WASHINGTON—The Department of Education has found the California Department of Education guilty of violating the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act for its policies pressuring school officials to conceal information about student gender identity.
The news marks the latest instance of Gavin Newsom’s California defying federal guidance from the White House on the issue of transgenderism. Posied for the next presidential election, Newsom has attempted to present himself as a moderate on the issue, but his state continues to be a radical outlier.
An investigation conducted by the Department of Education’s Student Privacy Policy Office (SPPO) found that California’s polices, laws, and practices created “powerful state directed pressure” for schools to adopt policies that led to FERPA noncompliance, effectively forcing schools to withhold information from parents, violating FERPA, which gives parents the right to access their children’s educational records.
For example, one California law explicitly bans schools from requiring parents to be informed of their child’s “gender transition.”
“Our investigation found that the California Department of Education egregiously abused its authority by pressuring school officials to withhold information about students’ so-called ‘gender transitions’ from their parents,” explained Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.
McMahon blames California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and his “failed leadership” for the matter, saying that under his watch, school personnel have even bragged about facilitating ‘gender transitions,’ and shared strategies to target minors and conceal information about children from their own families.”
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Education Linda McMahon arrives in the Russell Senate Office Building on December 09, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“While the Biden Administration turned a blind eye to this deprivation of parental rights and endorsed the irreversible harms done to children in the name of radical transgender ideology, the Trump Administration will fight relentlessly to end it,” she promised. “Children do not belong to the state — they belong to families. We will use every available mechanism to hold California accountable for these practices and restore parental rights.”
During a press call with reporters, a senior Education Department official shared that the investigation found a systemic problem of schools maintaining secret records of child gender support plans. That official told The Daily Wire that the investigation also uncovered that a number of administrators were soliciting AERIES, a student information software system, to find ways to hide gender information from parents via the parent portal used to register children for classes.
California has been offered the opportunity to “voluntarily resolve its FERPA violations” by sending a notice to all school administrators and superintendents. That notice should, among several items, let school officials know that “gender support plans” and similar documentation are education records under FERPA and subject to parental inspection, that there is no “unofficial records” exception to FERPA and none of the state’s laws should be interpreted to undermine federal law — and that violations of FERPA may cause the California education system to risk loss of federal financial assistance.
Emails dating back to 2022 show staff in California discussing changing students’ names without their parents’ knowledge, using different names for children in front of their parents, and even overriding the “Parent Portal” to choose what parents could or could not see, according to the Education Department.
Gavin Newsom during the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026. Photographer: Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg via Getty Images
At least 300 students in the state were put on “Gender Support Plans” in 2025, The Daily Caller News Foundation reported, and many of those children were put on these plans without parental knowledge or consent.
In one particularly alarming case that the Education Department shared, a mother sued her daughter’s school after she found out that school officials had convinced her young daughter to identify as a transgender boy. School officials told the girl not to tell her mother and helped the girl to learn how to make chest binders, restricting her chest so that she would look flat-chested.
School administrators told the mother that they could not tell her about all of these goings-on due to their “parental secrecy policy,” the Education Department said.
Schools that followed FERPA and refused to hide gender issues from parents were “aggressively targeted” by California, the Education Department investigation found. When Chino Valley Unified School District’s school board adopted a parental notification policy in July 2023, state officials acted quickly to put an end to the policy, saying that children have a constitutional right to “privacy from their parents” — and that telling parents about their child’s gender identity issues might cause the child to suffer.
The Education Department has repeatedly asked the California Department of Education to issue guidance clarifying that parents have a right to see “gender support plans” under FERPA, but the California Department of Education has repeatedly refused these requests, though it says in grant agreements that it will follow federal law.
🚨 BREAKING: Ben Shapiro grills California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) over whether he believes that girls cannot become boys and boys cannot become girls
Newsom refuses to answer the question
Newsom says: “Yeah, I just, well, uh, I think, uh, I’m for the grace of God. Yeah.” pic.twitter.com/w0Gc7cKvec
— Ryan Saavedra (@RyanSaavedra) January 16, 2026
The move comes only two weeks after Newsom sat down for an interview with The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro, one in which Shapiro grilled the governor about whether he believes that girls can actually become boys, or boys can actually become girls.
Newsom refused to directly answer the question, ultimately telling Shapiro: “Yeah, I just, well, uh, I think, uh, I’m for the grace of God. Yeah.”
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