Dive Brief:

• A lawsuit that sought to to end the allocation of federal funds for textbooks used by private schools in New Mexico will not be heard again by the state’s Supreme Court.
• Some 100 individual private and religious schools in the state are reported to use as much as $1.8 million dollars in federal funding, the Santa Fe New Mexican reports, and a previous court decision found the practice unconstitutional, since using using public funds for private schools and colleges is prohibited in the state.
• The standing decision says “that because that money flows into New Mexico’s general fund, state lawmakers, and not the federal government, have the ultimate say over how the funds are spent.”

Dive Insight:

Previously, an appeals court in New Mexico ruled that since the textbooks are secular, it’s in students' best interests to have them — and that they should be provided. But now, that’s been turned on its head.

In general, state funding shouldn’t be used to fund private or religious schools, but the issue does become contentious from time to time. In Ohio, a battle over “the rightful ownership” of supplies purchased with public funds on the behalf of White Hat Management, a privately run management company that ran a chain of charter schools, went to the state’s Supreme Court.

In an analysis of public funding in religious private schools, the Pew Research Center notes, “…Together, the majority opinions in Everson and Allen helped outline a permissible means for the government to support religious schools. The rule derived from these decisions is that the government may provide aid to religious schools as long as the aid is (1) secular in content, such as funding for bus subsidies or secular textbooks; (2) generally available to students in both public and private schools; and (3) primarily directed toward students rather than toward schools.”