Education Battles Get National Attention

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Two critical education issues have reached the U.S. Supreme Court. One involves Montgomery County Public Schools, one of the nation’s largest school districts. A group of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim parents is arguing that the Maryland school district violated their First Amendment right to religious freedom when it refused to allow them to opt their children out of LGBTQ-themed lessons.

The case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, illustrates the growing tension between sex-obsessed schools and the rights of religious parents, who are  challenging the Montgomery County School Board’s decision in 2022 to approve more than 22 LGBTQ+ books for classroom use, including works like “Pride Puppy,” “Intersection Allies,” and “What Are Your Words.”

According to court documents, one of the books, Pride Puppy, is a “picture book directed to three and four-year-olds that describes a Pride parade and what a child might find there.” The book invites students to search for various images, including “underwear, leather, lip ring, drag king, and drag queen.”

Other books adopted by the Montgomery County School Board promote pride parades and gender transitioning while advocating for a “child-knows-best” approach to social transitioning. The books tell students that their decision to transition to another gender doesn’t have to “make sense,” and unbelievably, that physicians in the delivery room guess newborn babies’ sexual identity.

Montgomery County argues that if families choose to attend public schools, they “are not cognizably coerced by their children’s exposure there to religiously objectionable ideas.” If the First Amendment gives parents a right to pick and choose from the curriculum, the county says there’s “no discernible limit,” and it would work the same in science or history classes. Public schools “simply cannot accommodate” these exceptions.

Ultimately, the case is really about parental rights, as it also applies to nonreligious parents. As Melissa Moschella, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, writes, “When I told my father, who is secular and a staunch Democrat, about this case, he said that you don’t have to be religious to object to telling 3-year-olds that doctors only ‘guess’ a baby’s sex at birth or giving them a ‘Pride Puppy’ storybook instructing them to search for images of things they would find at a pride parade, such as a drag queen, leather and an intersex flag. He thinks that parents having the right to opt their children out of such indoctrination is just common sense.”

The Court heard the arguments on April 22, and it looks favorable for the plaintiffs.

“What is the big deal about allowing them to opt out of this?” Justice Samuel Alito asked Alan Schoenfeld, who represents the school district. As an example of a “clear moral message,” Alito pointed to Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, a picture book focusing on a girl’s feelings of jealousy when her favorite uncle gets married to another man. “It doesn’t just say ‘Look, Uncle Bobby and Jamie are getting married.’ It expresses the idea [that] this is a good thing.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a long-time resident of Montgomery County, was surprised that “this is the hill we’re going to die on” because the state of Maryland was “founded upon religious liberty and religious tolerance.”

Even liberal Justice Elena Kagan seems to be on the parents’ side, “I too was struck by—these are, you know, young kids’ picture books, and on matters concerning sexuality, I suspect there are a lot of nonreligious parents who weren’t all that thrilled about this, and then you, you know, add in religion, and — and that’s, you know, even more serious.”

The second case the Supreme Court will rule on is Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, which addresses whether the St. Isidore of Seville Virtual Charter School should be allowed in Oklahoma. The Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa had won approval for the school from the state charter board despite acknowledging that St. Isidore would participate “in the evangelizing mission of the Church.”

Much of the commentary about the case is hysterical. Yale Law School professor Justin Driver warned that a religious charter school threatens to “destroy the American public school as we have known it” and “raze foundational structures of American law and life.”

This is nonsense. Although charter schools are nominally public schools, the legal issue before the court isn’t concerned with traditional public schools, which are operated by school districts. They are unquestionably government entities and therefore should be secular. Charter schools, however, are privately operated and have their own boards.

Phil Sechler, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group, asserts that charter schools aren’t government actors but rather “private contractors.” Sechler maintains that, as private entities, they should have the same ability to apply for a charter as a secular group.

In reality, billions of taxpayer dollars go to private schools, many of which are religious, in the form of vouchers, and the U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in on this issue. In Espinoza v. Montana (2020), SCOTUS endorsed a state tax credit program that pays for students to attend religious schools.

Also, the Supreme Court’s Carson v. Makin decision in 2022 revolved around Maine’s town tuition law, which allows parents living in districts that do not own and operate elementary or secondary schools to send their children to public or private schools in other areas of the state, or even outside the state, using funds provided by the child’s home district. SCOTUS ruled that if a state subsidizes private education, it cannot disqualify religious schools.

It’s important to note that government-run schools in the U.S. have traditionally been religious. The public school movement was started to instill Protestant values in our nation’s youth. Catholics, Jews, and others had to pay extra for schools that reflected their religious ideals.

Public schools are still religious, but now the dominant belief system in many of them is leftism or cultural Marxism. Many of its practitioners teach Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) with devotional zealotry.

Both of the SCOTUS cases could have been avoided entirely by a system of universal choice, which lets all parents control how education dollars are spent.

Should the Supreme Court come down on the parents’ side in these two cases, their children and the nation will be much better off. At the same time, the Educational Industrial Complex will take a well-deserved gut-punch.

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Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.