President Donald Trump’s plan for schools nationwide is a familiar one to observers of Indiana education policy.

Since 2021, the state has taken steps each legislative session to limit content in schools and minors’ access to gender-affirming care and social transition procedures, while expanding access to vouchers and school choice. That push continues in the 2025 session, with dozens of bills filed that expand on similar issues.

Advocates for these laws say they’re necessary to protect parents’ rights to choose how to raise their children — rights that they say need to be on par with constitutional rights, and which they hope to see reflected in national legislation.

“When parents drop their children off at school, they want to know what’s going on,” said Matt Sharp, senior counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group.

But the laws’ critics say they haven’t led to mass bans of content or revelations of indoctrination in schools because schools weren’t teaching objectionable content to begin with. Instead, they say the primary effect has been increased anxiety among educators and already vulnerable students.

Jessica Heiser, an attorney with Imprint Legal group, which helps districts understand educational civil rights laws, said that these curriculum laws often oversimplify the difficulty of running a classroom, which can cause problems for the districts left to implement them.

“They really don’t want laws around what they’re allowed to teach and not teach,” Heiser said of school administrators, regardless of their politics. “When you get into the nitty grittiness of you shall teach this, or you shall not teach that … legislators are out of their depth.”

To apply some of these laws on a national scale might require the kind of heavy-handed federal enforcement Trump — who — professes to dislike, or else leave schools to police themselves with inconsistent results. Still, and his suggest his desire to fight particular cultural battles through American schools has not subsided.

The available evidence doesn’t clearly show that the statutes targeting curriculum, library books, and transgender students have accomplished their stated goals. But there’s reason to believe they’re increasing families’ interest in vouchers.

Some observers say it’s no coincidence that a major consequence of the new laws about public schools has been a surge in private school enrollment and voucher use. Discussions this year about making Indiana’s voucher program universal also often center around parents’ rights to choose a school for their children.

Fights over social issues can lead to citizens losing “trust and confidence in public schools,” Heiser said.

“You end up creating an atmosphere where public schools are so unpredictable and public schools are such a place of confusion and such a place of dissatisfaction, that you open up a conversation better for vouchers and for privatization,” Heiser said.

But some Indiana lawmakers have characterized concerns about how such laws affect the state’s broader reputation as overblown, as evidenced by what they say is Indiana’s ongoing economic and growth.

In remarks late last year, Republican House Speaker Todd Huston chided doomsayers who had told him that “if we pass this bill, no one will ever come to Indiana again.”

“All that extreme hyperbole didn’t age well,” Huston said.

Classroom content bans seem slow to catch on

Lawmakers have made several attempts over the years to restrict the teaching of certain kinds of content in Indiana classrooms. It’s part of a nationwide push to ban “divisive concepts” related to race, racism, gender, and sexuality.

There are . One bill would prohibit instruction on American history from promoting the idea that the national identity or culture has been established by racial identity or racial discrimination, gender identity or gender discrimination, victimization, class struggle, a hierarchy of privileges, or systemic exclusion. Others would require schools and state agencies to prohibit certain statements in training and curriculum related to .

But the push began in Indiana in 2022, when lawmakers considered a wide-ranging bill that sought to restrict how teachers teach about race and racism. It in the state Senate following an outcry from a broad coalition of educators, parents, clergy, and others.

The following year, lawmakers scaled back their ambitions and passed narrower restrictions on content in schools. One new law required schools to adopt procedures to that contain material deemed harmful to minors. Another banned teaching human sexuality to students in preschool through third grade.

Since then, there have been instances of complaints at local school board meetings about books and lessons in schools. One example is the community uproar last year over a in an elementary school classroom in East Noble Schools.

But there have not been widespread reports of public backlash to classroom material leading to curriculum changes. And Chalkbeat and other outlets’ reporting have found few formal complaints about books, and even less action taken to move or remove them.

Supporters of the laws like the Alliance for Defending Freedom say this simply means the legislation is working, and schools have taken care to purge their curriculum of objectionable material.

Other observers say the effect has been a chilling one. have told Chalkbeat they or their colleagues avoid topics related to politics due to fears about how some parents might react.

Even relatively straightforward events in national politics that students might encounter independently can be affected by this environment. Kevin Melrose, a social studies teacher in Washington Township schools, said he in order not to be partisan, per district policy, even as the class held mock debates for class president on the same day of the 2024 vice presidential debates.

One thing that makes Indiana unique is Eyes on Education, said Christopher Lubienski of the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University. That’s alast year by Attorney General Todd Rokita for people to file complaints about how schools teach race, gender, and political ideology. (Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin launched a similar tip line, but it has since shut down.)

