234
Opinion of the Court
entanglement. They are present no matter where Title I services are offered, and no court has held that Title I services cannot be offered off campus. Aguilar, supra (limiting holding to on-premises services); Walker v. San Francisco Unified School Dist., 46 F. 3d 1449 (CA9 1995) (same); Pulido v. Cavazos, 934 F. 2d 912, 919-920 (CA8 1991); Committee for Public Ed. & Religious Liberty v. Secretary, United States Dept. of Ed., 942 F. Supp. 842 (EDNY 1996) (same). Further, the assumption underlying the first consideration has been undermined. In Aguilar, the Court presumed that full-time public employees on parochial school grounds would be tempted to inculcate religion, despite the ethical standards they were required to uphold. Because of this risk pervasive monitoring would be required. But after Zobrest we no longer presume that public employees will inculcate religion simply because they happen to be in a sectarian environment. Since we have abandoned the assumption that properly instructed public employees will fail to discharge their duties faithfully, we must also discard the assumption that pervasive monitoring of Title I teachers is required. There is no suggestion in the record before us that unannounced monthly visits of public supervisors are insufficient to prevent or to detect inculcation of religion by public employees. Moreover, we have not found excessive entanglement in cases in which States imposed far more onerous burdens on religious institutions than the monitoring system at issue here. See Bowen, supra, at 615-617.
To summarize, New York City's Title I program does not run afoul of any of three primary criteria we currently use to evaluate whether government aid has the effect of advancing religion: It does not result in governmental indoctrination; define its recipients by reference to religion; or create an excessive entanglement. We therefore hold that a federally funded program providing supplemental, remedial instruction to disadvantaged children on a neutral basis is not invalid under the Establishment Clause when such instruc-
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