Muslims claim unconstitutional exclusion from Texas school voucher program
Lawmakers in Florida take steps that could lead to similar challenges there
When the creation of a costly school voucher program was debated in the Texas Legislature last year, advocates said it would empower parents to direct the education of their children regardless of their religious beliefs, providing them opportunities to receive instruction in ways they couldn’t get in public school. But that promise is ringing hollow for many of the state’s Muslim parents wanting to give their children an education rooted in Islam as state officials have excluded some two dozen Muslim schools from the list of schools eligible to receive indirect state funding via Texas Education Freedom Accounts.
Meanwhile, hundreds of Christian (generally Catholic or evangelical), Jewish and secular schools have been approved for the list.
Under the program, parents can receive vouchers of up to $10,474 per child to get reimbursed for tuition, fees and education expenses beginning this autumn, and much more than that for disabled students. The program is turning out to be highly popular: The $1 billion allocated for the program can accommodate nearly 100,000 students, but more than 160,000 have applied with more to come before tomorrow’s application deadline. A lottery will be used to select the students whose parents will receive the funding.
The state’s acting comptroller, Kelly Hancock, has excluded the Muslim schools because of their alleged ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights organization that Hancock has claimed is linked to terrorism and/or foreign adversaries. CAIR has vigorously denied it supports terrorism.
The result is a pair of lawsuits filed in federal district courts seeking to get Muslim schools approved for the program:
🟪 Mehdi Cherkaoui, an attorney who has two children attending the Houston Quran Academy Spring, filed a lawsuit in late February against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Hancock, and Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath.
🟪 Last week, three parents (Layla Daoudi, Muna Hamadah and Farhana Querishi) and three school operators (Bayaan Academy, the Islamic Services Foundation and The Eagle Institute) filed a lawsuit against Hancock and the manager of the voucher program, Mary Katherine Stout.
According to Cherkaoui’s lawsuit, there was not a single accredited Muslim school that had been approved for the program as of Feb. 4. It is unclear whether any have been added to the list of approvals since then. According to news accounts, there also have been a few non-Muslim schools that have been excluded because of alleged connections with CAIR.
According to Cherkaoui’s lawsuit, this is the sequence of events that led to the exclusion: Last December, Hancock requested Paxton’s legal opinion on whether the comptroller could disqualify accredited Islamic schools that had “hosted publicly advertised events organized” by CAIR, which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott designated as a “foreign terrorist organization” and “transnational criminal organization” the month before. Paxton determined that the voucher program could legally disqualify schools “to stop any school illegally tied to terrorists or foreign adversaries from accessing taxpayer dollars.” Between the time of that determination and the filing of the lawsuit, no Muslim schools were approved for the program.
Cherkaoui said that the exclusion violates First and Fourteenth Amendments, which provide for freedom of religion and equal protection under the law, respectively.
News accounts have indicated that several of the schools as well as CAIR deny having had any connection with each other. In any case, the alleged connections appear to be nebulous, involving a school accrediting agency, Cognia, participating in CAIR-sponsored events.
Abbott has defended the exclusions. In a tweet on the X social network, Abbott said in response to a news article about the exclusions:
That’s right.
We don’t want school choice funds going to radical Islamic indoctrination with historic connections to terrorism.
I signed laws banning Sharia cities.
I designated CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and transnational criminal organizations.
And I will pass another law that completely bans Sharia Law in Texas.
Another voucher court fight could occur in Florida
Meanwhile, a similar legal dispute could be taking shape in Florida.
The Florida Legislature on Thursday passed a bill that would allow certain state officials to designate groups as terrorist organizations and would prevent private schools with ties to those organizations from receiving voucher funds from parents. The bill had Republican support and Democratic opposition. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to sign the bill.
Muslim schools have been receiving funds through the state’s voucher program.
In December, DeSantis signed an executive order declaring CAIR to be a terrorist organization. But a federal judge blocked that order after CAIR challenged DeSantis’s action with a lawsuit.