If the Trump administration launched such a tip line launched nationally, it would require large-scale monitoring and investigation, which might conflict with Trump’s plans to run a smaller, leaner federal government.

So far, Rokita has posted complaints from just 18 out of the state’s 300 school districts and more than 150 charter schools, as well as from two universities. The substance of these complaints ranges from the material available in a school library catalog, to an invitation for Black students to meet with a college representative.

And records show that even a politically charged event like the 2024 presidential election didn’t lead to complaints about inappropriate or politically biased instruction. A Chalkbeat request for material submitted to “Eyes on Education” that was related to the election yielded two complaints that were apparently jokes.

Student pronoun law yields murky data, inconsistent approaches

Indiana has passed several laws that affect transgender students, including a prohibition on

transgender girls playing on girls’ sports teams at the K-12 level.

When the law was passed in 2022, the Indiana High School Sports Association, which had procedures in place for transgender athletes’ participation, had gone through the outlined process to play on a girls’ team in recent years. The association did not return a request for comment on whether there have been any additional instances since the law passed.

Data shows that trans students are a tiny fraction of school enrollment. Researchers estimate that . In addition, compete in U.S. school sports.

The author of the law, Rep. Michelle Davis, said at the time that the legislation was important whether it affected one student or 100. Davis this year has filed an expansion of the law that would affect collegiate and out-of-state teams. She did not return a request for comment.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging the law on behalf of a transgender Indianapolis Public Schools student. But the group the lawsuit in early 2023 after the student transferred schools.

Lawmakers then passed a law in 2023 requiring schools to inform a parent of a student’s request to use a different name, nickname, pronoun, title, or word to refer to themselves. Supporters say parents have a right to know about such cases.

“It’s been helpful and effective in putting school officials on notice that when a child is asking questions about gender, or any mental or physical issue, the first call should be to mom and dad,” said Matt Sharp, the ADF attorney.

But without specific guidance from the Indiana Department of Education about how districts should notify parents, or whether they should categorize such requests in any way, the result has been .

From a legal perspective, this inconsistency can open districts to lawsuits and other conflicts, according to Heiser, the attorney who consults with districts.

In addition, such laws can affect students, even — and sometimes especially — when they are applied inconsistently, said Brian Dittmeier, director of public policy at GLSEN, a nonprofit focused on supporting LGBTQ+ students.

“When hostile laws are passed, and especially hostile laws that are vaguely drafted, it leads to a chilling effect on LGBTQ free expression,” said Dittmeier. “It leads to self-policing that harms students’ free expression and inclusion in the school community.”

A Chalkbeat survey of Indiana’s 10 largest districts found little willingness to share or discuss their policies.

Some districts use the notification requirement to hold a meeting with parents about how to support their students. Another district requires parental permission to use a nickname or pronoun that a student has requested.

Some districts’ policy interpretations obtained by Chalkbeat focus on students making a request related to their gender identity. Others applied the policy to all nicknames, including nicknames that cisgender students had used for years, .

Some districts informed students that their parents would be notified about such changes, and gave them the chance to rescind their name or pronoun change request. But it’s unclear how widespread this practice is.

From 2023 to 2024, three districts — Perry Township, Fort Wayne, and Tippecanoe — each sent between 56 and 67 notifications to parents to inform them of a student’s desire to use a nickname or different pronoun, title, or word.

Students later rescinded some of their requests, indicating that the law may have pushed some transgender students away from publicly expressing their identity.

But it also isn’t clear from the districts’ data how many such requests or notifications were related to gender identity to begin with. The law doesn’t require schools to collect or share that specific information.

In all three districts, the notifications involved fewer than 1 in 200 students, or less than 0.5% of enrollment. The notices were most common in high school.

Several districts, including Indianapolis Public Schools, said that only individual schools track the notifications.

School voucher use surges as wealthier families qualify

If Indiana policymakers want to change schools’ approach to social issues, the stats don’t really say clearly whether they’ve succeeded.

But with private school choice, numbers tell a plain story — one that poses a different long-term challenge to public schools than culture war clashes, albeit a related one.

Over the last few years, as conservatives nationwide have pushed back on transgender student rights and certain classroom content, their reasons to support school choice nationwide have also begun to focus less on helping just students from low-income households or struggling schools, and more on giving choices to all families.

Private school enrollment in Indiana has surged since 2020, reaching an all-time high of 92,000 students in 2023-24.

The growth has been partly driven by Choice Scholarship Accounts — Indiana’s decade-old school voucher program. Though vouchers began as a targeted program offering state funding for private school tuition for low-income families, the qualifications have .

Last year, the program saw a in enrollment, driven largely by in 2023. Families can now make 400% of the amount required for students to qualify for federally subsidized meals — or around $230,000 for a family of four.

