late 1960s to avoid the consequences of the desegregation of public schools.

> It indicated that it was just as opposed to the de facto segregation in the cities of the North as to the now forbidden legal segregation of the South. Ruling on the system in Denver, the court upheld a lower-court finding that the school board had fostered segregation in a significant portion of the city. Sending the case back to the lower courts for further action, the Justices said that unless the school board can prove it did not practice segregation in mixed neighborhoods, it may be required to integrate the entire system, presumably by busing if necessary.

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