Americans are blessed that our laws protect parents’ right to raise, teach, and love their children in their own unique way. Barring extreme cases of children being harmed or neglected, our government defers to parents as the primary decision-makers.
This is not the case in many other countries, where parents are required to send their children to a state-recognized school. Those who try to pursue other education options can have their children taken away by law enforcement.
That could have been the United States, if not for an obscure Brandeis-era Supreme Court case that was decided in June of 1925—exactly a century ago this month.
Pierce v. Society of Sisters emerged from an era where compulsory schooling was trendy. Following the lead of Europe, the state of Oregon passed a 1922 law requiring all children to attend public schools—and effectively outlawing private and religious schools. One school, operated by the Roman Catholic Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, sued the governor and took their case all the way to the Supreme Court.
In 1925, the Court ruled unanimously to strike down the Oregon law on Fourteenth Amendment grounds. In his opinion, Justice James McReynolds held that “the child is not the mere creature of the State”— and that parents have a fundamental right to direct their children’s education.
In 2025, this truism might sound obvious. Nobody can come into a parent’s house and tell them how to parent or educate their own children. But we should not forget the 1925 court case that established this precedent of parental rights. Nor should we, today, fail to defend those rights from progressives who think of children as property of the state.
The progressive model for education seeks to use classrooms to mold children according to a preferred ideology or put them on a path that is centrally planned by the government. Over the past century, progressives have tried to use the force of law to accomplish this vision and undermine parents’ right to choose how their children will be educated.
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The Trump administration has pledged to stand up for parents—because that’s the most effective way to help students. Students are most likely to succeed when their parents are engaged in their learning and making choices that position them to excel.
This is the reason we support education choice so strongly—and why the progressive left opposes it just as strongly. Our competing visions of parent-led education and government-run education diverge in more than classroom culture or teaching techniques. We have vastly different hopes for the future.
Centrally-planned, progressive education rarely yields happy results. When parents are cut out of the education system and cut off from their children, the result is an FBI that declares moms “domestic terrorists” for protesting at school board meetings. The result is schools trying to hide critical health information about students from their parents—in violation of FERPA disclosure laws. The result is inappropriate curriculum that families can’t opt out of, as in the Mahmoud v. Taylor case currently before the Supreme Court.
At the Department of Education, we’ve made it our mission to uphold the spirit of the Pierce case and defend parents’ rights to make education decisions for their children, so that an innovative and accountable education system can grow. We have championed education choice initiatives, expanding access to charter schools, and providing guidelines to states on how they can empower parents. We’ve ended the Biden-era practice of interfering when local school districts protect students from explicit materials in libraries or classrooms. And we’ve strengthened FERPA enforcement, ensuring schools comply with federal laws by transparently sharing health information with parents.
All of these pro-parent policies reflect our ultimate goal of reducing the federal footprint in education and letting parents—who best know the needs of their children—lead the way. The progressive experiment of a government that overrides the rights and preferences of parents has been tried and failed. On this 100th anniversary of Pierce v. Society of Sisters, let’s stay focused on the goal of empowering parents so children can thrive.
Hayley Sanon is the Acting Assistant Secretary for the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education