This year, lawmakers could remove the final income limit on which families can receive vouchers to make the program fully universal. That’s a priority for GOP Gov. Mike Braun and legislative leaders.

“I’m not going to apologize that our caucus will be very supportive of universal vouchers,” said GOP Rep. Bob Behning, chair of the House Education Committee, at a December legislative . “I think letting parents make that choice as to what’s best for their son or daughter is the best way to move forward.”

Since 2021, lawmakers have also added new voucher-like programs to pay for special education expenses and career training. Both of those programs reached this year, and some lawmakers have pushed to make the former available to all families to purchase classes and services using state funding.

It’s unlikely that many Indiana politicians believe in the complete privatization of the education system, said Lubienski of Indiana University. But the implicit effects of the social issue laws include raising questions about the public education system.

“The social issues put a target on public education and create a narrative that they’re serving special interests, or students who feel they’ve been ignored, at the expense of the wider population,” Lubienski said.

Aleksandra Appleton covers Indiana education policy and writes about K-12 schools across the state. Contact her at aappleton@chalkbeat.org.

Kae Petrin is a data & graphics reporter who covers data related to K-12 education, voting rights, and public health for Civic News Company. Contact them at kpetrin@chalkbeat.org.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at

Kate Gould said the classroom became a dangerous place for her son after took over the Douglas County school board and the district removed masking requirements.

After a prolonged back-and-forth, involving a pulmonologist and a special education attorney, district leaders finally agreed to an accommodation for his classroom, mandating masks. But mere weeks later, the superintendent was fired and, under new leadership, the district again removed the masking accommodation without consulting doctors or Gould, she told The 74 in a recent interview. 

Now, almost four years later, Gould and her family live in Southern California — where they moved during the pandemic for its masking and eventual COVID vaccine requirements — and they and other parents, advocates and health experts are gearing up for what could be the next front of the school culture wars: a broader attack on school vaccine mandates by the incoming Trump administration.

Currently, all 50 states have vaccine requirements for children entering child care and schools. But with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who has peddled baseless conspiracy theories and “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” — potentially at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services, advocates and parents are right to fear a rollback of requirements, enforcements and funding, according to interviews with about a dozen experts. 

“The anti-vax warriors have made it inside the castle walls,” said Richard Hughes, a George Washington University law professor who teaches a course on vaccine law.

Kennedy’s legitimization and the different levers he could pull, experts told The 74, could have an immense impact on vaccination rates and the spread of preventable, contagious diseases in school-aged kids.

If confirmed by the Senate, Kennedy would take control of an agency with a budget and 90,000 employees spread across 13 agencies, including the and the . Dave Weldon, nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to head the CDC, has also endorsed debunked theories, and some chronic diseases.

Kennedy, whose nomination faces from health professionals and scientists and questioning by , did not respond to requests for comment. He has said he would not take away vaccines but look to make more of their safety and efficacy data available. 

“We don’t know what he’s going to do,” John Swartzberg, a professor at the University of California Berkeley’s School of Public Health told The 74. “But if he tries to carry out the things that he’s publicly stated — not just recently but over a long, long time — then the implications for our children in school are dire.”

While most school vaccine requirements come from states, the recommendations they’re based on begin with federal agencies, such as the CDC, and enforcement is often left up to local districts. This leaves room for both federal influence and “a hodgepodge of enforcement,” said Northe Saunders, executive director of the pro-vaccine , who sees battles around school vaccination mandates playing out at the federal, state and school board levels.

Experts agreed the federal government is highly unlikely to attempt to take vaccines off the market or categorically ban mandates, and most don’t anticipate individual states will do away with their long-standing requirements.

But James Hodge, a public health law expert at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, pointed out, “You don’t actually have to pull the vaccine for people to stop using it. You have to raise doubts about it.”

That can happen by planting seeds of misinformation, he said, or by starting to require that vaccines be assessed differently for approval or federal funding. Any slight dropoff in parents vaccinating their kids entering schools or day care can result in disease outbreaks, an outcome Hodge said he expects to see over the next year or so. Such declines are

As secretary, Kennedy could delay FDA vaccine development and influence the selection of CDC advisory committee members who make the vaccine recommendations that states then use to determine their requirements. Programs that provide free vaccines for kids could also see their funding cut.

“There’s short-term threats in terms of funding and what’s going to be available for state immunization programs,” Saunders said, “[and then] there’s long-term threats about immunization policy and what the future of the immunization landscape in the country can hold.”

Even in Democratically controlled California, Gould, the mom whose son has cystic fibrosis, said she’s concerned about shifts in vaccine rhetoric, particularly at the school board level. 

