The U.S. Department of Education on Thursday issued new “guidance on constitutionally protected prayer and religious expression in public elementary and secondary schools.” The document replaces guidance issued under the Biden administration in 2023. Much of the guidance is similar, but the new guidance incorporates insights from the Supreme Court’s Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025) decision, places greater emphasis on religious freedom, and specifically recognizes the right of school employees to pray with students.

“It’s good to see this needed update to federal guidance on prayer in schools, to include the results of recent Supreme Court cases that have protected the rights of individuals to pray and adhere to their religious beliefs at school,” Arielle Del Turco, director of FRC’s Center for Religious Liberty, told TWS. “The guidance doesn’t push boundaries. Rather, it simply affirms the right to pray that has already been protected by the Supreme Court. This provides helpful clarity for school administrators and teachers.”

The guidance affirms that “the First Amendment’s protections extend to both ‘“teachers and students,” neither of whom “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”’ The [Supreme] Court has upheld the right, not only of students to pray, but also of public school teachers and officials to engage in individual acts of prayer — and to pray with students — during the conduct of their work.”

However, the guidance also recognized, based on Supreme Court precedents, that “public schools may not require students to pray, nor may a school engage in or sponsor prayer in such a way as to effectively implicate the school itself in a religious practice.”

“It follows that public schools, school officials, and teachers may not suppress such religious expression, but also may not coerce it,” the 2026 guidance reasons.

In substance, this principle is similar to the Biden administration’s guidance, published in 2023 after the Supreme Court’s decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022). “Teachers, school administrators, and other school employees may not encourage or discourage private prayer or other religious activity,” said the previous guidance. Both try to steer a neutral course.

Yet the different orders convey different emphases. In the Biden administration’s guidance, the greatest force is placed on the fact that school officials “may not encourage … religious activity.” In the Trump administration’s guidance, force is laid on the fact that school officials “may not suppress” it.

The 2026 guidance provides “additional clarity” by listing examples of constitutionally permissible forms of prayer in schools. For example, students may “pray privately and quietly by themselves,” or “in a speaking voice on the same terms as any other student might engage in non-religious speech.” Students may also pray “in student groups,” supported “on the same terms” as “non-religious groups.

However, the guidance proscribed the freedom of prayer in school assemblies, based on Supreme Court precedents. “If, for example, a valedictorian wants to thank God in her graduation speech, she should be allowed to do so. She must not, however, require the assembly to bow their heads in prayer and thank God with her,” the guidance explains. Under current precedents, public school officials or outside clergy are not allowed to pray publicly at school assemblies or events, or in their official capacity.

The most notable change came in the guidance for public school teachers and other employees. “Visible, personal prayer, even if there is voluntary student participation in such prayer, does not itself constitute coercion,” the guidance explained. “But teachers and other school officials and employees should not deliver prayers on behalf of the school or in contexts that students cannot opt out of. For example, a teacher may bow her head to say grace before lunch, and students may join her in grace, but she may not instruct her class to pray with her, pressure them to pray with her, or create an atmosphere in which students are favored if they pray with her.”

This differed from the 2023 guidance, which allowed teachers to “meet with other teachers for prayer or religious study” during breaks but forbade them from any religious expression that would “compel, coerce, persuade, or encourage students to join in the employee's prayer or other religious activity.”

In spirit if not in letter, this guidance was strangely at odds with the Kennedy v. Bremerton decision, in which the Supreme Court upheld a high school football coach’s freedom to kneel at the 50-yard line after games to pray — even though students joined him there.

Before Kennedy v. Bremerton, school prayer guidance issued during the first Trump administration prevented school employees “from actively participating in such activity with students.” In Kennedy v. Bremerton, the Supreme Court recognized that public school employees do not leave their religious freedom rights at the schoolhouse door, and the 2026 Trump administration guidance finally recognizes that fact.

“The prudent course of action for school officials is to allow the individuals who make up a public school community to act and speak in accordance with their faith, provided they do not invade the rights of others, the school does not itself participate in religious action or speech as an institution, and the school does not favor secular over religious views or one religious view over another,” the guidance concluded. “This is not the familiar but legally unsound metaphor of a “wall of separation” between religious faith and public schools. It is rather a stance of neutrality among and accommodation toward all faiths, and hostility toward none.”

“Our Constitution safeguards the free exercise of religion as one of the guiding principles of our republic,” said Education Secretary Linda McMahon, “and we will vigorously protect that right in America’s public schools.”