WASHINGTON — Oklahoma will not be able to launch the nation’s first religious public charter school after the Supreme Court on Thursday deadlocked 4-4 in a major case on the separation of church and state.

The decision by the evenly divided court means that a ruling by the Oklahoma Supreme Court that said the proposal to launch St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School violates both the federal Constitution and state law remains in place.

As there was no majority, the court did not issue a written decision, and the case sets no nationwide precedent on the contentious legal question of whether religious schools must be able to participate in taxpayer-funded state charter school programs.

A key factor in the outcome was that conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who would have been the deciding vote, did not participate in the case. She did not explain why, but it is likely because of her ties with Notre Dame Law School. The law school’s religious liberty clinic represents the school.

The one-page decision did not say how each justice voted. During oral arguments last month, most of the court’s conservatives indicated support for the school while liberals expressed concern. At least one conservative is likely to have sided with the liberals, most likely Chief Justice John Roberts.

The court will likely be asked to weigh in on the issue in future cases.

St. Isidore would have operated online statewide with a remit to promote the Catholic faith.

The case highlights tensions within the Constitution’s First Amendment; one provision, the Establishment Clause, prohibits state endorsement of religion or preference for one religion over another, while another, the Free Exercise Clause, bars religious discrimination.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court had cited the state’s interest in steering clear of Establishment Clause violations as a reason not to allow the proposal submitted by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa to move forward.

A state board approved the proposal for St. Isidore in June 2023 despite concerns about its religious nature, prompting Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond to file suit.

The case saw Drummond on the opposite side of fellow Republicans in the state who backed the idea, but he prevailed at the Oklahoma Supreme Court the following year.

The Supreme Court, when Barrett is participating, has a 6-3 conservative majority that often backs religious rights. In recent years it has repeatedly strengthened the Free Exercise Clause in cases brought by conservative religious liberty activists, sometimes at the expense of the Establishment Clause. Some conservatives have long complained that the common understanding that the Establishment Clause requires strict separation of church and state is incorrect.

Lawyers representing the school and the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board sought to portray the dispute as similar to a series of recent rulings in which the court said that under the Free Exercise Clause, states cannot bar religious groups from government programs that are open to everyone else.

During the oral argument, Roberts pushed back, indicating that he saw the schools case as different from the previous decisions.

Those cases, he said, “involved fairly discrete state involvement” compared with Oklahoma’s charter school program.

“This does strike me as a much more comprehensive involvement,” he added.

The push for religious public charter schools dovetails with the school choice movement, which supports parents using taxpayer funds to send their children to private school. Public school advocates see both efforts as broad assaults on traditional public schools.

Graduating students of color at Harvard University and other colleges across the country would end their semester by attending affinity graduation ceremonies — but this year, they had to organize these celebrations without the school’s financial backing.

Harvard, currently battling the Trump administration over a range of issues, halted all of its affinity ceremonies for students this year. This left alumni stepping in to raise funds and students scrambling to find new spaces.

Members of the Harvard Black Alumni Society raised $46,000 for this year’s event after the university announced April 28 that it would no longer fund the ceremonies.

“This rapid response from our alumni network demonstrates the strength and commitment of our community,” Alana Brown, the society’s university relations chair, said in a statement earlier this week.

An attendee of Harvard’s canceled Lavender Graduation, which celebrates LGBTQ students, said on Facebook that a small group of students had organized an independent event.

“It was a beautiful mix of #lgtbqia young people and elders,” the attendee, Peter Khan, added. “It was an honor and privilege to be there.”

Harvard’s Asian American Alumni Alliance said on Facebook that its ceremony was important for students to experience because they provide space for recognition, solidarity, and community in the face of uncertainty. The alliance said the ceremony took place as the Trump administration announced plans to revoke student visas for international students at the university.

These actions come as the Trump administration this week asked federal agencies to potentially end their contracts with the university, worth an estimated $100 million in funding. These threats follow President Donald Trump’s executive order ending federal spending toward DEI, which he calls “radical and wasteful.”

Affinity graduations at most higher education institutions are usually optional and supplement the main commencement ceremony. They are meant to honor students’ academic achievements and cultural identities, specifically those from communities that have “historically been denied access to higher education because of who they are,” according to the Leadership Conference Education Fund, a civil rights policy think tank. This includes disabled students, people of color, Jewish and first-generation students, among others.

The university joins many others across the nation that have canceled affinity graduations after the federal crackdown on funding for colleges. Notre Dame canceled its Lavender Graduation for 50 LGBTQ students, with members of the university’s Alumni Rainbow Community and the Notre Dame Club of Greater Louisville stepping in to host an independent ceremony this month.

Wichita State University, the University of Louisville and the University of Kentucky also canceled some or all of its affinity ceremonies. The Hispanic Educators Association of Nevada said it canceled its event for Latino students because of a lack of financial support.

Harvard University did not respond to NBC News for a request to comment. Earlier this year, the college announced it would “no longer provide funding, staffing, or spaces for end-of-year affinity celebrations. Under the new auspices of Community and Campus Life, the University is building inclusive traditions that reflect the richness of every student’s experience and reinforce our shared identity as one Harvard community.”