“I think what I have learned from my experience in Douglas County, Colorado, is that when these individuals take over majorities on school boards, it really affects everyone … Despite the fact that we are a highly educated, very liberal, coastal section of Southern California, you definitely have people that are trying to make inroads — and these are people who are anti-science.”

Are vaccines the new critical race theory?

Parents across the country are able to apply for exemptions if their child is unable to get vaccinated for medical reasons. Most states also have religious exemptions, and 20 have some form of personal , leaving a varied landscape. 

School vaccine mandates have been around for , and while some pushback has always existed, it wasn’t until COVID that there was a real spike in vaccine hesitancy, according to Kate King, president of the and a school nurse in Ohio.

The source of the skepticism has shifted, too: “Rarely have we seen the federal government behind those debates in a way that this next administration could be,” said ASU’s Hodge.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, sees the potential “unraveling of decades and generations of protective vaccines.”

“RFK believes he knows more than the totality of any science that has come before him,” she said. 

For a vaccine to get approved, it must first go through an advisory committee at the FDA. Another committee at the CDC then develops recommendations for vaccine schedules, which state legislators rely on to determine their school policies. Kennedy would have an enormous impact on who serves on these committees, and he could stack them with anti-vaccine advocates.

Kennedy could also request a review of all vaccines that have been previously approved by the FDA and subject them to new requirements. 

Many vaccines are paid for by the federal government. If Congress — under HHS’s direction or on their own — were to begin pulling that money, some of the most vulnerable children across the country could lose access to immunization. Trump has threatened to requiring vaccines for students. 

“The moment you start tacking on any price tag to a vaccination — any price tag whatsoever, even fairly minimal — you do see vaccination rates go down,” said Hodge.

Beyond policy actions, experts warned of the power of rhetoric. “We still rely — even under legal mandates that exist at the state level — on public acceptance of vaccines,” Hodge added, so for vaccine rates to remain high, so too must the public trust. The mere presence of a federal official who is skeptical and — at times outright hostile — towards vaccines gives the opposition more credibility.

Since the enforcement of these policies is typically left up to the district level, some advocates are anticipating increased pressure on school board members to take anti-vaccine positions. 

“The real tension is if a school board decides that they don’t want to support these [vaccine mandate] policies,” said Hughes, the GW law professor. “They can’t change the policies, but they might say, ‘We don’t support these policies. Not in our school district. No way, no how.’”

He said he’s already seen some groups use vaccines as a wedge issue, much like the debate over critical race theory — an academic framework used to examine systematic racism — that convulsed school boards a few years ago.

In , public health workers were recently forbidden from promoting COVID, flu and mpox — previously known as monkeypox — shots, according to a recent NPR investigation. And a regional public health department in Idaho is no longer providing COVID vaccines to residents in six counties after a by its board. 

There’s money in anti-vax anxiety

The anti-vaccination movement is not new. It can be traced back as far as the 18th century with Edward Jenner’s discovery of the smallpox vaccine. Because it was made from cowpox, people at the time were afraid that if they got the vaccine, they’d turn into a cow, said Swartzberg, the public health professor who has taught a course on the anti-vax movement for over a decade. 

“There’s always been opposition to vaccination because it’s the idea of the word inoculate, — meaning putting into you something foreign — and that scares people,” Swartzberg said. “I understand that. That’s where emotion has to be countered with data.” 

The group of people so stringently anti-vaccination that they refuse them is small but vocal, he said. Over the past few years, though, “something has dramatically changed in our society,” and the voices behind the movement have shifted from expressing personal fears to looking to monetize the fears of others. 

For example, Joseph Mercola, deemed one of the — the 12 people responsible for sharing the majority of anti-vax messaging on social media — made substantial sums of money by peddling far-fetched health claims and then as alternative treatments. Kennedy also appeared on the “Disinformation Dozen” list.

Others sell merchandise, books and tickets to events, offer exclusive paid content on platforms like Patreon, have sponsored content and display affiliate marketing links to anti-vaccine products.

“It’s turned into an incredibly lucrative field for anti-vaxxers, and what’s really facilitated this has been the internet and the lack of any monitoring of the internet for misinformation and disinformation,” Swartzberg said.

Just last week, Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, d that it will end its fact-checking program on social media posts. 

Using social media and other mechanisms, the anti-vax movement has targeted fairly insular groups around the United States with misinformation, he added. These include New York’s and the y in Minnesota, both of which have seen recent measles outbreaks. 

While the image of vaccine skeptical parents is often one of young, white “,” Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, also pointed to “well-earned” trepidation among Black and Latino parents. 

