The Education Law Project’s international work focuses on how the law shapes educational pluralism in other countries, especially in the Global South. In much of the Global South, where fragile states lack capacity, the plural delivery of education, and faith-based schools in particular, is critical to the goal of universal education.
To better advance that goal, and to ensure that the most vulnerable children in the world have access to a high-quality education, the the Project engages in scholarship exploring the funding and regulation of faith-based schools abroad, In contrast to the United States, where–until relatively recently–government funding was mostly limited to government-operated public schools, most other nations fund a range of types of schools, public and private, secular and religious. Also in contrast to the United States, where government regulation of private schools has historically been quite minimal, many other countries extensively regulate private schools, either outright or as a condition of receiving public funding. The Education Law Project seeks to document how government policies–including both public funding and regulation–shape the operation of private and faith based schools through a series of scholarly reports on individual nation’s laws, beginning with Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America.
OIDEL Partnership
Additionally, the Education Law Project and the Notre Dame Global Human Rights Clinic have partnered with OIDEL, a nongovernment organization that specializes in the right to education and freedom of education, which holds Consultative Status with ECOSOC, UNESCO and the Council of Europe. The purpose of this partnership is to promote educational pluralism and parental rights in education abroad, both in the national context and in international law bodies. The partnership is a response to the promulgation in 2019 of the so-called “Abidjan principles,” which erroneously argue that–under international human rights law–private and religious schools should not receive public funds and should be governed by the same regulations applied to public school. The partnership seeks to develop guidelines that will counteract these erroneous arguments and ensure that private and religious schools, especially in the Global South, are given the necessary autonomy and religious liberty to operate effectively and are entitled to receive public funding.