(Daily Signal)—Oklahoma consistently ranks among the worst states in the country for public school outcomes. In an effort to improve educational options, the state’s official charter school board and an online Catholic charter school are fighting what they say is religious discrimination all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Charter schools in Oklahoma are run by private entities that receive public funding through a contract with the state. These schools are open to all students, tuition-free. Attorneys from the Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom are appealing an Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling from June 2024 that said the state’s charter school board could not authorize a contract with St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School because the school is religious.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond on April 30.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a lawsuit against the board in the state Supreme Court for failing to adhere to state law when it granted a charter authorization to St. Isidore. Article 2 Section 5 of the Oklahoma Constitution prevents public money from supporting any religious institution. The attorney general also cited the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution and a nonsectarian provision in the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, which classifies charter schools as public schools.
Though not technically a Blaine Amendment, the provision in the state constitution follows from the same history as the proposed but failed 19th-century U.S. constitutional amendment that would have forbidden the states to grant public money or lands to schools with religious affiliations. Thirty-seven states passed their own so-called “mini” Blaine amendments around the turn of the last century. Oklahoma followed suit when it achieved statehood in 1907.
Andrea Picciotti-Bayer, an attorney and the director of The Conscience Project, said the mini Blaine amendments originate from anti-Catholic and anti-minority discrimination.
“You can’t shake the discriminatory foundation and history even if, in Oklahoma’s [case], it may not have had its genesis at the time of [Blaine], it still reflects this anti-religion animus and bigotry,” Picciotti-Bayer said.
Ashley McGuire, a senior fellow with The Catholic Association, said the Supreme Court has been chipping away at the teeth of the states’ Blaine amendments in recent years. In Ezpinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue in 2022, the court held Montana violated the free exercise of religion clause of the First Amendment by preventing families from using state-funded tuition assistance at private Catholic schools.
In a brief filed March 31, Drummond said a taxpayer-funded public Catholic charter school would violate the U.S. Constitution.
“Oklahoma readily agrees that there is no categorical bar against public monies reaching (and funding) private religious schools, including for devotional instruction and ministry, through such parental choice programs,” the filing said. “No one doubts that such an education can be profoundly valuable. But it is not one that states must provide in public schools.”
Oklahoma’s school choice laws offer tax credits and tuition assistance for religious private schools, he said, thus eliminating the need for religious public schools.
The case is not about the exclusion of a religious entity from government aid, according to Drummond’s press secretary Leslie Berger. It is about the state’s creation of a religious school, which is the establishment of religion, she said.
“St. Isidore’s proponents have said the public charter school will be ‘Catholic in every way,’ from employment regulations to Catholic instruction,” Berger said. “As the attorney general has argued, that simply cannot be squared with the Oklahoma Constitution or the U.S. Constitution. The framers of the U.S. Constitution and those who drafted Oklahoma’s Constitution wisely understood how best to protect religious freedom: by preventing the state from sponsoring any religion at all. If St. Isidore Catholic public charter school is allowed to proceed, the inevitable result will be taxpayer-funded public schools teaching Sharia law, Wicca—even the Church of Satan.”
The head of the state’s charter school board said he is more concerned with improving test scores than proselytizing the youth. Oklahoma ranks 48th out of 51 (including Washington, D.C.) in one World Population Review ranking state public school systems based on K-12 performance, school funding and resources, higher education quality, and safety.
“We want to make sure we have great options for families to choose and expand their choices so that we can improve educational outcomes for the state of Oklahoma and the children and the families,” Chairman of Oklahoma’s Statewide Charter School Board Brian Shellem told The Daily Signal.
The charter school initiative gives parents the option to pull their children out of low-performing public schools and give them better educational opportunities at no cost, Shellem said. The charter contract prevents Isidore from excluding children based on religion.
The U.S. Constitution trumps state constitutions on First Amendment violations, according to Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Phil Sechler.
“That Constitution makes clear that you’re entitled to the free exercise of religion, which the Supreme Court has made clear, means that state programs, government programs that are open to private groups are open to religious groups, too,” Sechler said. “They have to be.”
Shellem said the online school would provide an option for low-income or rural families who may not otherwise have access to a charter or private school. The state’s charter school board approved St. Isidore on its merit as an educational program, he said.
“We want the best results,” Shellem said. “We want the people who can get the job done the best. And we shouldn’t be excluding those who can get it done just because they have a religious affiliation.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