Historically, she noted, significant harm has been done to Black communities through the weaponization of medical trials, and families of color have had particularly negative experiences with the health care system —

During the pandemic, Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine advocacy organization, seemed to tap into this distrust when it put out targeting Black Americans with disproven vaccine claims. 

Gould, the California mom, said if she were still living in more conservative Douglas County she’d fear that people would “believe the disinformation [and] stop vaccinating their children. For kids with chronic illnesses — or like my son, a life-limiting illness — that has massive consequences. It has life-or-death consequences.”

Consider the Washington Post’s excellent education reporter Laura Meckler, writing on Nov. 12: 

President-elect has promised sweeping changes to federal agencies, but there’s one he wants to do away with altogether: the Department of Education.

And here’s Forbes on Nov. 20, announcing the choice of Linda McMahon to be education secretary:

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Linda McMahon—one of his top donors, a former cabinet member and wife of billionaire former WWE chair Vince McMahon—to lead the federal Department of Education, an agency he has repeatedly vowed to shutter in favor of relegating all educational responsibility to individual states in his second term.

But here’s Meckler again, just five days later on Nov. 17:

“…while his promise to has drawn enormous attention, experts in both parties say this is not likely to have sufficient support. A more likely outcome is Trump using the department to press a conservative worldview.

And here’s PBS on Nov. 15:

Donald Trump’s vision for education revolves around a single goal: to rid America’s schools of perceived “ wokeness ” and “left-wing indoctrination.” The president-elect wants to forbid classroom lessons on gender identity and structural racism. He wants to abolish diversity and inclusion offices. He wants to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ sports….

What’s going on here? Is the federal role in education slated for elimination or expansion? Is McMahon’s mandate getting rid of her agency or empowering it?

There’s no way to be sure today—and I’m not the first to ponder this seeming paradox. But there’s ample reason to be unsure, and that’s because the Trump world has long sent exceedingly mixed messages when it comes to K-12 education and the federal role therein.

One clear message is that education belongs to the states, localities and parents—and Washington should get out of the way. There’s certainly no need for an Education Department if the federal role is minimal or even nonexistent. 

But another view—and faction—holds that Uncle Sam should require schools to do the right thing and prevent them from doing wrong things, with those things being decided by Trump’s acolytes. 

You’ll find both views—and the resulting mixed messaging—in both the Republican platform and Project 2025.

The 2024 platform, for instance, says this:

We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run.

But it also says this:

Republicans will ensure children are taught fundamentals like Reading, History, Science, and Math, not Leftwing propaganda. We will defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children using Federal Taxpayer Dollars.

Project 2025’s education chapter, written by the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke, says this:

Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated…The federal government should confine its involvement in education policy to that of a statistics-gathering agency that disseminates information to the states.

But it also says this:

No public education employee or contractor shall use a name to address a student other than the name listed on a student’s birth certificate.

A sage veteran of earlier Republican administrations terms this a tug-of-war between the “decentralizers” and the “centralizers.”

It’s not limited to education, of course. The libertarian (or decentralizing) strand within conservatism has always wanted as little government as possible, along with minimal regulation and low taxes. What one might call the “traditionalist” strand has long sought to deploy government power to ensure people behave properly and be prevented from doing things regarded as immoral, sacrilegious or unpatriotic. They can’t help but be centralizers! 

Decentralizers have pushed in the past to scrap the department, to “voucherize” Title I, and to “block grant” just about everything else, as well as to rescind a slew of regulations and rein in the department’s Office for Civil Rights.

Centralizers are often found in Democratic administrations—consider the strings President Barack Obama attached to Race to the Top as well as sundry Biden-era regulations involving gender and school discipline. But the centralizing impulse also runs deeper than you might think among conservatives, sometimes—this may be counter-intuitive—in the form of mandating school choice and parental rights. 

The Project 2025 chapter on education, for instance, recommends a host of legislative and regulatory moves that would ensure parental rights and role in their children’s education and provide school choice within existing federal programs. Such recommendations parallel bills that GOP members of Congress have introduced to expand federal tax credits for education, extend “education savings account” options, and enact a “parents’ bill of rights.”

Trump’s choice of Linda McMahon as Education Secretary—Mike Petrilli has called this her “consolation prize” for not being given the Commerce Department—may simply signal that education, for now, will be a policy backwater. 

While she’s a long-time supporter of charters and choice, it’s a little difficult to picture her doing battle over bathrooms. She’ll likely go through the motions of trying to get her department abolished—as Terrel Bell did, with no success, back in the early Reagan years—but neither she nor anyone else is likely to get Congressional assent to repealing the agency’s innumerable spending programs nor its protections for kids with disabilities.

Does that mean in the end, that little will change? 

