by Uncle Ludwig

Created on: June 06, 2008

Public charter schools embrace innovation in an effort to break out of ineffective or limited practices that have been used in the past. Their charters are designed to free them from the constraints and failures that have become trade-offs in systems that represent the educational norm. Those who are in favor of placing faith-based missions in charter schools rely on a specialized interpretation of such charters based on the phrase "different philosophies" that somehow, they try to convince us, includes faith-based philosophies. This interpretation was never the intent of charter schools, and the legal language used to describe the intent of charter schools in each state must be very loosely interpreted by faith-based proponents to even come close to justifying their view.

A Philosophy, of course, is not necessarily a Religion. It's an intellectual understanding or dialectic regarding questions of human existence. Religion is a distinct subset of Philosophy as it deals with existence based on a universe hierarchically created and/or inhabited by deities. But a philosophy in the charter-school context is simply another subset of Philosophy; one that deals with pedagogy, not the broader intellectual pursuit. Educational philosophy deals with questions regarding the existence and perpetuation of schools in order to educate the uneducated. More precisely, these are systems of pedagogic methods developed by various educational philosopher/researchers, such as Dewey, Montessori, Piaget, Steiner, and others.

The next phase of the argument for faith-based proponents is to try to overcome the concept of "public" vs. "private" schools, which essentially has to focus on public funding vs. private funding. Again, the intent of any charter school is to work past the constraints often placed on schools by government agencies that offer educational funding. Arguing that funding agencies' constraints specifically support the need for faith-based missions in charter schools is a straw man argument that tries to refocus the discussion away from the reality that all charter schools face the same constraint issue. And the issue of public funding for faith-based initiatives still remains to be addressed.

If one feels that tax monies should be available to fund religious organizations, one has to address the U.S. Constitution head on, particularly in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court has on more than one occasion staunchly protected the wall that

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