It is an unhappy irony that while the nation has traditionally looked to the U.S. Supreme Court for clarity and continuity, the court’s current majority is intent on sowing confusion and chaos by abolishing old standards while providing only the haziest guidance for how to apply their rulings to a real world with which they seem to have little familiarity. But unlike with reproductive rights and gun laws, the court recently provided a clear road map on education, one that we believe can only lead to the end of Vermont’s historic practice of paying tuition to send some students to private schools.

This road map was drawn in a Maine case in which the court ruled last year that while no state is obliged to pay tuition to send students to private schools, if it chooses to do so, it cannot exclude religious schools from the program.

This is certainly an affront to the sharp separation of church and state that we and many others regard as a foundational principle of American democracy. It also contradicts a provision in the Vermont Constitution that says Vermonters cannot be compelled to support a religion with which they disagree. So the Vermont Legislature is faced with the task of reconciling the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the dictates of the U.S. Constitution with the express mandate of the state’s own constitution.

To that end, as our colleague Alex Hanson detailed in a story last Sunday, bills have been introduced in both the House and the Senate in the current session that would require districts that don’t operate schools for students in certain grades to designate up to three public schools and restrict tuition payments to whichever of those families choose, rather than allowing public funds to flow to private schools.

This change would affect relatively few students — only about 4% of publicly funded Vermont students attend private schools, to which the state sends the state-average tuition no matter where they are located, in-state or out. But it could have dire implications for schools such as The Sharon Academy, whose head believes that the end of public funding would likely force the school to close, and for towns such as Hartland, which does not operate a high school and where, as a result, families have enjoyed a wide range of subsidized public and private school options.

As an educational matter, this is a hard call; we are aware that private schools provide wonderful, even life-changing, results for some students. And we do wonder if the Legislature might provide a way for schools such as Sharon Academy to become qualified as quasi-public, in the same way that the state’s four historic independent academies operate as public schools. (The legislation under consideration allows those four — which include Thetford Academy — and therapeutic private schools that serve special education students to continue to receive public funds.)

But whatever pain is involved, as a matter of law and principle, the provision of public funds to religious schools, and their possible use to indoctrinate students in religious dogma, is anathema to anyone who adheres to traditional American nonsectarian values.

It is hard to imagine any halfway measures that would solve the problem, and a VtDigger story, also from last Sunday, suggests why that would be so. It reported that two private religious schools that are seeking public tuition funds — including Mid Vermont Christian School in Quechee — have declined to attest, as required, that they adhere to a Vermont’s Public Accommodations Act, which prohibits discrimination based on “race, creed, color, national origin, marital status, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity.” One can only conclude that they declined to do so because they do not abide by it in all respects.

But denial of public funds to them would likely invite a federal lawsuit claiming a religious exemption to public accommodations laws, arguments to which the U.S. Supreme Court has lately been sympathetic. In the event that such a suit succeeded, Vermont taxpayers would be in the position not only of being forced to subsidize religious groups, but also of paying for discrimination expressly prohibited by state law.

The conclusion seems to us inescapable. The Vermont Legislature should end tuition payments to private schools.

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