By Auguste Meyrat, Acton Institute, May 21, 2025
Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in North Texas, the senior editor of The Everyman, a senior contributor for The Federalist, and a frequent contributor to The American Conservative, Crisis, and American Mind.
St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. the State of Oklahoma may prove to be the breakthrough in school choice parents nationwide have been looking for.
As school choice becomes the law of the land, particularly here in Texas, this has raised some fundamental questions on how much choice parents will be allowed to have. Not only are there many different pedagogies and teaching styles parents could conceivably prefer, but there is also a wide array of deeper guiding principles that inform instruction, many of which are explicitly religious.
It’s relatively uncontroversial to argue that parents should have the option to send their kids to a rigorous private preparatory school with hardworking students and well-trained teachers instead of the neighborhood public school suffering from violence among students and poorly trained teachers. It only becomes a problem when that prep school is an independently run charter school—and both explicitly Catholic and designed to evangelize as well as to educate. ….
