The last U.S. Supreme Court term was among the most consequential in recent years for K-12 education, with the justices issuing major rulings on special education, the federal E-rate program for school internet connections, and parental rights to exclude their children from LGBTQ+-themed lessons.
The court also deadlocked in a case on religious charter schools, leaving for another day the question of whether states may directly provide public funding to religiously affiliated schools.
“I’ve long maintained that the public school is the most significant site of constitutional interpretation and legal conflict in our nation’s history,” said Justin Driver, a Yale University law professor and leading expert on education law. “The Supreme Court’s recent intervention in this area only underscores that proposition.”
The new term opens Oct. 6—unaffected for now by the federal budget shutdown because the court’s own fees and reserves can fund operations for now—with one major education issue already on the docket: A potentially landmark pair of cases about transgender students’ participation in girls’ sports, to be argued late this year or early next year.
The cases, involving Idaho and West Virginia laws that bar students who were assigned male at birth from female sports, will continue a debate over transgender rights reflected in the court’s decision last term upholding a Tennessee law that bars certain medical treatments for transgender youths.
Meanwhile, the education community is watching a handful of other cases on such wide-ranging topics as counseling therapies for LGBTQ+ patients and President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffs.
But the court is still adding cases to be heard this term, and it’s possible that legal battles over Trump administration cuts to federal education funding and the gutting of the U.S. Department of Education, along with other matters of interest to educators, could be added. The justices granted review of last term’s three biggest education cases—on special education, religious charters, and parental rights over the curriculum—in January and heard arguments in April.
Transgender cases from Idaho and West Virginia
The transgender sports cases have been working their way through the courts for several years, even as more states—now 27—adopt similar laws barring transgender girls and from participating in female athletics.
West Virginia v. B.P.J. involves that state’s 2021 Save Women’s Sports Act. The law was challenged by a now 15-year-old transgender student, Becky Pepper-Jackson, who was assigned male at birth and transitioned in 3rd grade. She sought to participate in girls’ track in the spring of 2023, and after she won an injunction, the state sought emergency review by the Supreme Court. The court declined to intervene, over the dissent of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, in Richmond, Va., upheld the injunction allowing Pepper-Jackson to participate in girls’ sports under both the equal-protection clause and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded schools.
The other case is Little v. Hecox, involving Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act, a 2020 law that was the first of its kind in the nation. The law was challenged on behalf of a transgender female student who, at the time, was playing soccer on the girls’ team at Boise High School, as well as by Lindsay Hecox, a transgender female who aspired to join the track team at Boise State University.
A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, last year upheld an injunction blocking the law as it applied to Hecox. The panel said the law likely violates the equal-protection clause, but it didn’t rule on a claim that it also violated Title IX.
The states both appealed to the Supreme Court, which appeared to hold on to the cases while the justices weighed United States v. Skrmetti, in which it upheld the Tennessee law banning certain gender-transition treatments for transgender minors.
The court in Skrmetti ruled 6-3 that the Tennessee law classified people based on age and medical status, not sex, and the decision left open several key issues surrounding transgender rights. But two justices in the majority sent a signal that they believe states have wide authority to regulate sports eligibility and access to restrooms for transgender students.
“Legislatures have many valid reasons to make policy” regarding access to restrooms, girls’ and boys’ eligibility for sports teams, “and so long as a statute is a rational means of pursuing a legitimate end, the Equal Protection Clause is satisfied,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in a concurrence joined by Thomas.
Both West Virginia and Idaho filed supplemental briefs in the Supreme Court after the Skrmetti decision, renewing their request that the court grant review, and the court did so in July.
Jonathan Scruggs, a senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that is helping Idaho defend its law, said “the court can address all these important issues … that have really been percolating in the lower courts for over a decade. I think the one thing that everyone agrees on is that we need clarity on this issue.”
Speaking at a Federalist Society online forum last month, Scruggs said state laws like Idaho’s do not make distinctions based on gender identity.
