692
Souter, J., dissenting
the entanglement, the Court's focus in the post-Allen cases was on the principle of divertibility, on discerning when ostensibly secular government aid to religious schools was susceptible to religious uses. The greater the risk of diversion to religion (and the monitoring necessary to avoid it), the less legitimate the aid scheme was under the no-aid principle. On the one hand, the Court tried to be practical, and when the aid recipients were not so "pervasively sectarian" that their secular and religious functions were inextricably intertwined, the Court generally upheld aid earmarked for secular use. See, e. g., Roemer v. Board of Public Works of Md., 426 U. S. 736 (1976); Hunt v. McNair, 413 U. S. 734 (1973); Tilton v. Richardson, 403 U. S. 672 (1971). But otherwise the principle of nondivertibility was enforced strictly, with its violation being presumed in most cases, even when state aid seemed secular on its face. Compare, e. g., Levitt v. Committee for Public Ed. & Religious Liberty, 413 U. S. 472, 480 (1973) (striking down state program reimbursing private schools' administrative costs for teacher-prepared tests in compulsory secular subjects), with Wolman v. Walter, 433 U. S. 229, 255 (1977) (upholding similar program using standardized tests); and Meek v. Pittenger, 421 U. S. 349, 369-372 (1975) (no public funding for staff and materials for "auxiliary services" like guidance counseling and speech and hearing services), with Wolman, supra, at 244 (permitting state aid for diagnostic speech, hearing, and psychological testing).
The fact that the Court's suspicion of divertibility reflected a concern with the substance of the no-aid principle is apparent in its rejection of stratagems invented to dodge it. In Committee for Public Ed. & Religious Liberty v. Nyquist, 413 U. S. 756 (1973), for example, the Court struck down a New York program of tuition grants for poor parents and tax deductions for more affluent ones who sent their children to private schools. The Nyquist Court dismissed warranties of a "statistical guarantee," that the scheme provided at most 15% of the total cost of an education at a religious school,
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