School choice policies are sweeping the country. Eighteen states now make every K–12 student eligible to receive public funds to attend the school of their family’s choice, and more are expected to do likewise. To craft sound policies that deliver on the promise of school choice, policymakers must ground their approach in the fundamental principles that justify this shift away from traditional public education.

Typically, school choice advocates make their case on utilitarian grounds: school choice means more efficiency than relying on government-run schools, they say, because markets and competition produce better outcomes. Others emphasize equity, noting that school choice gives lower-income families opportunities to provide their children with quality education rather than being trapped in failing schools based on which home their parents could afford.

Both arguments are true and important. But there is an even more fundamental case for school choice that often gets lost in debates over test scores and efficiency metrics: school choice empowers families to choose schools that align with their values, including their religious beliefs. This is not merely a policy preference—it reflects America’s deepest constitutional commitments to parental rights, religious liberty, and limits on state power.

Our Founders understood that education is essential both for self-government and individual advancement. As Thomas Jefferson warned: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared that “schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

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Over time, states adopted compulsory education laws to ensure all children learn the knowledge and skills necessary to be good citizens and productive members of their community. But the Founders also understood something equally important: parents are the primary educators of their children.

A century ago, the Supreme Court made this principle explicit in its unanimous decision in Society of Sisters, famously ruling that “the child is not the mere creature of the state.” In striking down a Ku Klux Klan–supported law to ban private schooling in Oregon, the Court recognized that parents—not the state—have the right and primary authority “to direct the upbringing and education” of their children. While the government can require that children attend some school and regulate schools to some extent, its role in education is “limited and secondary at best.”

The liberty interest of parents to direct the upbringing of their children is inextricably tied to their rights to religious liberty. Nearly fifty years after Pierce, the Supreme Court reaffirmed in Wisconsin v. Yoder that the “primary role” of parents in raising their children is “established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition.” The Constitution protects the “fundamental interest of parents to guide the religious future and education of their children,” sometimes even against compelling state interests like universal compulsory education. Only “interests of the highest order” can override these fundamental freedoms.

These principles matter because there is an inherent tension between government schooling and parents’ rights, including their right to religious liberty. Despite what some educators claim, there is no such thing as a “values-neutral” classroom. Schools inevitably transmit values through both their explicit curriculum and their “hidden curriculum”—the unspoken lessons embedded in classroom routines, institutional norms, and which topics are discussed or ignored.

When teachers choose which historical narratives to emphasize, how to handle discussions of religion, or what behaviors to reward, they make value-laden decisions that communicate messages about authority, morality, and worldview. Even seemingly neutral choices—from daily schedules that do or don’t accommodate religious observances to how scientific topics are framed—reflect particular assumptions about faith’s role in society.

Government-run schools, by their nature, reflect the values and priorities of the state. As John Stuart Mill warned in On Liberty, government-run schooling risks “establishing a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body,” especially where the government has a monopoly over education.

This tension is particularly acute regarding moral instruction. When public schools promote ideologies that contradict families’ deeply held beliefs, parents face an impossible choice: surrender their children to an environment that undermines their values or bear the financial burden of private school or homeschooling.

In recent years, these tensions have intensified as ideologues have coopted many public schools to push controversial agendas. Parents have increasingly objected to lessons that contradict their values, especially on gender and sexuality. While some have sought to opt their children out, as recognized in the 2025 case Mahmoud v. Taylor, many schools have embedded these themes throughout the curriculum. The only option becomes withdrawing entirely—imposing significant financial burdens on families. As the Court held in Mahmoud, the “availability of [private and home schooling] is no answer to the parents’ First Amendment objections” because “many parents cannot afford such a substitute.”

The solution is universal school choice. Public funds should follow children to schools that align with their families’ values. School choice respects parental rights while fostering diversity that reflects American families better than the one-size-fits-some status quo.

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But for choice to be meaningful, private school autonomy must be preserved. In Pierce, the Court held that “the fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose” prevents government attempts “to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.” The same principle should prevent governments from standardizing private education through regulation.

Unfortunately, some states have sought to do just that. For example, New York has sought to impose public school curricular norms on private yeshivas serving Orthodox Jewish communities. State law requires that private schools provide an education that is “substantially equivalent” to that offered by the public schools.

In recent years, the New York State Education Department has interpreted this statute to require private schools to provide instruction in eleven specific subjects for more than seven hours per day. Although the Court in Pierce held that states may require private schools to teach “certain studies plainly essential to good citizenship,” that is a far cry from requiring them to be “substantially equivalent” to public schools. Such burdensome requirements exceed a state’s constitutional authority. The Constitution protects the right of parents to choose schools that are substantially different from public schools.

This isn’t merely a local dispute. Just as Pierce and Yoder had implications beyond Catholic and Amish communities, the yeshiva case concerns fundamental issues of parental rights, religious liberty, and limits on state power.

America’s constitutional tradition recognizes parents as primary educators. To honor this, policymakers must safeguard private school autonomy and ensure funding follows students to their families’ chosen learning environment. Only by protecting parental rights can we ensure America’s education system respects and reflects our deepest commitments to freedom, diversity, and self-government.