This piece first appeared in our weekly newsletter, The Fallout.

Last week, the Supreme Court announced it was taking a major church-state separation case, one that could pave the way for religious charter schools to overtake public education—and my guess is you probably didn’t hear about it.

Lost in all the chaos and shock of the first official week of President Donald Trump’s second term was news that the Court agreed to hear two cases out of Oklahoma that conservatives see as a double whammy to achieve governments funding religious schools and eventually erasing secular public education entirely.

The issue in both Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond and St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond is straightforward: Can states fund religious schools directly via their charter school programs? Both cases involve a planned public charter school in Oklahoma that would be run by two Catholic dioceses. The planned public school, St. Isidores, is to be designed in the spirit of the church and to serve its “evangelizing mission.”

I can’t emphasise that first point enough. This is a school to be run by Catholic dioceses, with an explicitly evangelical Catholic mission, and its supporters want direct taxpayer funding without the usual strings that come along with that funding—like, for example, complying with anti-discrimination laws. I’ve been covering this kind of conservative grift for a while now, but this move to create an explicitly religious public charter school is by far one of the boldest.

In June 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court put the brakes on this plan. It ruled that using taxpayer money to fund religious charter schools would violate the state constitution which forbids the use of public money “for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion.” But now the conservative justices get to weigh in, and they’ll likely further erode what’s left of church-state separation when it comes to public education.

The case will be argued later this spring with a decision expected sometime in the summer.