After Mahmoud: The Coming Collapse of Inclusion in Public Education
How Mahmoud v. Taylor empowers the quiet dismantling of inclusive education—and why compliance now risks complicity.
A Supreme Court ruling has shifted U.S. public education toward exclusion—legalising opt-outs not just from content, but from community. This piece traces how Inclusion is being dismantled, and what we stand to lose if we don’t resist.
Introduction: A Turning Point for American Public Education
It is difficult to describe the particular kind of weight that settles in one’s chest whilst watching elected officials debate whether your presence—your identity—is suitable for children to encounter. It is not merely policy under scrutiny, but your very being, rendered debatable. The recent Supreme Court ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor has crystallised this slow-moving trauma into precedent. On its face, the ruling appears to reaffirm parental rights: families may opt their children out of classroom content they find objectionable. But the ruling stretches the definition of “content” beyond ideas or materials. In effect, it allows objection not only to what is taught, but to who teaches it, who writes the curriculum, who is named within it, and—by quiet extension—who is permitted to be seen and acknowledged in public education at all.
What this sets into motion is far more dangerous than a single lawsuit or an isolated policy change. It offers districts a legal and rhetorical tool to retreat from Inclusion—not only of LGBTQ+ students or authors, but also of disabled learners, and particularly those whose very modes of communication or behaviour are increasingly pathologised. Under the guise of neutrality, schools can now comply with the narrow terms of an Individualised Education Programme (IEP) whilst abandoning the broader educational and ethical commitments of inclusive pedagogy. This ruling does not just reshape individual classrooms; it opens the door to a systematic, calculated rollback of Inclusion itself. The vision of shared learning, of difference as generative, becomes reframed as dangerous or divisive. And as this legal precedent settles into practice, we may find that the most significant threat to public education was not loud protest, but quiet compliance.
What Inclusion Meant: A Vision Now at Risk
Casale-Giannola, D., Delisio, L., Sardo, L., & Kline, K. (2023). Research and Reality: A Survey of Educators’ Perceptions about Evidence-Based Practices in Inclusive Settings for Students with Intellectual Disabilities. Education Sciences, 13(6), 558. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci13060558
Inclusion, as outlined in Casale-Giannola et al. (2023), is not simply a logistical arrangement—placing a disabled student in a general education classroom and checking off the box. It is a pedagogical commitment, a way of structuring learning environments so that all students are seen as rightful participants in the collective life of the classroom. It is a practice rooted in relationality, in shared meaning-making, in the belief that learning is not diminished but deepened by neurocognitive and communicative difference. Inclusion asks educators to move beyond minimal compliance and towards intentional design: co-teaching models, universal design for learning, peer-mediated support, and curricula that reflect the lives and languages of all students—not just the normative ones.
The authors show clearly that Inclusion yields tangible benefits. Students with IEPs who are included experience better academic and social outcomes, greater independence, and stronger peer relationships. They gain exposure to grade-level content and authentic community interactions, rather than being sidelined into life skills courses that too often prepare them for a life apart. Inclusion benefits their non-disabled peers as well, fostering empathy, collaborative problem-solving, and a more accurate understanding of the world’s diversity. And yet, as the paper rightly insists, inclusion is not a given. It is not synonymous with implementing an IEP. One can follow an IEP to the letter and still isolate a student in the corner of the room. One can meet the “fidelity” of a goal and still fail to offer belonging. The danger, now more pronounced than ever, is that districts will point to technical compliance—minutes served, accommodations/modifications offered—and mistake it for ethical or communal success. But Inclusion was never just about access. It was always about participation. Always about presence with meaning. Always about making room—for the whole person, not just their paperwork.
The Post-Mahmoud Pivot: From Inclusion to Containment
In the wake of Mahmoud v. Taylor, the legal terrain has shifted—not suddenly, but decisively. The ruling doesn’t ban inclusive education outright; it does something far more insidious. It empowers districts to withdraw from it under the guise of neutrality, safety, or “parental choice.” The door is now wide open for objectors to challenge not just specific texts or topics, but the perceived values embedded in any lesson, any classroom interaction, any educator. Fear of litigation will push risk-averse districts to pre-empt controversy. They will strip classrooms of books, authors, visuals, and speakers deemed “divisive.” But more dangerously still, they will begin to treat people—students and teachers—as sources of controversy themselves.
