One further note from this decision: a concurring Justice
observed that, through this ruling, the Court was now assuming "the role of a
super board of education for every school district in the nation" an ominous
prediction of what has now become the norm. Engel v. Vitale, 1962

For fourteen years following the McCollum case, the Court
not only ceased to strike down voluntary religious activities for students, it
actually upheld them, retreating significantly from its inflexible concept of
"separation" introduced in 1947 in Everson see Zorach v. Clauson, 1952 21.
However, in the Engel case, the Court reverted to its Everson position; it
attacked the long-standing tradition of school prayer and struck down this
simple 22-word prayer from New York schools:

Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and
we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.
Contemporary reviewers often claim that the "real" issue in this prayer case
was coercion since it involved a state approved prayer. Yet this is a misportrayal;
there was no coercion; even the Court conceded that the schools did not compel
any pupil to join in the prayer over his or her parents' objection.

New York had taken great pains to provide that
participation in these prayers be completely voluntary. Furthermore, in an
attempt to be as inoffensive as possible, the prayer's wording was simply a
nonsectarian acknowledgment of God. In fact, that acknowledgment was so bland
that a later court described it "as a 'to-whom-it-may-concern' prayer." Since
the prayer was both voluntary and nondenominational, it should have been
upheld; yet the Court explained why it must be struck down: Neither the fact
that the prayer may be denominationally neutral nor the fact that its
observance on the part of the students is voluntary can serve to free it from
the limitations of the Establishment Clause, as it might from the Free Exercise
Clause, of the First Amendment. It ignores the essential nature of the
program's constitutional defects. Prayer in its public school system breaches
the constitutional wall of separation between Church and State.