To no one’s surprise, the Supreme Court agreed with the parents in Mahmoud v. Taylor, among the most high-profile cases of the court’s 2025 term. The case arose when the Montgomery County (Maryland) school board decided to force students in kindergarten through 6th grade to read or listen to books exploring themes such as transgenderism and Pride parades. In a 6–3 decision, the court granted the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian parents’ request for an injunction protecting their right to opt their children out of instruction on gender and sexuality that violates their religious convictions, ruling that the parents were likely to succeed on the merits.
Recognizing what a disaster the case was for the school district and the public education establishment, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten lamented on X that the case “should have been worked out on a local level, it’s a shame it went all the way to SCOTUS. Parents must have a say about their own kids, they are our partners in education.” Except a belligerent school board that was too stubborn or mathematically challenged to count votes on the Supreme Court made that impossible. Even though the decision reached the rather obvious conclusion that compelling children to receive instruction contrary to parents’ traditional religious beliefs on sexual ethics violates their free exercise rights, it raises other questions related to school choice.
Citing Pierce v. Society Sisters (1925) and Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the majority strongly reaffirmed that parents have the right to direct the religious upbringing of their children. Pierce famously declared that “the child is not the mere creature of the state” (see “The Centennial of Pierce v. Society of Sisters,” features, Summer 2025). Yoder held that Wisconsin’s compulsory education law violated the free exercise rights of Amish parents because it would force their children into an environment “hostile” to their beliefs. Bizarrely, the lower courts had held that Yoder only applied to the Amish, claiming it was “sui generis” and “inexorably linked to the Amish community’s unique religious beliefs and practices”—as if a religion had to be a quaint tourist attraction to receive constitutional protection. Alito quickly dispensed with that claim, writing that “Yoder is an important precedent of this Court, and it cannot be breezily dismissed as a special exception granted to one particular religious minority.”
Combined with the Court’s reasoning in the trilogy of Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana (2020), and Carson v. Makin (2022)—holding that the government cannot make receipt of a public benefit contingent on accepting a burden on religious belief—the Mahmoud decision clearly provides additional ballast for school choice. As Justice Alito pointed out, the school board’s callous defense that, in its graciousness, the state still allowed parents to send their children to private school and teach them at home was no defense at all. “It is both insulting and legally unsound,” he wrote, “to tell parents that they must abstain from public education in order to raise their children in their religious faiths, when alternatives can be prohibitively expensive and they already contribute to financing the public schools.”
As Justice Stephen Breyer noted in his dissent in Espinoza, it is a very short walk from the court’s reasoning to a mandate for universal school choice. Must a school district, Breyer wondered, “pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to send their children to religious schools?” After all, if education is the generally available public benefit, then paying only for education in secular public schools deprives parents whose convictions impel them to seek out a religious education for their child of a benefit available to others. It’s not difficult to imagine other school districts adopting a similarly rigid and discriminatory posture towards religious parents, followed by additional litigation that pushes the majority in Mahmoud toward the position that a neutral, secular education is a chimera. Blinkered and obstinate school boards like Montgomery County’s could turn out to be school choice’s best friend.
