Amid the tumult of President Donald Trump’s first week back in office, the Supreme Court accepted a landmark case that could, depending on how the court rules, allow religious public schools. But while this is an enormous issue on its own, the case could introduce an even more fundamental concept: the recognition that public schooling itself is unconstitutional.

The case the court agreed to hear involves Saint Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, a Catholic charter school approved by the Oklahoma charter schooling board. However, the school ultimately had its charter rescinded after the state’s attorney general intervened and won at the state Supreme Court. Both the charter board and the school’s board are appealing the decision.

A charter school is typically created by a government entity such as a school board. It must meet agreed-upon terms, receive public dollars for each student enrolled, and be public. On the more free-market side, it is typically operated by a private entity chosen by families and is supposed to be free of many rules governing traditional public schools.

Legal opposition to Saint Isidore is grounded in charter schools being public schools. Since the early 1960s, with Supreme Court cases forbidding prayer and Bible reading in public schools, legal precedent has mandated that public schools can have no religious character. There must be a strict “separation of church and state.”

That public schools, government-funded and ‑run schools, should not be able to favor a specific religious group or religious people generally is entirely reasonable. Not only is government establishment of religion forbidden by the First Amendment, but it is clearly a problem for a diverse society if the government elevates one group of people over another. But that also points to a huge problem: Without religion, public schools elevate atheist and agnostic people over religious.

Charter schools are not the same as traditional public schools. Government does not run them, and it mainly funds them because families freely choose them. If there were religious charter schools, in theory, government would not be elevating one religion over another or any religion over secularism. It would simply be allowing people to choose. As the petitioners argue, not allowing religious charter schools is discrimination against religion, keeping people from a generally available benefit, chartering, for being religious.

Charter supporters have a compelling argument; a blanket prohibition against religious charter schools seems like rank discrimination. But there is an important wrinkle: To establish a charter school, a government entity must approve it. In the case of Saint Isidore, it was initially Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, which was later absorbed into the Statewide Charter School Board. The state decides which schools exist and which do not.

The danger is clear: How would one know if a proposed charter school was rejected for being religious? Of a particular religion? Not religious enough? Even if religious motives played no part in a board’s decisions, the suspicion they did could open the state to wrenching battles about all kinds of alleged religious discrimination. It would dangerously entangle the state with religion.

Is the solution to keep discriminating against religion? No.

The first part of solving the problem is to acknowledge what is, frankly, obvious when one thinks about it: Public schooling unconstitutionally and inherently discriminates based on religion. Currently, all people, including religious, must pay for schools that cannot be religious, establishing secularism and elevating atheist and agnostic people over religious. But make the schools religious, and you reverse the discrimination, elevating religious over nonreligious, with the added problem of favoring specific religions and denominations.

Thankfully, government religious neutrality is easy to establish: Funding should follow students to schools or other educational arrangements parents freely choose. Religious or nonreligious. Catholic or Muslim. Private or public. Government funds students, not schools.

It is time we act on what is logically clear: With traditional public schooling, government must discriminate either for or against religion, and even with chartering it untenably decides which schools will exist and which will not. Only when we let families freely choose among independent options will the problem of government discrimination be resolved.