Emergency exit

I wasn’t yet 16, still hoofing it to the corner bus stop, when I made a quiet vow: “My kids will never set foot in public school.” The thought was not a swipe at my parents. They had sacrificed to buy a house in the best school district so I could have every possible advantage. But each day delivered an unmistakable audit. The Catholic school buses rolled up on the dot, whisking away uniformed, disciplined teens who were polite if understandably aloof. Our bus lumbered in whenever, through clouds of cigarette smoke, snowball crossfire, and the crude, sometimes cruel, talk that sticks in your ears long after the algebra fades. I wasn’t a Christian then, happier to laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints, as Billy Joel sang. I just knew which world looked saner.

Many years later, that instinct feels prophetic. In July, the Supreme Court issued Mahmoud v. Taylor. In a 6-3 majority opinion, the court granted a preliminary injunction against Montgomery County, Maryland’s mandate that its K-5 students sit through an LGBTQ-affirming storybook—one title assigned to each grade level—with no opt-out allowed. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting, warned the ruling “threatens the very essence of public education” and will echo “for generations.”

Right again, Justice Sotomayor. Take away the compulsory power to steer a second grader’s moral imagination and today’s public school model starts wobbling like a Jenga tower after the wrong block is yanked. The court’s decision didn’t undermine the “essence of public education.” It exposed how fragile that essence already was.

For me, the key exhibit in the case was a six-page teacher handout. Montgomery County Public Schools and MCPS defenders call it routine anti-bullying prep. It isn’t. I dropped the PDF into a family group chat with a few of my adult children who have families of their own, and their responses ranged from disgust to horror. One scenario assumes a child objects to a storybook heroine who fancies another girl:

Student: “She can’t like a girl like that; she can only like boys because she’s a girl.”

Teacher: “Disrupt the either/or thinking. … People of any gender can like whoever they like. … How would it make [character’s name] feel to hear you say that?”

Add: “My best friend is a woman and she is married to another woman.”

That is no mediation of playground taunts. It’s catechesis, a ready-made homily meant to rewire a child’s moral imagination using fictional characters to provoke a predictable response. The district creates the clash and smokes out any faith-shaped reaction, then turns teachers into bullies, programming them to “disrupt” and rebut.

The ruling, anchored in Pierce v. Society of Sisters and Wisconsin v. Yoder, found the district’s policy “substantially interferes” with parental rights and therefore triggers strict scrutiny. By likening MCPS’ policy to Yoder—where Amish parents won the right to withdraw teens from high school—it effectively told public schools: You’d better have (1) a compelling objective and (2) a narrowly tailored means of achieving it, otherwise known as the two-part “strict scrutiny test.” The court found the school district flunked.

Some well-meaning reformers propose a friendly reset: keep anti-bullying rules, move contested lessons to opt-in modules, give families more choice. That might nudge public schools toward a healthier common good, if it worked.

But I’ve experienced the system, and I don’t trust it to pivot. The MCPS script was no isolated mistake. It was the logical outcome of a model that sees children as malleable citizens to be formed in the state’s image, trained in the way they should go. Give bureaucrats a new handbook and they’ll find a new end-run.

Public schools could’ve contented themselves with teaching reading, arithmetic, and the Bill of Rights without moral compulsion. They chose a different path. Now many families are choosing different schools: private, charter, co-op, kitchen table. The Supreme Court pried open an exit door. Parents who share my bus-stop epiphany—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or simply fed-up—should walk through it.

Justice Sotomayor was right: The court’s decision strikes at the essence of public schooling. But the tremor comes not from parental liberty; it comes from a system that has forgotten the difference between teaching children how to live in a complicated society and forcing them to confess a state creed. My kids can tell the difference, and after Mahmoud so can the Constitution.