The Trump administration is investigating the State of California over a law signed by Gavin Newsom last year that bars school districts from adopting policies requiring schools to notify parents if children want to change genders.
As Breitbart News reported last July, Newsom signed the law after several conservative school districts enacted policies requiring schools to notify parents. The issue arose out of concern that schools were encouraging students to change their genders, and were hiding those transitions from parents, ostensibly because of students’ privacy rights.
Polls show the vast majority of Californians agree parents have the right to know if children want to change gender.
Breitbart News had confronted Newsom about the issue in the spin room at the Republican presidential primary debate in 2023, and he had tried to avoid an answer by claiming that the transgender issue was a marginal one:
Here’s @GavinNewsom trying to minimize the transgender issue in 2023. He has better instincts than the rest of his party and is at least gesturing back toward common sense now. The rest haven’t got the memo yet. pic.twitter.com/VSCzTMaYHJ
— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) March 9, 2025
On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Education announced that it was investigating California over the issue:
Today, the U.S. Department of Education’s Student Privacy Policy Office (SPPO) launched an investigation into the California Department of Education (CDE) for alleged violations of the Family Educational Rights Privacy Act (FERPA). FERPA gives parents the right to access their children’s educational data. The California Department of Education has allegedly abdicated the responsibilities FERPA imposes due to a new California state law that prohibits school personnel from disclosing a child’s “gender identity” to that child’s parent.
SPPO has reason to believe that numerous local educational agencies (LEAs) in California may be violating FERPA to socially transition children at school while hiding minors’ “gender identity” from parents. Given the number of LEAs that appear to be involved, SPPO is concerned that CDE played a role, either directly or indirectly, in the widespread adoption of these practices, which appear to be required by the recently enacted California Assembly Bill 1955.
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FERPA is a federal privacy law enforced by the Department’s SPPO. FERPA gives parents the right to access their children’s education records, the right to request record corrections or amendments, and the right to control, with important exceptions, disclosure of personally identifiable information in education records.
Newsom has tried to walk back some of his extreme positions on the transgender issue, recently telling conservative Charlie Kirk that biological men should not be able to play in women’s sports — a position at odds with state policy.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
