It’s not a recipe. It’s not a patented algorithm. It’s not the secret to a billion-dollar product line. It’s a set of slides used to train public school teachers on the latest methods for disseminating race and gender ideology in the classroom. And yet, a Pennsylvania school district tried to classify this material—the kind that shapes your child’s education and future—as a “trade secret” to hide it from parents’ eyes.
That fiction collapsed when one Pennsylvania mother, Ann Trethewey, stood up and demanded transparency from the Downingtown Area School District in Chester County. In 2023, Ann filed a public records request seeking copies of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) presentations that were used to instruct or train teachers, staff, and students. The district refused to turn over the materials, claiming they are a “trade secret.”
That’s right. Public school bureaucrats tried to shield their ideological training materials by invoking a legal doctrine designed to protect confidential business information, like the formula for Coca-Cola. According to the district, these taxpayer-funded materials—created by government employees and circulated among public school staff—were so innovative and proprietary that they couldn’t be shared with parents.
That argument fell apart, though, when Ann took the district to court. With legal support from the American Freedom Network, a pro bono affiliate of the Goldwater Institute, she challenged the district’s secrecy all the way to the state’s highest court. Recently, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a decisive rebuke, upholding a lower court ruling: teacher training materials are not “trade secrets.” These materials were widely distributed among faculty and used to shape the educational experience of students across the district. By striking down the district’s claim, the court upheld a far deeper truth: government institutions are accountable to the people, not owned by bureaucrats or shielded by administrators.
The ruling should reverberate far beyond Downingtown. Across the nation, school districts increasingly resort to obfuscation, armed with euphemisms like “culturally responsive pedagogy” and “trauma-informed instruction” to mask the expansion of identity-based ideological programming. When parents request to see what their children are being taught, they are often met with evasions, delays, and—now, astonishingly—claims of corporate confidentiality or copyright protection. The district’s goal was not protection of innovation. (After all, why wouldn’t teachers want to spread effective methods?) It was avoidance of accountability.
Ann’s victory is a shot across the bow that signals to parents that they have a say in what happens in their children’s classroom. The court’s decision now binds school districts statewide: training materials, ideological curricula, and taxpayer-funded instructional content can no longer be hidden under the guise of trade secret protection. What is taught with taxpayer funds, by taxpayer-paid staff, in taxpayer-funded classrooms, is subject to taxpayer oversight. This is not just a technical rule. It is foundational to democratic governance. Radical administrators who attempt to undermine that principle should meet swift resistance and lose.
The fight isn’t over, though. Public schools across the nation have already begun repackaging the same materials under new labels, hoping that a rebrand can keep parents in the dark. But the legal tide has turned. Thanks to Ann’s victory, parents now know they can stand up to overzealous and ideological administrators and demand to know what’s being taught in our local schools.
What happens at our schools has always been the business of the parents. And thanks to one brave Pennsylvania mom, it’s a little harder for rogue administrators and school boards to pretend otherwise.
Jon Riches is Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation.
