(Syracuse Post-Standard | Sept. 2, 2025) As students and teachers head back to school, implementing the Supreme Court Mahmoud v. Taylor ruling from this past June is, at best, messy, and, in reality, troubling.
The case centered on picture books that were part of the regular curriculum. These picture books had LGBTQ+ characters and families. The Supreme Court decided that families should be able to opt out their children from school content that does not align with their religious beliefs. The ruling indicated that merely being exposed to this content is a burden on the family’s religion because exposing students to the curriculum normalizes that same religion-conflicting content.
Prior to this ruling, most school districts made affordances for opting out of health and sexual education curriculum. Mahmoud v. Taylor greatly expands that tradition by allowing families to opt out of school content that they feel conflicts with their sincerely practiced religious beliefs. This necessarily means that educators now must inform families of any content that might conflict with religious beliefs and allow students to be opted out of any such lessons.
As a former public school teacher and principal who currently prepares future teachers for elementary school classrooms, I find this ruling in conflict with the purpose of public school in our diverse democracy. It also raises many unanswered questions about the implementation.
“I find this ruling in conflict with the purpose of public school in our diverse democracy.”
Part of the New York state social studies standards requires elementary students to learn about family traditions — their family’s traditions and other peoples’ cultures. Thus, it is common for first grade classrooms to have a unit on family traditions where students, and often families, present their traditions as part of the formal curriculum.
When my students learn to plan elementary lessons, we use the composition of an actual class of elementary students to make practicing more authentic and less hypothetical. That class provides real-life examples that raise questions about this ruling …