Perhaps. But remember, too, the very last act of the previous Trump administration in the realm of education: releasing of the “1776 Commission ,” which sought to refute the then-inflammatory “1619 Project” and combat “identity politics” by proffering its own view of U.S. history. It contained this passage regarding the duty of school and educators:

States and school districts should reject any curriculum that promotes one-sided partisan opinions, activist propaganda, or factional ideologies that demean America’s heritage, dishonor our heroes, or deny our principles.I agree with that statement myself, as do many Americans, and I note that it doesn’t call for the federal government to get involved with curricular disputes. But I wouldn’t count on the team that will take over the White House on Jan. 20 to be equally restrained.

Maurice “Mo” Green,  a retired leader of a progressive foundation who was recruited by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to run for state superintendent, defeated Michele Morrow 51% to 49%.

“The work does not end here. It’s now upon us to put forth and implement our bold vision, direction, and plan for [North Carolina] public schools,” Green said in a statement. “Our children and the future of our state depend on it.”

The race boiled down to both candidates accusing each other of extremism. Morrow, a former nurse who focused her campaign on school safety, portrayed Green as a left-wing radical who isn’t tough on student discipline. Green, meanwhile, reminded voters of Morrow’s derogatory statements about public schools and her calls for violence against Democrats on social media, including a that she wanted to see former President Barack Obama before a firing squad  —  comments that she said were blown out of proportion. In the final weeks of the campaign, Obama at a campaign rally in Charlotte, noting that someone “saying just crazy stuff” shouldn’t be in charge of decisions about textbooks and funding for schools.

In a statement, Morrow, who unexpectedly ousted incumbent Superintendent Catherine Truitt in the Republican primary, blamed “smear messaging” for her defeat and said the fact that the race was so close was evidence that a lot of voters agreed with her message. 

“We nearly overcame incredible odds,” she said. “Between Mo Green’s campaign funding and the support of his special interest groups, we were outspent nearly 300  to one.”

Morrow ran as an outsider, frequently criticizing public schools as “indoctrination centers” pushing liberal ideas about race and gender.  She considered her years teaching science and Spanish to homeschooled students, including her own, as adequate qualifications for the position.

Green, a lawyer, held a top spot in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and then led the 68,000-student Guilford district from 2008 to 2015. He plans to advocate for more funding for public schools. While he supports public school choice, he has been critical of the state’s voucher program. With lawmakers poised to approve a that would fully fund private school vouchers and eliminate a waiting list of more than 50,000 students, Green said during with Morrow, that resources are “being drained away from our public schools.”

While he used Morrow’s past social media posts to his advantage, his background in public schools appeared to make the difference for education advocates.

“Her lack of experience in the public education sphere was glaring,” said Marcus Brandon, who leads CarolinaCAN, part of a network of policy and advocacy groups. “Mo Green, being a former superintendent, made the case [that] he knew public education, and that literally is the job.”

These tensions escalated last year when a teacher disagreed with the superintendent’s decision to follow the advice of the school district’s lawyer and honor a transgender student’s request not to share their transition with their parents. The teacher went public and the results were swift and intense.

Hundreds of people descended on the next school board meeting. A local talk radio host said the superintendent wanted to “indoctrinate their children and … make them become gay and transgender.” Community members verbally accosted the schools chief in public saying, “You’re gonna go to hell. You never read the Bible.” 

The fiscal consequences were also considerable, forcing the district to divert funds from planned professional development. Ultimately, five educators left their jobs in response to the spreading unrest.

This small community’s turmoil is one of many accounts included in a new , which tries for the first time to put a dollar amount on the costs of the culture war conflicts that have consumed school districts over the past several years. The researchers estimate that the nation’s public schools spent approximately $3.2 billion in 2023-24 dealing with divisive public debates over race, gender and sexual orientation, forcing them to spend money on legal fees, security, public relations and employee hours responding to misinformation, disinformation and public records requests. 

And although the researchers said their figures don’t account for the emotional and social toll on educators and students, their numbers do include a significant and related expense: staff turnover.  

“There are many different costs that are really consequential and are undermining the ability of educators to support student learning and well-being,” said John Rogers, a professor at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies and the report’s lead author.

Data from the report comes from a national survey of 467 superintendents across 46 states conducted during summer 2024, followed by interviews with 42 superintendents across 12 states. Of those interviewed, 12 had taken the survey and reported moderate or high levels of conflict; the remaining 30 hadn’t taken the survey and were identified through professional leadership networks.

School districts were categorized as having either high, moderate, or low levels of conflict based on a series of questions about the nature of conflict related to culturally divisive issues, the frequency of and topics associated with personal or professional threats to superintendents and district staff and the financial and human resource costs.

