Excessive Entanglement

The financial plight of New York's parochial schools, which teach some 700,000 students whom the public school system could ill afford to handle, is desperate. So desperate that Governor Nelson Rockefeller promised to disburse $33 million to non-public schools for "secular educational services" (including the teaching of English, math and history). Last week, a three-judge federal court, following Supreme Court decisions on similar programs in three other states, declared Rockefeller's plan unconstitutional, an "excessive entanglement between government and religion."

Undaunted, Rockefeller and Republican legislative leaders announced that they would find alternative ways to help parochial schools, possibly in the form of state income tax deductions for the parochial students' parents. But a spokesman for an association dedicated to church-state separation said that it would next challenge the $28 million in aid that is already going to non-public schools for state-required recordkeeping, transportation and book allowances.

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