Two notes on the Supreme Court

•  I've been enjoying Kevin Kruse's new Substack "Campaign Trails" and his latest one is on Engel v. Vitale, a case decided in 1962 on school prayer. As Kruse notes:
  

  After explaining the details of the case, Black paused to collect himself and clutched his papers tightly. There could be “no doubt,” he read, that “the daily invocation of God’s blessings [was] a religious activity” and, as a result, no doubt that New York “adopted a practice wholly inconsistent with the Establishment clause.” Black asserted that the First Amendment embodied the founders’ belief that faith was “too personal, too sacred, too holy to permit its ‘unhallowed perversion’ by a civil magistrate.” (Here, an observer noted, “his voice trembled with emotion as he paused over ‘too personal, too sacred, too holy.’”)
  In Black’s view, religion certainly deserved a place of prominence in American life, but the state could not dictate it. “It is no part of the business of government,” he read, “to compose official prayers for any group of the American people to recite as a part of a religious program carried on by the government.” Departing from his text, Black added an impromptu plea. “The prayer of each man from his soul must be his and his alone,” he said. “If there is anything clear in the First Amendment, it is that the right of the people to pray in their own way is not to be controlled by the election returns.” 

• There was some surprise in the online education universe this morning that the Supreme Court declined to take up Charter Day School. v. Peltier, which is a case on dress codes that hinges on if the charter school in North Carolina is a public school. The charter school in question barred girls from wearing pants to school; parents sued, saying this was sex discrimination, which public schools cannot do under Title IX. The lower court decision that will now stand agreed with the plaintiffs. As Matt Barnum wrote in Chalkbeat: 
  

  The case turned on whether Charter Day School is a private entity or a public “state actor.” This issue is also crucial for the brewing legal dispute over religious charter schools. If charter schools are state actors then they likely cannot be religious. If they are private, though, religious entities would have a stronger case for running charter schools. These debates will likely be tested in Oklahoma, which recently approved what could be the country’s first religious charter school. Ultimately, this may end up being sorted out via years of litigation — which could end up back at the Supreme Court.

  So...stay tuned.