With many eyes on the Trump administration’s incendiary attempts to shutter the Department of Education and effectively dismantle public education, fewer people are closely watching how a conservative majority on the Supreme Court is changing how K-12 students learn in the country.
Nevertheless, the court delivered stark change in some instances, while narrowly upholding the status quo in others.
Some of the highlights:
Opting Out of Lessons
This last term brought Mahmoud v. Taylor, which handed a victory to religious parents looking to shield their children from LGBTQ-inclusive materials. The court ruled that Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland had violated parents’ rights when it removed opportunities for parents to opt their children out of lessons with LGBTQ-inclusive materials. Functionally, this allows religious parents to withdraw their students from lessons with LGBTQ-inclusive texts, and it also requires schools to give notice when those lessons occur.
The case will have long-standing reverberations for K-12 schools around the country. And it's a decision some students, parents and teachers have balked at. For instance, Ayah, a high schooler from Montgomery County, said the ruling made students feel “helpless and powerless when it comes to their own education,” in an interview with the National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit focused on gender justice.
In the 2023-2024 school year, PEN America, a nonprofit focused on free expression, noted there were more than 10,000 book bans across the country, many of which targeted books with LGBTQ-inclusive themes. Advocates worry that the decision, in addition to creating logistical hurdles for lessons, will accelerate these sorts of bans.
Keeping Kids Connected
The court preserved the federal E-Rate program. Some schools and libraries rely on this program for broadband and other services, because it provides discounts for districts with high levels of poverty and for schools in rural areas. Postpandemic, with the increase of digital services for students, this has become pivotal to how many schools operate.
But the legal structure behind the funding for this program through the “Universal Service Fund” — which diverts money from telecom companies to a congressionally-created, private nonprofit — was challenged. In FCC v. Consumers’ Research this summer, the court upheld the program.
However, that doesn't mean it won't face future changes or challenges. For example, the Senate passed a measure to peel back the FCC’s plan to use the program to distribute Wi-Fi hot spots, part of the agency's effort to make sure students across the country have an equal chance to complete digital homework assignments.
Funding Religious Instruction
This term, the court also heard a case involving religious schools seeking to access public funds. In St. Isidore v. Drummond, the court weighed in on a case over a contested charter grant issued in Oklahoma to a virtual Catholic charter school that intended to use the money for religious instruction. The case had sought to upend typical notions of separation of church and state in education, extending the logic of recent court interpretations of religious liberty, and the resulting case caused an identity crisis for public charter schools in the country, whose leaders fretted that it could trigger backlash and forcibly reclassify them as private schools.
If successful, the case would have pried open access to public funds and, critics argued, starved public schools of even more money. But with a recusal from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Catholic, the court deadlocked, leading to a 4-4 split.
The result is that the ruling from the lower court held, which had sided with the Oklahoma attorney general, who argued that the school shouldn’t have received the grant.
Unlike some other justices, Barrett refuses to explain her recusals, which she indicated is out of concern for the safety of her family and friends during her current book tour, pointing toward the impact of threats against the court in a politically charged environment.
The case's result doesn’t preclude the issue from coming up in the near future. Indeed, some legal experts predict religious charters will find their way in front of the court again.
But sometimes, what the court doesn’t say has the most impact.
What They Do In the Shadows
With plummeting public trust in the country’s high court, the “shadow docket,” a list of “emergency” cases the court takes on, has become particularly contentious. These rulings don’t require explanations from the court, and the number of these cases it rules on this way has grown in recent years.
This session, the shadow docket included a huge win for the Trump administration’s attempt to dismantle public education. That’s because the court struck down an order from a lower court that was preventing the “reduction in force,” the firing of around half of the Education Department employees. The firings were a part of the administration’s explicit attempts to undo the department, occurring at a time when they are also beefing up investments into private school alternatives.
In the dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor characterized the action as a power grab by the Trump administration. That the court stepped in to give the thumbs up despite the “lawlessness” of the administration’s actions is “indefensible,” she wrote.
The majority did not explain this decision.