We already know that most general education teachers create far more curricular material than they’re given. The purchased curriculum is a skeleton; the flesh is made through lesson plans, examples, scaffolds, questions posed in the moment, and stories shared to spark connection. When I teach a lesson on the transformation of functions in Pre-Calculus, I am teaching mathematics. But because I am a neuroqueer trans woman, my body and voice may render the entire experience “queer content” in the eyes of some parents. My choice of names in a word problem, my presence during a discussion, even the tone of a classroom poster—these become grounds for objection, not because they are inappropriate, but because they interrupt the fantasy of a normative, apolitical classroom. That fantasy has always been a lie. But now, backed by Mahmoud, it becomes a legal strategy.
The ruling reframes inclusion as a risk. It gives cover to district leaders who were never fully committed to equity but lacked an excuse to back away. Now they can frame the withdrawal not as bigotry, but as balance. Not as exclusion, but “respecting all sides.” Meanwhile, disabled, neurodivergent, trans, and racialised educators and students will be asked to make themselves smaller—less visible, less vocal, less real—or risk becoming the next target. This is not just about books or bathrooms. It is about whether we are allowed to be seen in public education at all.
What This Means in Practice
This is what it looks like in practice: a whiteboard full of carefully built scaffolds, developed in the moment to meet students where they are. Graphs showing amplitude, phase shift, unit circle relationships. Colour-coded clarity, sketched with care. This is the kind of real-time instructional labour that RSP and general education teachers alike rely on—not just to deliver standards, but to make meaning accessible. And yet, under Mahmoud v. Taylor, the mere fact of who made this board—if the hand behind the marker belongs to a trans, queer, or disabled educator—may be construed as controversial. My sine wave, annotated with transformations and teaching prompts, can be framed not as pedagogy, but as ideology. My presence reframes the content.
This is the shift: Segregation by default. Not through overt policy, but through the path of least resistance. Co-teaching becomes too politically risky; pull-out becomes the safer option. “Just do the IEP,” administrators will say. “Don’t cause a stir.” Inclusive texts, inclusive teachers, even inclusive scaffolds like these—responsive, relational, unstandardised—will be subjected to scrutiny. A function drawn to explain phase shift might now require approval if drawn by the “wrong” educator. Will every visual I create in the moment, in support of a disabled student, need to be vetted in advance? Will support staff be required to pre-submit anything beyond the district-purchased core? It seems unthinkable—until you remember that in some districts, it’s already begun.
Curricula will be narrowed. Peer learning discouraged. Educators whose identities are marked as contentious will be quietly pushed out, or told to mask—to make themselves smaller, less visible, less “provocative.” Inclusion will be reframed as enrichment, an optional extra, a budget line item that can be slashed when politics demand austerity. And in its place will rise a hollow version of equity: technical compliance without relationship, without care, without truth. A classroom may still be called Inclusive on paper, even as it becomes more isolated, more surveilled, more hostile to the very bodies it once claimed to welcome.
The Right’s Larger Strategy: Undermine, Fragment, Replace
What’s happening now is not accidental. The Mahmoud v. Taylor ruling is not a deviation from U.S. educational policy, but its logical next step—a judicial tool in a broader, decades-long strategy to undermine, fragment, and ultimately replace public education. For international readers unfamiliar with the political terrain: the United States has no viable leftist party. What the U.S. does have are two right-wing parties—one led by a careerist like Hakeem Jeffries, who advances oligarchic interests through technocratic containment and rhetorical moderation, and the other by a religious zealot like Mike Johnson, who pursues authoritarian goals with open reactionary hostility. Both serve overlapping sets of oligarchs. The Republican Party has, for decades, championed private vouchers, religious charter schools, and the ideological defunding of public education. The Democratic Party, for its part, has supported similar outcomes under the banner of “school choice,” “accountability,” and “innovation.”
