Family · Nationwide · August 25, 2026
Trump Administration Push Ties Parental Rights to FERPA Enforcement, School Control
Fox News reported on August 25, 2026, that Defending Education founder Nicole Neily appeared on 'Fox & Friends First' to discuss the Trump administration's efforts to shift education authority away from Washington and back to states and parents. According to Neily, the administration has pursued an executive order aimed at eliminating the federal Department of Education, and is working to enforce the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a long-standing federal law governing parental access to student records, which she says has gone underenforced. The segment did not specify particular states, districts, or new regulations beyond this general description, and did not detail the executive order's legal status, implementation timeline, or which agency would take over Education Department functions. What is confirmed is the stated policy direction and the FERPA enforcement emphasis; specifics of implementation are not yet established from this source.
Source: Fox News
Why Bible-Believing Christians Should Care
Scripture places the primary responsibility for raising and instructing children on parents, not the state (Deuteronomy 6:6-7; Ephesians 6:4). Christian families have watched federal and district-level policies increasingly obscure curriculum content, withhold student records, or bypass parental notification on sensitive matters. A genuine restoration of FERPA enforcement and state-level control would be a meaningful check on that trend, returning decision-making closer to the family. Believers should welcome structural reforms that strengthen parental authority while remaining watchful that any shift in federal architecture does not simply relocate the same ideological pressures to state agencies rather than removing them.
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. — Proverbs 22:6
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From the book
As the Chapter 8b case study showed, the capture of parental authority usually happens by reframing morality as safety. Activists introduce concepts of gender theory or sexual liberation into schools. They do not call it moral instruction, which would be the parent's domain. They call it comprehensive health education, which is the expert's domain. Then when a parent objects to explicit material, the institution answers that these materials were selected by credentialed experts and the parent is not an expert, so the objection is invalid.
— Chapter 18, “The Expert Against the Parent”
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