Back-to-school season always comes with changes: fresh outfits, a mountain of school supplies that will inevitably and mysteriously vanish halfway through the year, new teachers and friends, and new subjects that might ignite lifelong passions. However, across the country, many parents are finding that back-to-school has brought more changes than they anticipated.
The school may look the same as it did last year, but it is operating under a very different set of rules. For example, the classroom teacher spent all summer documenting every book, worksheet, and discussion topic she plans to use, knowing it will all be scrutinized by the community. The school librarian removed over two dozen books from the library, fearing a single complaint could result in a formal investigation or worse. The freshman history teacher revised his lesson plans so the class will only spend a single day discussing the Civil Rights Movement, understanding additional time could risk an accusation that he is promoting “divisive concepts.” Three teachers resigned from the middle school after learning their classrooms would be livestreamed for parents to monitor. The principal doesn’t know when she’ll find replacements.
This is the state of public education in the age of “parents’ rights.” Parents’ rights were once a legitimate constitutional protection against government overreach, but a decades-long effort by white Christian Nationalists has transformed these rights into a weapon to censor curricula, control what all children learn, and ultimately dismantle public education as we know it. In 2025 alone, lawmakers throughout the United States introduced over 70 bills to expand parents’ rights at the expense of students’ rights. When these bills become law, they serve as a multipronged attack against public schools by overwhelming districts with paperwork and complaints, placing teachers under surveillance, and creating an environment where staff must self-censor to avoid becoming a target.
The silencing and suppression of the majority by a vocal minority was never part of the intended path for parents’ rights. These rights were first articulated in the 1923 Supreme Court case Meyer v. Nebraska as a way to stop government-sponsored cultural conformity. In 1919, the Nebraska legislature enacted the “Siman Act,” which prohibited all public and private school teachers from teaching students in any language other than English. The policy was part of a broader attempt by the state to root out “un-American” influences and forcibly assimilate the large immigrant populations who called Nebraska home. A number of local governments had already prohibited speaking any dialect of German in public, directed companies to cut the telephone lines of any family overheard speaking in German, and prevented more than 60 German newspapers from publishing except in English.
A teacher at a rural Lutheran school, Robert Meyer, found himself targeted by the Siman Act for teaching students in German. The Supreme Court ruled the Act unconstitutionally interfered with parents’ rights to direct their children’s education, including choosing which language(s) their children would learn. The Court emphatically declared that constitutional protections extended “to all, to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue.” A state could not override these rights by statutorily prohibiting education in a foreign language, as parents have a natural duty to guide their children’s development and determine the type of education they receive.
Meyer and subsequent Supreme Court rulings built strong foundations for parents’ rights, particularly focusing on protecting religious and ethnic minorities from government overreach. For much of the 20th century, these protections were used to prevent public education from becoming a tool for government-sponsored ideological conformity. In recent years, however, these protections have been inverted and weaponized. Parents’ rights now serve as a mechanism for extremists to impose their religiopolitical beliefs onto others, effectively creating a system that enforces homogeneity rather than defending diversity.
In 31 states this year, parents’ rights bills proposed sweeping changes to public school operations. They sought to grant parents unprecedented control over curricula; allow real-time classroom monitoring via cameras installed in their children’s classrooms; and would have required teachers to post their entire curriculum, including all supplementary instructional materials, online for parental review. If a parent or guardian was to find any lesson objectionable—a biology class covering evolution, a history unit on the Civil War, or a discussion about women in the workforce—they would be allowed to opt their student out of instruction or petition to have these lessons removed entirely and for everyone, giving a small subset of parents disproportionate power over classroom content and superseding the rights of other students and their families.
Although the majority of these proposals failed, parents’ rights legislation has already reshaped education in dozens of states. Nearly 20 states have enacted some form of parents’ rights law, and 32 states have granted parental rights the strongest possible legal protections, making nearly all government oversight virtually impossible. This has created a complex web of challenges for school districts, which must navigate an administrative minefield in order to properly serve their students.
In these states, curriculum restrictions and surveillance policies have cultivated an environment where educators feel compelled to self-censor. Broad opt-out provisions disrupt daily classroom activities as students come and go when certain topics arise, while administrators struggle with the impossible logistics of facilitating sometimes hundreds of opt-out requests each year. Book challenge procedures— and the fear of them—have dramatically reduced school library collections. The culture warriors have erased LGBTQ+ representation from classrooms and whitewashed history lessons to the point that even the horrors of chattel slavery are glossed over.
Parents’ rights policies have effectively undermined one of public education’s core promises: to provide an equitable learning experience for all students, where every young person receives the resources they need to navigate the world as an adult. The cumulative toll of these policies can only be described as “death by a thousand cuts” to public education.
The legislative assault on public schools received a significant boost from a recent Supreme Court decision, Mahmoud v. Taylor. In the case, parents sought an unprecedented level of control over public education by demanding what amounts to a line-item veto over curricular elements they deem incompatible with their religious beliefs. They argued the government was burdening their religious freedom by offering a free public education while allowing private, religious institutions to provide a similar service at a cost. In other words: The state was interfering with the parents’ rights because someone else was charging money for their services.
This argument was a dramatic deviation from the traditional scope of parental rights, which were long understood to permit parents to choose a public or private education for their children, but never to bestow the right to a free private education. Even so, the Supreme Court sided with the parents in a 6-3 decision and declared that schools must allow curricular opt-outs whenever the topic or materials are in conflict with a parent’s sincerely held religious beliefs.
While the Court majority attempted to frame this radical departure from established precedent as a modest accommodation, Justice Sotomayor revealed its true implications in her dissent: Public schools will face the logistical impossibility of devising curricula that satisfy every possible religious belief. For instance, a guardian whose faith prohibits interracial marriage can demand their child be exempt from any lessons featuring multiracial families. Christian Scientist students can skip basic science lessons, like those about the germ theory of disease. Mormon parents might remove their children from history lessons that conflict with the Book of Mormon, including a unit on human migration across the Bering Strait.
The Mahmoud mandate places an overwhelming and untenable burden on already struggling schools. Compliance will require districts to develop new infrastructure to process a multitude of opt-out demands, to find and staff space for nonparticipating students, and to offer substitute tests that exclude “objectionable” material. Administrators must anticipate which books, discussions, and facts could trigger religious objections, and educators must provide alternative plans to avoid them.
The reality is most public schools lack the resources necessary for such an elaborate framework. It’s more likely these districts will take the path of least resistance and engage in preemptive self-censorship—removing library books, sanitizing lessons, and stripping classroom instruction down to the bare minimum even the most restrictive parent will tolerate—further undermining the quality of education for all in an effort to ward off a loud and litigious few.
Though the onslaught of opt-outs may seem overwhelming, there are practical steps each of us can take to help protect public education. When your local school board debates new policies at the behest of anti-education groups and allows public input, show up in opposition. Bring a friend or five. Consider running for a school board position. Despite the enormous power these seats hold over education, many of them go uncontested each election cycle. You don’t need to be an education expert; you just need to have a commitment to evidence-based education and civil rights.
Our data show that grassroots engagement is one of the most effective ways to stop parents’ rights policies before they harm educators, administrators, and students. So, contact your lawmakers, testify at committee hearings, sign a petition, and support American Atheists’ advocacy efforts in your state and all the rest.
Together, we will stop the bloodletting of our schools and stand united for the true purpose of parents’ rights: to prevent any group or government from violating the religious and intellectual freedom of all.