Moms for Liberty, a high-profile parental rights group, was named specifically in the report in relation to board members they supported and other far-right groups accusing a western school district of indoctrinating students around sexual health issues. That superintendent cited having to spend roughly $100,000 to hire “armed plainclothes off-duty officers” and more than $500,000 in legal fees. Superintendents and school board members being attacked as pedophiles, groomers or sexual predators was a common refrain in the report.

Moms for Liberty did not respond to a request for comment. Closely aligned with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the group’s influence over school board elections is seen as waning even if battles over curriculum content and library books are still being waged.

Of the districts surveyed, roughly one-third experienced low levels of conflict, just over one-third experienced moderate levels and just under one-third experienced high levels. About 2.5% of superintendents reported no conflict. Overall, Rogers said those surveyed “look a lot like superintendents from the entirety of the (national) pool” in terms of their race, gender and whether they lead urban, rural or suburban districts.

Half of the schools chiefs reported that they experienced at least one instance of harassment in the 2023-24 school year. One in 10 said violent threats were directed toward them and 11% experienced property vandalism.

In order to calculate the overall fiscal costs, researchers asked superintendents about direct expenditures during the 2023-24 school year that were above and beyond what they previously would have spent for resources such as legal services or security; indirect costs, such as redeployed staff time; and employee turnover costs. 

To determine the cost of redeployed staff time, researchers took the number of hours that superintendents reported across these different activities and assigned them a dollar figure based on average district administrator wages from the . For each staff member that left the district, researchers assigned a dollar figure related to recruitment and new staff training based on research out of the .

Rogers noted that “there’s a certain imprecision” when it comes to calculating the cost of staff turnover because “you’re asking superintendents to draw upon the knowledge that they have to make this determination” of why educators and administrators left their positions. Follow-up interviews, he added, helped to bolster the reliability of these figures.

The researchers, who also include Rachel White of the University of Texas at Austin, Robert Shand of American University and Joseph Kahne of the University of California, Riverside, estimated that in their entirety, the conflict-related costs were more than enough to expand the national school breakfast program by 40% or hire “an additional counselor or psychologist for every public high school in the United States.”

Beyond the dollar figures, when speaking with superintendents, Rogers said he was particularly struck by the ways in which violent threats were playing out and how frequently it appeared there was a “concerted effort to disrupt, to foment conflict for the sake of fomenting conflict.”

For example, he heard from a number of superintendents whose districts spent an immense amount of time fulfilling public records requests they felt had been filed in bad faith. Once the materials were compiled, they often went unused, Rogers said.

The lasting implications of these in-district battles — beyond the fiscal costs — still remain unknown and appear to be shifting with the changing landscape. Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the History of Education at The University of Pennsylvania, recently on his previous work around the culture wars’ impact on history teachers, writing, “It seems like I might have exaggerated them.” 

But, he noted in an interview with The 74 this week, the effects on other educators and administrators are ongoing. Within the culture wars, he’s noticed less of a focus on race and critical race theory and more on gender and sexuality, hypothesizing that this may mean history teachers feel a lesser impact than English teachers, who might be more likely to teach directly about gender.

His sees the report as a reflection of the country’s “brittle and abusive” political culture. 

“This is the school politics chapter of a much broader story about the way that politics is conducted in America,” he said.

It appears that even as some of these more divisive players move on or are voted out, their political agendas may persist. That’s been the case in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County, one of the most closely watched regions for these debates. 

According to recent New York Times , despite Democrats sweeping the last school board election, not all contested books have been returned to school library shelves nor have teachers been allowed to display identity markers, like rainbow flags. Nearly a year after the Moms for Liberty-backed candidates were ousted, their presence is still felt. 

A moderate from an elite world versus a MAGA-backed veteran. 

An attorney general versus a lieutenant governor. An ardent supporter of public education versus a skeptic who called educators “” and wants to strip schools of federal funding. 

North Carolina’s governor race, dubbed the its final moments. But in the aftermath of several scandals and increasing political fanfare, the swing state known for nail-biting election days is almost certain to elect Democrat Josh Stein over Republican nominee Mark Robinson.

In late September, as polls were already showing a slight lead for Stein, reported Robinson called himself a “Black Nazi” and posted “slavery is not bad” anonymously on a porn site. Once his cheerleader, former President Donald Trump has since gone silent about Robinson and has not been seen with him in public, even while campaigning in North Carolina. In recent weeks, Robinson has taken to of Trump.

“The expectation is with everything dragging Robinson down, Stein should have a good night,” said Michael Bitzer, North Carolina elections expert and politics chair at Catawba College. 

