Last year the Supreme Court said a Maryland public school district could not force religious parents to sit their children through storybooks telling them the boy named Penelope is a girl, and a California school district responded by hiring a lawyer to explain that the opinion does not apply there. That is the conservative movement’s whole story in one paragraph—the Wall Street Journal editorial board celebrates “A New Lawsuit on School Gender Lessons” as the next test of religious freedom, and they are not wrong about the case’s merit. The Court said, 6–3, that the First Amendment means what it says. Sunnyvale is defying it. The Taylors should win. And then the county will rearrange the furniture—rename the un-opt-outable material “math,” put the gender-identity lesson inside the arithmetic word problem, and the families will start over in a new suit, and the editorial board will write another column about a new lawsuit, and the children will still be in the classroom while the lawyers bill.

I grant the honest point: public schooling in a diverse society requires some common ground, and a family that wants every lesson to mirror its own convictions cannot expect the public to fund it. But what Sunnyvale is teaching is not the ABCs. It is telling third-graders that the traditional family is something to be “disrupted.” It is pressing a view of human identity that a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints cannot affirm. The district is not teaching children to read. It is catechizing them in a doctrine, and it is using state compulsion to do it. The district is no longer an educational institution serving the community whose taxes fund it. It is a moral-formation institution with compulsory attendance and state funding, accountable to neither the families who send their children nor the faiths that sustain them. And the party that claims to defend the family has no answer except to help the family leave.

Notice what the editorial board does not examine: its own side’s theory of local control. The same party that insists the school board knows best about library books has, through its state legislators and governors, built the legal architecture in which a California school district can tell a family, “We cannot make exceptions because state law requires it.” The state legislature in Sacramento writes the “inclusive curriculum” mandate. The county office of education produces the “Two Spirit and Non-Traditional Families” lesson plan and the list of books. The district that used to be a local institution—governed by the very neighbors who sit in the pews at St. Leo’s or the Latter-Day Saints ward—is now a compliance arm of a distant administrative apparatus. The editorial board treats the lawsuit as “a good argument for school choice,” which is the free-market answer to every institutional question: dissolve the thing and let the family shop. That answer treats the school as a commodity to be purchased, not a place to be owned. But the family does not want a voucher to drive forty miles to a religious school. The family wants the public school down the street to be its school again.

I am a Catholic from a county where the parish closed, the railroad yard downsized, and the fairgrounds still have a flagpole from the 1957 centennial. I know what happens when the conservative movement stops fighting for the rooted institution and starts fighting for the right to exit it. The exit is real. School choice is real. But an exit-only conservatism is a conservatism that has conceded the town. It has accepted that the local school belongs to the administrative state and the best the family can do is leave. That is not conservatism. That is managed retreat, and the editorial board is its quartermaster.

The point is not whether the Taylors will win on the First Amendment. The complaint is strong, the precedent is fresh, and a lower court that ignores Mahmoud risks reversal. The point is what the movement has permitted to be built while it fought for the right to leave. For forty years, the party that talks about family values and local control ceded the actual content of public education to a professional-managerial class that treats a child’s religious formation as a barrier to be accommodated when legally cornered. It fought valiantly for the opt-out clause. It did not fight the takeover that made the opt-out necessary. The fusionist movement that gave us the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act—the same movement that speaks of local control—built a Title I compliance infrastructure so vast that every district in the country now answers to a federal testing regime. The state standards followed, then the curriculum mandates, and the local school board became a body that manages compliance rather than governs. The editorial board presents a lawsuit as victory when the real conservative project—a school governed by the community it serves, accountable to the parents who pay for it, teaching the things the families who live there believe—lies in the dust.

The cooperative is the model here, not the voucher. The rural electric co-op in my county is governed by the members who use it. They elect the board directly. The meetings are open, and the board knows the members by name because the service territory is small enough that a person can drive from one end to the other in twenty minutes. Nobody in Madison or Washington tells the co-op what to do, because the co-op answers to the members and the members answer to nobody but each other. The principle transfers. A public school funded by a per-student formula tied to community revenue, governed by a parental school board elected by the families who live there, with charter-like autonomy to set its own curriculum and its own standards—that was the conservative ideal once. The editorial board does not propose building that. It proposes suing for the right to flee it. The flight will not restore the town. It will accelerate the hollowing. The families leave, the school becomes a pure administrative outpost, and the county that was supposed to be a community becomes a place where people live near each other with no institution they share.

Start the co-op school that the exit will never build. Restore the school board that answers to the parents. Take back the ground that was ceded. The lawsuit is necessary. It is not sufficient, and the editorial board’s complacent satisfaction with a good case in a good cause papers over the ruin it has helped create.