Committee For Public Education and Religious Liberty v. Nyquist Anderson v. Committee For Public Education and Religious Liberty Nyquist v. Committee For Public Education and Religious Liberty Cherry v. Committee For Public Education and Religious Liberty 8212 694, 72 8212 753, 72 8212 791 72 8212 929

• Decision Date: 25 June 1973
• Docket Number: Nos. 72,s. 72
• Citation: 37 L.Ed.2d 948,93 S.Ct. 2955,413 U.S. 756
• Parties: COMMITTEE FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY et al., Appellants, v. Ewald B. NYQUIST, as Commissioner of Education of the State of New York, et al. Warren M. ANDERSON, as Majority Leader and President pro tem of the New York State Senate, Appellant, v. COMMITTEE FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY et al. Ewald B. NYQUIST, as Commissioner of Education of the State of New York, et al., Appellants, v. COMMITTEE FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY et al. Priscilla L. CHERRY et al., Appellants, v. COMMITTEE FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY et al. —694, 72—753, 72—791, and 72—929
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

413 U.S. 756

93 S.Ct. 2955

37 L.Ed.2d 948

COMMITTEE FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY et al., Appellants,

v Ewald B. NYQUIST, as Commissioner of Education of the

State of New York, et al.

Warren M. ANDERSON, as Majority Leader and President

pro tem of the New York State Senate, Appellant,

v. COMMITTEE FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS

LIBERTY et al.

Ewald B. NYQUIST, as Commissioner of Education of the

State of New York, et al., Appellants,

v. COMMITTEE FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS

LIBERTY et al.

Priscilla L. CHERRY et al., Appellants,

v. COMMITTEE FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION AND RELIGIOUS

LIBERTY et al.

Nos. 72—694, 72—753, 72—791, and 72—929.

Argued April 16, 1973.

Decided June 25, 1973.

Syllabus

Amendments to New York's Education and Tax Laws established three financial aid programs for nonpublic elementary and secondary schools. The first section provides for direct money grants to 'qualifying' nonpublic schools to be used for 'maintenance and repair' of facilities and equipment to ensure the students' 'health, welfare and safety.' A 'qualifying' school is a nonpublic, nonprofit elementary or secondary school serving a high concentration of pupils from low-income families. The annual grant is $30 per pupil, or $40 if the facilities are more than 25 years old, which may not exceed 50% of the average per-pupil cost for equivalent services in the public schools. Legislative findings concluded that the State 'has a primary responsibility to ensure the health, welfare and safety of children attending . . . nonpublic schools'; that the 'fiscal crisis in nonpublic education . . . has caused a diminution of proper maintenance and repair programs, threatening the health, welfare and safety of nonpublic school children' in low-income urban areas; and that 'a healthy and safe school environment' contributes 'to the stability of urban neighborhoods.' Section 2 establishes a tuition reimbursement plan for parents of children attending nonpublic elementary or secondary schools. To qualify, a parent's annual taxable income must be less than $5,000. The amount of reimbursement is $50 per grade school child and $100 per high school student so long as those amounts do not exceed 50% of actual tuition paid. The legislature found that the right to select among alternative educational systems should be available in a pluralistic society, and that any sharp decline in nonpublic school pupils would massively increase public school enrollment and costs, seriously jeopardizing quality education for all children. Reiterating a declaration contained in the first section, the findings concluded that 'such assistance is clearly secular, neutral and nonideological.' The third program, contained in §§ 3, 4, and 5 of the challenged law, is designed to give tax relief to parents failing to qualify for tuition reimbursement. Each eligible taxpayer-parent is entitled to deduct a stipulated sum from his adjusted gross income for each child attending a nonpublic school. The amount of the deduction is unrelated to the amount of tuition actually paid and decreases as the amount of taxable income increases. These sections are also prefaced by a series of legislative findings similar to those accompanying the previous sections. Almost 20% of the State's students, some 700,000 to 800,000, attend nonpublic schools, approximately 85% of which are church affiliated. While practically all the schools entitled to receive maintenance and repair grants 'are related to the Roman Catholic Church and teach Catholic religious doctrine to some degree,' institutions qualifying under the remainder of the statute include a substantial number of other church-affiliated schools. The District Court held that § 1, the maintenance and repair grants, and § 2, the tuition reimbursement grants, were invalid, but that the income tax provisions of §§ 3, 4, and 5 did not violate the Establishment Clause Held:

1. The propriety of a legislature's purpose may not immunize from further scrutiny a law that either has a primary effect that advances religion or fosters excessive church-state entanglements. Pp. 772—774.

