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The Supreme Court is currently considering whether the Constitution requires public schools to out transgender students to their parents, even when those students inform the school that they do not want their family to be informed of their gender identity. The case, which is currently pending on the Court’s shadow docket, is known as Mirabelli v. Bonta.

California law provides that public school employees “shall not be required to disclose any information related to a pupil’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression to any other person without the pupil’s consent unless otherwise required by state or federal law.” The plaintiffs in Mirabelli argue that this law is unconstitutional, and they ask the justices to embrace a trial judge’s claim that “when gender incongruence is observed…parents have a right to be informed.”

The Mirabelli plaintiffs, in other words, claim that the Constitution requires the government to side with parents in an internal family dispute with their own children. When a public school student wants to keep their trans identity secret from their parents, these plaintiffs argue, government employees are constitutionally required to defy the child’s wishes and inform the parents regardless.

Key takeaways

Nor is Mirabelli an isolated case. While Mirabelli sits on the Court’s shadow docket (a forum for expedited matters that the justices often decide without explaining why they ruled the way they did), the Court is also weighing whether to hear a nearly identical case, known as Foote v. Ludlow School Committee on its merits docket (unlike shadow docket cases, the justices typically release a published opinion explaining why they ruled the way they did in merits docket cases). Last year, Justice Samuel Alito complained in a third case that, in his view, too many lower courts are avoiding the question of “whether a school district violates parents’ fundamental rights” when they permit a transgender student to socially transition.

Off the Court, the Federalist Society, the powerful legal group with close ties to the Republican justices, hosted a debate at its most recent national convention on whether “parents have a constitutional right to know and consent to public school facilitation of their children’s gender-identity transition.”

This question, in other words, is clearly a matter of great importance to the conservative legal movement’s religious wing. And the Supreme Court’s Republican majority rarely breaks with the religious right on its high-priority issues.

It is inevitable that public school teachers, and the officials who write the curricula taught by public school teachers, will shape the moral beliefs of their students. Indeed, the Supreme Court historically viewed this reality as a good thing. As the Court said in 1979, one of the public school system’s most important functions is to “inculcat[e] fundamental values necessary to the maintenance of a democratic political system.”

To the extent that Americans disagree about which values these schools should teach, the United States has historically managed these disagreements by giving the lion’s share of control over public schools to state governments and local school boards. A school in rural Arkansas may teach different books than a school in Manhattan. And that’s okay.

Lawsuits like Mirabelli and Foote, by contrast, seek to centralize control over public schools in a Supreme Court dominated by conservative Republicans. And those six Republicans recently showed that they are very eager to become superintendents of the entire nation’s public schools.

The religious right just won a transformative victory over public education

Until very recently, federal courts firmly rejected the idea that courts should micromanage how public schools teach and relate to their students — largely due to concerns that schools would find it impossible to function if they were subject to such management. In a 1948 opinion, for example, Justice Robert Jackson wrote that there were “256 separate and substantial religious bodies” within the United States, and warned that “if we are to eliminate everything that is objectionable to any of these warring sects or inconsistent with any of their doctrines, we will leave public education in shreds.”

This hands-off era came to an abrupt halt last June, however, with the Supreme Court’s decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025).

In Mahmoud, the Court’s Republican majority held that parents who object to books with LGBTQ characters or themes must be........

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