CHALLENGING SCHOOL CENSORSHIP

THE IMPACT

An early ruling in the case is helping to stop the Trump administration’s attempt to censor schools across America.

THE CASE

The Tennessee Education Association (TEA) and five public school teachers are suing to strike down Tennessee Public Chapter No. 493, known as the Prohibited Concepts Ban. According to the TEA, “the law prohibits teaching of core subjects in Tennessee State Standards, which puts teachers in an impossible position and deprives students of a quality education.”

The Ban prohibits the “inclu[sion] or promot[ion]” of fourteen “prohibited concepts” dealing with race, gender, and other subjects in Tennessee’s K-12 public school classrooms. As a result, according to the complaint:

• In Tipton County, one school has replaced an annual field trip to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis with a trip to a baseball game.
• In Shelby County, a choir director fears that his decades-long practice of teaching his students to sing and understand the history behind spirituals sung by enslaved people will be perceived as “divisive” or otherwise violative of the Ban.
• In Blount County, a 45-year veteran of Tennessee public schools was entangled in months of administrative proceedings, with her job on the line, because of a single parent’s complaint about an award-winning work of young adult literature that the Tennessee Department of Education approved and the local elected school board adopted as part of the district’s curriculum.

To fight the ban and others like it, Free + Fair and its partners developed the case under a 14th-Amendment vagueness theory. The lawsuit “provides a novel answer to anti-woke hysteria,” according to a Washington Post analysis. In a major 2024 ruling, the court agreed – finding that state’s ban “manifestly unworkable” and advancing a new legal theory that could be used to challenge similar bans everywhere.

In February 2025, the Trump administration ordered the nation’s schools to terminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and shut down any classroom teaching or discussions that the administration might consider discriminatory. In April 2025, a New Hampshire federal court issued an injunction to stop these unconstitutional threats, and cited T.E.A. v. REYNOLDS as precedent throughout its high-profile opinion.

THE TEAM

The educators are represented pro bono by Free + Fair, Davis Polk, and Bass, Berry & Sims.