Here’s something you don’t hear every day: a legal victory has been granted to parents and ordinary taxpayers who were in a battle over education funding. What’s more, they defeated the mighty (and perennially belligerent) ACLU.

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a huge victory for proponents of parental choice in education Monday. The high court agreed 5–4 with the arguments of Alliance Defense Fund attorneys and dismissed an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against an Arizona program that promotes school choice. The program, like others across the country, allows state residents to claim a tax credit for donations to private organizations that provide scholarships to private schools.

The court dismissed the suit saying that the ACLU’s clients--taxpayers who don’t like the program--didn’t have any legal standing to sue over someone else’s private donations. ADF represented the only party to make this argument to the court.  The decision creates a national precedent that will prevent similar legal attacks in the future. 

The ACLU has pulled bizarre stunts in the past, but this one is almost breathtaking in its effrontery. This battle wasn’t even about allocation of current state educational funding. It was about the ACLU trying to persuade the courts to interfere with the private donations of private citizens. One searches for adequate adjectives to describe their overreaching arrogance, but invariably comes up short.

The majority decision came down firmly on the side of parental choice, which no doubt sends chills down the spine of the average union/educational bureaucrat. The ACLU is all for “civil liberties”, as long as those liberties don’t contradict their own radical agenda. 

“Parents should be able to choose what’s best for their own children. This ruling empowers parents to do just that,” said ADF Senior Counsel David Cortman. “Parents should decide what schools their children attend and where their money goes. The ACLU failed in its attempt to eliminate school choice for hundreds of thousands of students nationwide and also failed to demonstrate that it had any constitutional basis for its clients to file suit in the first place.”

ADF represents one of many (over fifty) non-profit corporations whose function is to distribute private donations (in the form of scholarships) to students attending hundreds of private schools throughout Arizona. 

ADF argued that the Arizona program involves individual, private choices and funding--not government action or money--and pointed out that the program saves the state money and relieves burdens on overcrowded public schools.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority:

Respondents’ contrary position assumes that income should be treated as if it were government property even if it has not come into the tax collector’s hands. That premise finds no basis in standing jurisprudence. Private bank accounts cannot be equated with the Arizona State Treasury.

The court’s reasoning is sound,” Cortman explained. “The government does not own 100 percent of every American’s paycheck. The donations are private money, not government money.”

The ACLU, not to mention various other unions, somehow labour (no pun intended) under the delusion that they have a right to access, if not control, people’s private spending. (After decades of welfare-statism, with trillion dollar deficits and entire states going bankrupt, I wonder what gave them that idea?)

Greatest irony: a distinction is made between “private money” and “government money”—as if the latter could exist at all, apart from the compliance of John and Jane Taxpayer.

As for choice in education, the notion must be reclaimed—and proclaimed—that education is primarily about children (and by extension, their families who make up society), not unions (teachers’, support staff, civil liberty, or otherwise). As such, it is primarily parents and not bureaucrats who should be making the major decisions – and not just about funding. But it’s a start.