2. The maintenance and repair provisions of the New York statute violate the Establishment Clause because their inevitable effect is to subsidize and advance the religious mission of sectarian schools. Those provisions do not properly guarantee the secularity of state aid by limiting the percentage of assistance to 50% of comparable aid to public schools. Such statistical assurances fail to provide an adequate guarantee that aid will not be utilized to advance the religious activities of sectarian schools. Pp. 774—780.

3. The tuition reimbursement grants, if given directly to sectarian schools, would similarly violate the Establishment Clause, and the fact that they are delivered to the parents rather than the schools does not compel a contrary result, as the effect of the aid is unmistakably to provide financial support for nonpublic, sectarian institutions. Pp. 780—789.

(a) The fact that the grant is given as reimbursement for tuition already paid and that the recipient is not required to spend the amount received on education, does not alter the effect of the law. Pp. 785—787.

(b) The argument that the statute provides 'a statistical guarantee of neutrality' since the tuition reimbursement is only 15% of the educational costs in nonpublic schools and the compulsory education laws require more than 15% of school time to be devoted to secular courses, is merely another variant of the argument rejected as to maintenance and repair costs. Pp. 787—788.

(c) The State must maintain an attitude of 'neutrality,' neither 'advancing' nor 'inhibiting' religion, and it cannot, by designing a program to promote the free exercise of religion, erode the limitations of the Establishment Clause. Pp. 788—789.

4. The system of providing income tax benefits to parents of children attending New York's nonpublic schools also violates the Establishment Clause because, like the tuition reimbursement program it is not sufficiently restricted to assure that it will not have the impermissible effect of advancing the sectarian activities of religious schools. Walz v. Tax Comm'n, 397 U.S. 664, 90 S.Ct. 1409, 25 L.Ed.2d 697, distinguished. Pp. 789—794.

5. Because the challenged sections have the impermissible effect of advancing religion, it is not necessary to consider whether such aid would yield an entanglement with religion. But it should be noted that, apart from any administrative entanglement of the State in particular religious programs, assistance of the sort involved here carries grave potential for entanglement in the broader sense of continuing and expanding political strife over aid to religion. Pp. 794—798.

350 F.Supp. 655, affirmed in part and reversed in part.

Leo Pfeffer, New York City, for the Committee for Public Education etc., and others.

Jean M. Coon, Albany, N.Y., for Nyquist and others.

Porter R. Chandler, New York City, for Priscilla L. Cherry and others.

John F. Haggerty, Brooklyn, N.Y., for Warren M. Anderson.

Mr. Justice POWELL delivered the opinion of the Court.

These cases raise a challenge under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the constitutionality of a recently enacted New York law which provides financial assistance, in several ways, to nonpublic elementary and secondary schools in that State. The cases involve an intertwining of societal and constitutional issues of the greatest importance.

James Madison, in his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, ¹ admonished that a 'prudent jealousy' for religious freedoms required that they never become 'entangled . . . in precedents.'² His strongly held convictions, coupled with those of Thomas Jefferson and others among the Founders, are reflected in the first Clauses of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which state that 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.'³ Yet, despite Madison's admonition and the 'sweep of the absolute prohibitions' of the Clauses,⁴ this Nation's history has not been one of entirely sanitized separation between Church and State. It has never been thought either possible or desirable to enforce a regime of total separation, and as a consequence cases arising under these Clauses have presented some of the most perplexing questions to come before this Court. Those cases have occasioned thorough and thoughtful scholarship by several of this Court's most respected former Justices, including Justices Black, Frankfurter, Harlan, Jackson, Rutledge, and Chief Justice Warren.

As a result of these decisions and opinions, it may no longer be said that the Religion Clauses are free of 'entangling' precedents. Neither, however, may it be said that Jefferson's metaphoric 'wall of separation' between Church and State has become 'as winding as the famous serpentine wall' he designed for the University of Virginia. McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203, 238, 68 S.Ct. 461, 475, 478, 92 L.Ed. 649 (1948) (Jackson J., concurring). Indeed, the controlling constitutional standards have become firmly rooted and the broad contours of our inquiry are now well defined. Our task, therefore, is to assess New York's several forms of aid in the light of principles already delineated.⁵

I

In May 1972, the Governor of New York signed into law several amendments to the State's Education and Tax Laws. The first five sections of these amendments established three distinct financial aid programs for non- public elementary and secondary schools. Almost immediately after the signing of these measures a complaint was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York challenging each of the three forms of aid as violative of the Establishment Clause. The plaintiffs were an unincorporated association, known as the Committee for Public Education and...