Controversy continues to swirl around the Arabic-language Khalil Gibran International Academy in New York and (as Michael previously noted) its bizarro cousin, the Hebrew-language Ben Gamla charter school in Hollywood, Florida. The criticism of both schools is driven by skepticism regarding the secular nature of the schools. It is easy to dismiss the critics as the usual suspects, from Daniel Pipes to the ACLU, but the schools have also drawn criticism from less ideological figures. Recently in the New York Times Magazine, Jewcy's favorite constitutional law scholar Noah Feldman took the view that the projects of isolating Islam from a Arab cultural curriculum and Judaism from Jewish cultural curriculum were ultimately futile tasks, and therefore both schools were of dubious constitutional legitimacy.

Although it cannot be known for certain before they have begun instruction, Khalil Gibran and Ben Gamla seem poised to teach religion as a set of beliefs to be embraced rather than as a set of ideas susceptible to secular, critical examination. What, after all, is the point of a Jewish cultural school if not to bring the students to appreciation and acceptance of Jewish values? And what are those values if not the outgrowth of Judaism's millenniums of religious faith and practice? Not that Judaism without God is impossible. Secular Zionism sought to redirect yearning for God's redemption toward a national homeland. Likewise, Arab nationalism was born from the effort to supplant Islamic religious membership with a secular, cultural identity. But in both cases, the surgery designed to excise God was only partly successful, and there is ample reason to anticipate a recurrence in the classroom as there has been in the rest of the world.

If Feldman is right that Ben Gamla and Khalil Gibran are properly viewed as publicly funded religious schools, they clearly run afoul of the Establishment Clause. If one principle has held constant in the swirling morass that is the Supreme Court's religion jurisprudence, it is that the direct provision of public funds for religious indoctrination is treyf. If this red line is breached, the result will be the creation of multiple and parallel religious establishments - something the Founders clearly rejected.

Given this, the case of religious charter schools calls into serious question the Court's recent jurisprudence in school funding cases, which has held that parochial schools can be funded through public voucher programs. In the 2002 case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Court upheld Cleveland's voucher program despite its inclusion of parochial schools on the grounds that the funding was: (1) distributed through neutral criteria and (2) directed to religious schools as a result the individual private choices of parents. Both of these conditions are also present in a religious charter school context - charters are granted on religious neutral criteria and parents freely elect to send their children to particular charter schools. Thus, the constitutionality of vouchers seems to rest on the mere fact that funds technically pass through the hands of parents on route to funding religious indoctrination, an empty and formalistic distinction.

Even if Ben Gamla and Khalil Gibran could somehow scrub their texts of references to tefilah and salat, tzedaka and zakat, these schools would still be problematic in that they amount to publicly financed self-segregation. It is understandable why parents might want to send little Avi and Ibrahim to these schools. They provide an affordable way to help stem assimilation, through homogeneous social networks and literacy in the native languages of Jewish and Islamic civilizations. But as laudable as these goals from the view of parents, they should not be funded by the American taxpayer. One of the reasons why America has been so successful in integrating its immigrants is that they are thrown into the melting pot of the public school systems. Social networks become mixed, loyalties cross-cutting. If you have any doubts of whether our system works, the European model of state-sponsored religious schools and its failure to integrate Europe's Muslim immigrants stands in sharp contrast. (Or for a more extreme example, Israel's fractured education system and its failure to promote understanding between secular Jews, religious Jews and Israeli Arabs.)

Sure, a case can be made that Ben Gamla is a less problematic than Khalil Gibran as a matter of education policy. American Jews are already well integrated into American society, and the American Jewish success story would make any Jewish public school attractive to non-Jews. (Already Ben Gamla appears to have attracted a significant Black and Latino population.) But it is simply untenable to have a policy of permitting ethnocentric public schools for some cultures and not others and Arab and Muslim Americans would rightly be offended by such a policy.

There is a way out of both the constitutional and policy dilemmas posed by Ben Gamla and Khalil Gibran, one which can retain the primary benefits of these programs. Create charter schools that offer language immersion for multiple cultures- Chinese, Swahili, Farsi - under one roof. Better yet, pair the Hebrew and Arabic language school together, and have Avi and Ibrahim recite Shakespeare and dissect frogs next to each other. Since the Rambam already plenty of schools (as well as a Kentucky Derby favorite) named for him, why not Ibn Ezra-Ibn Rushd. It has a nice ring to it.