Jean Beaman, an associate professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York, said affinity graduations also recognize the range “of challenges and obstacles that students who come from various minoritized populations at predominantly white institutions face as they work towards their degrees.”

One example she cites is affinity graduations for Black students, which speak to “the ways that our accomplishments are not just ours, but also something in line with that of our ancestors and the hurdles of our ancestors, and making that more central to the festivities that you would have in a ‘typical’ graduation.”

Beaman calls the affinity graduation cancellations nationwide “a very disturbing development,” since she said many seem to be acting based on Trump’s executive orders and not on the law.

“It’s a way in which institutions of higher education are participating in anticipatory obedience,” Beaman said.

The Maricopa County Community Colleges District in Arizona canceled a ceremony for Indigenous students within the past few weeks, citing “new enforcement priorities set by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights,” which affect “programs and activities that focus solely on race, identity, or national origin,” according to an email obtained by NBC News.

Collin Skeets, a member of the Navajo Nation who received his associate degree in secondary education this month from Mesa Community College, said that “it was pretty heartbreaking” and that he even shed some tears over the cancellation. Once again he said he felt like he was again being told “no” after the history of hardships his own Indigenous ancestors had endured in continuing their education.

“Just knowing that I was able to graduate was just an unbelievable feeling, it’s hard to put into words,” said Skeets, who is 36 and a first-generation college student. He said he was looking forward to wearing his traditional clothing to graduation and celebrating with other Indigenous students.

Eventually the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community intervened, holding a ceremony on its reservation near Scottsdale. Skeets said he felt “so much better” knowing he could share the experience with family and even spoke at the ceremony

“Things kind of fell through at first but then came back and all meshed together in a way that I was able to celebrate with family again and achieve this milestone in my life,” he said.

Beaman of CUNY said she hopes schools will “put their foot down” against the cancellations in the future. Holding affinity graduations off-campus is a “testament of their will and determination,” she said of students, adding that it likely helped them obtain their degrees.

“It’s also a reminder that — both presently and historically — students have often had to be the vanguard of change in institutions of higher education, particularly predominantly white institutions, and I see this as no different from that.”

A federal judge in Massachusetts on Thursday issued an injunction blocking the Trump administration from dismantling the Department of Education and ordering that fired employees be reinstated.

“The record abundantly reveals that Defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department without an authorizing statute,” U.S. District Judge Myong Joun wrote, noting “the Department cannot be shut down without Congress’s approval.”

The judge said an injunction was necessary because “The supporting declarations of former Department employees, educational institutions, unions, and educators paint a stark picture of the irreparable harm that will result from financial uncertainty and delay, impeded access to vital knowledge on which students and educators rely, and loss of essential services for America’s most vulnerable student populations.”

Prior to the mass firings, or reduction in force, “the Department was already struggling to meet its goals, so it is only reasonable to expect that an RIF of this magnitude will likely cripple the Department,” Joun wrote.

A spokesperson for the Education Department, Madi Biedermann, said officials “will immediately challenge this on an emergency basis.”

The cuts were announced after President Donald Trump pledged to shutter the department, and days before he issued an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education,” the judge noted.

In her confirmation hearing, McMahon testified that the administration would not attempt to abolish the department without congressional approval, as required by law, and said that she would present a plan that senators could get on board with.

“We’d like to do this right,” she said, adding that shutting down the department “certainly does require congressional action.”

The judge wrote that the administration also acknowledged in court filings that “the Department cannot be shut down without Congress’s approval, yet they simultaneously claim that their legislative goals (obtaining Congressional approval to shut down the Department) are distinct from their administrative goals (improving efficiency).”

“There is nothing in the record to support these contradictory positions,” the judge added.

“Not only is there no evidence that Defendants are pursuing a ‘legislative goal’ or otherwise working with Congress to reach a resolution, but there is also no evidence that the RIF has actually made the Department more efficient. Rather, the record is replete with evidence of the opposite,” he wrote.

While administration says the reduction in force “was implemented to improve ‘efficiency’ and ‘accountability,’” the judge wrote, the “record abundantly reveals that Defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department without an authorizing statute.”

He ordered the administration not to implement Trump’s order, and said it must reinstate federal employees whose employment was terminated on or after Jan. 20. The judge said those moves were necessary “to restore the Department to the status quo such that it is able to carry out its statutory functions.”

It also blocks the department “from carrying out the President’s March 21, 2025 Directive to transfer management of federal student loans and special education functions out of the Department.”

Biedermann, the Education Department spokesperson, blasted the judge in a statement and said the ruling “is not in the best interest of American students or families.”

“Once again, a far-left Judge has dramatically overstepped his authority, based on a complaint from biased plaintiffs, and issued an injunction against the obviously lawful efforts to make the Department of Education more efficient and functional for the American people,” the statement said.

“President Trump and the Senate-confirmed Secretary of Education clearly have the authority to make decisions about agency reorganization efforts, not an unelected Judge with a political axe to grind,” Biedermann added.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the plaintiffs in the case, praised the ruling, which she said “rightly rejected one of the administration’s very first illegal, and consequential, acts: abolishing the federal role in education.”

“This decision is a first step to reverse this war on knowledge and the undermining of broad-based opportunity,” she said in a statement.