Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could profoundly reshape parents’ rights and curriculum decisions in public schools. Legally, Mahmoud v. Taylor asks whether public schools burden parents’ First Amendment right to religious freedoms by introducing students to content with which their parents disagree.
Attempting to resolve these types of issues through constitutional adjudication risks bypassing the intimate, local, relational, and pedagogically rich contexts in which public education operates and thrives. The court’s ruling, which is expected next month, will likely favor one side over the other—and therefore may silence the very conversations that help schools and families navigate differences with understanding and respect.
Prompted by the inclusion of books in elementary school classrooms, parents of students in the Montgomery County, Md., district are suing for the right to opt their children out of exposure to books they view as infringing on their rights. The school board, which oversees one of the nation’s most religiously diverse districts, approved several books featuring LGBTQ+ characters for use in elementary classrooms in the 2022-23 school year.
The district initially allowed parents to opt their children out of lessons involving the books but reversed course later that school year, citing administrative challenges. (In Montgomery County and throughout the United States, parents are generally permitted to opt their students out of particular subjects, like sex education.) In denying the parents the ability to opt out, the board invoked long-standing precedent from the lower courts: Mere exposure to disagreeable ideas does not violate the First Amendment.
The oral arguments last month revealed the difficulties of drawing this line, as the justices asked the lawyers many questions and presented numerous hypotheticals. The Supreme Court justices wrestled with what constitutes a “burden” on religion and where exposure ends and coercion begins—a crucial distinction in education law. For example, teaching about Islam and asking students to demonstrate their understanding is permitted (see the 2019 federal circuit court ruling in Wood v. Arnold), but compelling agreement with its tenets is not.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the parents are “not asking the school to change its curriculum. They’re just saying, ‘Look, we want out.’ Why isn’t that feasible? What is the big deal about allowing them to opt out of this?”
Most principals and teachers know quite well why opt-outs are indeed a “big deal.” If students need to be removed from a lesson, they need somewhere to go. They need someone to supervise them. And they need something to do—typically an alternative assignment covering similar concepts or standards, allowing them to still meet required curricular objectives.
As we navigate a national teacher shortage, with those remaining in the profession already overburdened by compounding mandates and ever-increasing expectations, adding additional supervisory and lesson-creation tasks could easily overwhelm a profession already near the breaking point. This is an issue that Justice Elena Kagan repeatedly returned to, invoking the idea of equal education opportunities.
Cases involving schools and parent and student rights often reduce highly complex, deeply personal, and profoundly emotional issues to a simple binary. As we have seen in this case and many others, narratives are often defined by extremes.
One extreme claims that mere exposure to LGBTQ+ people infringes on parents’ rights to direct the care and upbringing of their children; the other paints anyone who questions inclusivity initiatives like this as bigoted or intolerant. Most disagreements, though, live well within these extremes. And the act of working through those disagreements has enormous value. Schools and communities, not courts, should be where that happens.
In our years working in middle and high schools and with school leaders, we encountered people daily with whom we may have ideologically disagreed on one thing or another. However, the job of school leaders and educators is not to make someone believe what we want them to believe. Instead, it is to facilitate an open dialogue based on respect and understanding.
Of course, we both had values that we wouldn’t compromise, just like our schools’ parents and teachers did. But it was an extremely rare occasion when we couldn’t come to a mutually agreeable solution without resorting to external adjudication.
After all, parents want what’s best for their kids. Teachers and schools want the same thing. We may not always agree about how to get there, but if we lead with compassion, listen to one another, involve stakeholders in our decisionmaking, communicate our values, and treat people with respect, we can get pretty close.
Will that solve every ideological dispute? Absolutely not. But it will likely resolve most, and generally, the process of resolving these disagreements strengthens relationships and builds trust. It is that very process of building a democratic community that has always been a foundational goal of public education in the United States.
Civic unity is not about agreement or sameness. It’s about cultivating the habits of democratic life: dialogue, compromise, mutual respect. That kind of unity is forged through navigating differences, not in spite of them.
Unfortunately, the upcoming decision in Mahmoud risks silencing these conversations. Either the parents prevail, and schools may need to accommodate every opt-out request, or the school wins, and parents have little choice but to subject their kids to whatever the school wants to teach.
Sure, either result would eliminate the guesswork and provide a solution for those few unresolvable disagreements, but they would also eliminate the countless conversations that do lead to meaningful resolutions, jeopardizing the opportunity to build relationships in our communities.
When the court constitutionalizes school-based conflicts, it risks displacing local, democratic, and educational processes. While these processes can often be difficult and messy, they help communities learn to understand one another and live with their differences.
Schools aren’t just places where we teach democracy. They’re where we practice it. That’s a responsibility too important to hand over to the courts.
