Chelsea Langston, March 17, 2016

On March 15^th, IRFA sponsored a congressional briefing entitled “Will Nonprofits Remain Free to Serve? – The Vital Role of Religious Freedom in Education and Poverty Alleviation.” The event featured education expert Dr. Charles Glenn. Glenn is the author of many books on education systems and school choice, including The Ambiguous Embrace: Government and Faith-Based Schools and Social Agencies (Princeton Univ. Press, 2000). He served the state of Massachusetts for more than 20 years working in urban education and equity efforts.

On Tuesday Glenn discussed government’s responsibility to balance “competing social goods.” In the education context, Glenn elaborated, this entails balancing the rights of parents to educate their children as they choose and the responsibility of government to ensure children are receiving adequate instruction. Glenn emphasized that education goes beyond mere teaching and instruction in basic core competencies. According to Glenn, education involves all that encompasses the shaping of a human being, including the influences of family, school, civic organizations, religious institutions, and more. Glenn’s approach toward balancing responsibility and freedom, often regarded as polar opposites, provides an innovative and hopeful vision of a potential way forward in a divided policy space.

“We do have to have a way of ensuring that no child falls through the cracks as far as accountability,” Glenn stated. “We cannot merely rely on parents to make wise decisions. We need an accountability net that focuses on results.” Glenn further explained that while the government should focus on educational outcomes, it should not interfere with how parents choose to educate and form their children. Parents should have many choices: a public school, homeschooling, a faith-based educational institution, a charter school, or other modality. The focus of government should be on accountability for instruction that develops core competencies in children. According to Glenn, the government should not aim to limit the diversity of educational options for parents and students in a pluralistic society like ours.

Glenn discussed research he had recently done at six Muslim high schools. Glenn and his team interviewed parents and students in these schools, noting “the students were extremely motivated and encouraged to think through how they can live out their faith as devout Muslims while engaging positively with American culture.” Glenn remarked that this motivation of students to engage in substantive questions of how their lived faith intersects with their citizenship was consistent with evidence he has collected from other faith-based schools, including Jewish, Catholic and Evangelical institutions.

Such schools help students engage their whole being in their education and formation. The students are not asked to leave their religious identities at the door, or to consider their faith in only a nominal, periphery manner when engaging in the task of learning new subject-matter. Rather, faith-based educational institutions that embody their missions to educate and form the whole person, including the religious aspects of that person, give students of all faiths a means of understanding how they are to be living out their faith in the context of their particular community. This capacity to fully align faith with all elements of learning and engaging with the world is what makes religious schools distinctive, according to Glenn. This is not something that public schools—charged with serving any and all students and families–have the capacity to foster.

Public schools undoubtedly have an important role in our society, according to Glenn. He underscored this point by noting that he sent all seven of his children to Boston public schools. He also noted that it is completely possible for families of faith to choose to send their children to public school and to provide more rigorous faith-based formation at home or through a house of worship or other faith-based program.

Glenn also noted, however, the importance of advocating for a society that embraces not just individual pluralism, but institutional pluralism as well. In a society with so many individuals with so many needs, according to Glenn, we should be taking a “both/and” approach to education, working toward public policies that balance freedom and responsibility in the context of private schools, faith-based schools, charter schools, and public schools, so that all children can thrive.

With respect to faith-based schools, Glenn emphasized that it is vital to preserve their freedom to hire based on faith. This issue, in Glenn’s words, is a “non-negotiable” because faith-based schools cannot fulfill their faith-based missions if they do not have the right to employ people who abide, in belief and in practice, in the schools’ religious mission. And although other issues such as whether faith-based schools should have to participate in government-required testing or admit certain students are important, Glenn emphasized that nothing is as important to the future of faith-based schools and other faith-based service organizations as the preservation of the religious hiring freedom.

As the very notion of religious freedom faces mounting cynicism and even hostility in our society, it is ever more important for individuals and institutions of faith to take the time to engage others in a new way of thinking about religious freedom. Religious freedom, as Glenn demonstrated in this Hill briefing, cannot be confined to one narrow set of issues. Religious freedom is more than Kim Davis and wedding-cake bakers and same-sex weddings. Religious freedom is the capacity of a pluralist society to provide a diversity of educational options, private and public, faith-based and secular, to meet a diversity of needs. Religious freedom is the capacity of a diverse community to create diverse social services options for community members with complex racial, sexual, and faith identities. Religious freedom is, at its best, protecting the rights of your neighbor, or neighboring faith-based organization, to provide a distinctive service or operate in a distinctive way, even though that is not the way you believe or operate or serve.