The goal is not to improve public education. It is to hollow it out until there is nothing left to defend. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor doesn’t ban inclusive curricula outright—it does something far more destabilising. It hands the right a powerful instrument: a mechanism for selective withdrawal, framed as “parental rights.” It declares that secular public education must now bend, lesson by lesson, to individual religious objections—not to the curriculum itself, but to the values it is imagined to represent. As the Los Angeles Times notes, California’s current educational mandates, including those under SB-48, remain technically intact. Schools are still legally required to teach about the role and contributions of LGBTQ+ people, people with disabilities, and communities of colour. But “opt-out” now becomes a scalpel that carves those lessons away—family by family, district by district—until public schooling no longer offers anything public at all.
What this ruling does, in practical terms, is render classrooms ungovernable under pluralist values. Districts, particularly those already facing political pressure, will be forced to walk an impossible line. On one side: the legal requirements of state law, such as California’s SB-48, which affirms inclusive and non-discriminatory education. On the other: a growing swell of objections, backed now by the Court, that frames any mention of LGBTQ+ families—or any visible presence of a trans, queer, or neurodivergent educator—as indoctrination. Schools, desperate to avoid litigation, will turn inward. Inclusive programming will be cut or quietly cancelled. Staff will be pressured to mask their identities or avoid certain topics. The public classroom, once a space for shared civic education, will be emptied of conviction and increasingly devoid of content.
The result will not be a neutral curriculum. It will be a broken one. Districts will appear dysfunctional—not because they are failing, but because they are being sabotaged. Inclusion will become the scapegoat. “We tried,” they will say. “But it’s too divisive.” Meanwhile, charter networks, private academies, and religious schools—many exempt from the mandates of SB-48—will flourish. These schools will admit fewer disabled students, operate without union protections, and face no obligation to honour diversity. And yet they will be cast as the solution: orderly, traditional, cost-effective. The manufactured chaos in public schools becomes justification for their replacement.
This is not policy drift. It is a coordinated withdrawal from the project of democratic education. The very notion of a shared, pluralistic public system—where children of all backgrounds learn together, encounter each other’s histories, and wrestle with difference—has been quietly put on notice. The ruling in Mahmoud gives the Right precisely what it needs: plausible deniability. They are not banning books, they will say. They are protecting faith. They are not targeting queer and disabled students / teachers—they are giving parents choice. But we know better. The Court has empowered a form of educational redlining, where students can be sorted not only by zip code or test score, but by whether their families are willing to tolerate the existence of others.
And in this environment, who is left behind? The same students who have always borne the brunt of these ideological campaigns—disabled students, queer students, Black and brown students, multilingual students. Not because their needs are too great, but because their lives are deemed too political. These young people, and the educators who serve them, are being left to navigate the wreckage—asked to endure, once again, a system that was never built for their full humanity.
Conclusion: What We Stand to Lose
This is not just about students with disabilities. It never was. What’s at stake in the wake of Mahmoud v. Taylor is nothing less than the future of shared education in a pluralistic society. The ruling does not merely challenge policy—it shifts the entire terrain. It legitimises the fantasy that public education can be neutral whilst erasing those who challenge the comfort of dominant norms. It offers a legal path to opt out not just of curriculum, but of community. And in doing so, it accelerates America’s slide into a de facto theocracy—one where the loudest objections, cloaked in religious conviction, are granted disproportionate power to shape what all children are allowed to know, to see, to be.
The Casale-Giannola et al. paper framed Inclusion not as charity or accommodation, but as pedagogy—a vision of schooling built on interdependence, access, and shared growth. That vision is now imperilled. The authors warned of the consequences when Inclusion is reduced to IEP compliance: a failure to foster belonging, a system that meets legal thresholds but fails human ones. That failure is no longer theoretical. It is being codified into practice.
We must name what is happening. Researchers must resist the comfort of abstraction and speak plainly about the political project at work. Educators must recognise that “just following the law” is no longer neutral when the law itself facilitates erasure. Families must refuse the manufactured binary between their rights and their neighbours’ existence. And all of us must remember that inclusion—true Inclusion—is not a favour extended. It is a right long denied, now again under threat.
If we are to defend the very idea of public education as a common good, we must move beyond procedural compliance and reclaim a moral vision. Because once we accept that any child’s humanity can be opted out of, we have already abandoned the promise of the classroom. And the cost will not be measured only in lawsuits or headlines, but in all the futures we will have quietly foreclosed.