“Our argument would be that these [laws] are not singling out people who identify as the opposite sex, but that [lawmakers] were responding to a natural result of men taking away women’s opportunities in sports,” he said.
Questions about whether Idaho case is moot
The American Civil Liberties Union represents the challengers in both cases. Joshua Block, a senior lawyer with the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project, said this week that the state bans “are shockingly broad,” applying to everything from friendly school club leagues to state championships.
“This is part of a public education that [the transgender students] are being fenced out of,” he said, adding that supporters of such laws are hoping the court will use these cases to issue a broader ruling against transgender rights.
“We know that’s exactly why these laws were passed in the first place,” Block said. “They were passed as part of a movement to establish the idea, both in popular belief and in the law, that transgender girls and women are not real girls and women, and that they shouldn’t be treated as such.”
One late procedural skirmish has arisen in the Idaho case. Hecox, 24, filed papers in the lower courts and the Supreme Court seeking to dismiss her suit and the high court review of it. The ACLU said she has not been able to make intercollegiate track or cross country teams, and the negative public scrutiny from the case has distracted her from her schoolwork. So, because she is not seeking to participate in an athletic activity covered by the Idaho law, she believes her case is moot.
Idaho officials, seeking to maintain the Supreme Court review of their state’s law, argue the case is not moot and that Hecox should not be allowed to withdraw her case.
Even if the Supreme Court drops the Idaho case, the West Virginia case presents the same equal-protection question as well as the Title IX issue.
No argument date has been set, but December or January is likely, whether it is just for the West Virginia case, or both.
Court to weigh Colorado ban on ‘conversion therapy’
There are a handful of other cases that educators are watching on the merits docket of the new term, and there is the possibility of more education cases being added yet.
In Chiles v. Salazar, the court will examine a Colorado law that bars mental health professionals from engaging in “conversion therapy” that aims to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of a minor. The law has been challenged as an unconstitutional ban on free speech by a Christian youth counselor who sometimes counsels young people on those topics.
Various forms of conversion therapy have been denounced by major mental health groups, including the American School Counselors Association. And several LGBTQ+ support groups have filed friend-of-the-court briefs supporting Colorado, arguing that such therapies are more likely to lead youths to fare poorly in school or to drop out.
The case is set for argument on Oct. 7.
An educational toy company battles Trump tariffs
President Trump’s tariff policies, which are being felt by schools across the country, will be reviewed by the court on Nov. 5 in two cases, including one challenge by a pair of Chicago-area educational toy and resource companies that say they have been hit hard by tariffs.
Learning Resources Inc. and hand2mind Inc. are two related, family-owned businesses based in Vernon Hills, Ill., that market more than 2,000 educational toys and other products, such as Brightkins, Peekaboo Learning Farm, as well as specialized offerings for STEM, coding, and social-emotional learning.
The companies import most of their products from China and other countries hit by Trump administration tariffs, and they were among the first to challenge the president’s policies, leading to an injunction blocking the tariffs only for them.
The Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in their case, Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump, as well as a separate case brought by a broader array of businesses, and it will decide whether the president has the authority to impose the tariffs.
The justices will continue to add cases to its merits docket for this term. Among the appeals pending are two that involve school district policies on transgender student transitions, with parents or parent groups alleging that schools do not inform them or respect their wishes regarding their children’s names and pronouns. The court may hold those appeals pending the outcome of the transgender sports cases.
There is also an appeal pending regarding state-mandated vaccinations for school attendance, with a group of Amish schools and parents in New York state hoping the justices will take up their case challenging the lack of a religious exemption for such procedures.
Meanwhile, the court has sided with the Trump administration this year on two emergency matters involving the elimination of federal teacher-training grants and job cuts in the Department of Education. Those were tentative decisions (at least in theory), and the court could revisit the issues after lower courts reach more definitive rulings on those and other challenges to Trump administration actions.