But beyond the controversy that’s encircled Robinson – who has kept education debates centered on eradicating the presence of “politics” and “indoctrination” in schools, and – educators and students across the state told The 74 their top concerns are school safety and mental health, teacher pay and recruitment, and school funding. 

Their worries reach beyond the gubernatorial race, as the future of who will determine state education policy is in limbo. The state superintendent race is , with Democrat and former large district superintendent Mo Green holding a tiny lead over far-right candidate and homeschooling advocate, , who praised “patriots” outside the White House during the January 6 insurrection.

But whether the next governor is Stein or Robinson, the state leader will also appoint individuals for , subject to confirmation by the assembly. At least in March 2025, and five of Cooper’s picks have yet to be confirmed. The agency is in charge of policy, including credentialing criteria and what textbooks get used statewide. 

“Election day has got everybody a little nervous in the education world in North Carolina,” said Patrick Greene, president of the statewide school leader association and principal of Greene Central High School in Snow Hill, a town just over an hour’s drive southeast of Raleigh. 

“I think a lot of us are trying to get people to understand that the implications for this race go beyond party lines,” Greene said. “We need to do a better job of being advocates for people outside of the [education] world to understand how these policies directly affect them, their children, their communities.” 

There’s a strong chance North Carolina’s next governor will also in the state legislature, where lawmakers have repeatedly overridden current Governor Roy Cooper’s vetos to push through of laws including a 12-week abortion ban, restrictions on sports and medical treatments for transgender youth, and limitations on classroom discussions about gender – moves condemned by the . 

“Those of us who are boots on the ground need progress. We would love for the General Assembly and whichever gubernatorial candidate and state superintendent candidate wins to find some common ground — let’s get some stuff done,” Greene said, advocating for , teacher prep expansion and “all the things we want to do to make schools as good as they can be, rather than more and more rhetoric each time and blaming each other.” 

Stein’s top priority as governor, according to , is to improve public education. He has also supported to address the youth mental health crisis, and wants to expand support and access to community colleges and Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

The two education issues Robinson and Stein have some alignment on are raising teacher pay and expanding career and technical education. The question of how to afford educating the state’s most vulnerable populations, however, is another matter.

‘We need more than we’re getting’

Both Robinson and superintendent candidate Morrow have pushed to expand school vouchers, which would send more public funds to private schools. Governor Cooper called the effort the .”

Educators are also anxiously tracking the state supreme court as it wades into a , in which parents argued the state formula denied quality education to their impoverished, often rural areas. 

Today, the state where more residents live in rural areas ranks , more than $4,000 below average. 

The vast majority of North Carolina children are educated in public schools, with a little over . Similar trends held true in Arizona, another swing state where a recent revealed low income families were not accessing the voucher programs marketed to them.

“[Families] have options and they’re still choosing us,” said Greene.

Further worrying education advocates, for the states’s schools. “If I had my way about it, they’d send the check and I’d say, ‘Oh, no, you can have it. I don’t want your money. Your money comes with too many rotten obligations. We don’t want it.’”

Last school year, North Carolina received more than , which went predominantly to low-income schools, students with disabilities, career and technical education, and health programs like nutrition, mental health care and substance abuse support. 

“That’s scary in the world of the people who legally are bound to provide that. We don’t know where the resources would come from,” Greene added. “Quite honestly, we need more than we’re getting, I think like a lot of states that are predominantly rural.” 

Legacies of ‘hateful rhetoric’ 

Following in Trump’s footsteps, Robinson originally appealed to voters with a compelling personal story. He grew up a poor child in Greensboro, had faced multiple bankruptcies, and was a furniture-maker-turned lieutenant-governor in his first political bid after brief virality for a speech . 

Despite threats to preserving quality education for poor students, those with disabilities and LGBTQ youth, North Carolina students interviewed by The 74 are eager to vote and share optimism for the future.

“With all of this really extremist speech, I get to see firsthand how students my age are two things: either unmotivated to vote or talk about politics at all, or they’re really motivated because they’re frustrated and angry,” said Tai Stephan, 18, a first year student at the University of North Carolina and child of educators. “They’re educating themselves, they’re voting, they’re talking about things and to anyone that’s unmotivated.” 

Voting for the first time, Stephan said he is supporting candidates promoting equality and safety. His campus is one of several universities acting , including ending 59 staff positions. People “so beyond angry” are acting to change the policy they believe to be unjust, hosting teach-ins, speeches and considering lawsuits, risking possible disciplinary action. 

“They’re so frustrated that it goes beyond their educational prestige. It’s really scary to see a lot of groups at risk for losing the oasis they have in within schools… It shows that a lot of minority students are being attacked via legislation and where our country is moving if we don’t get out and vote.”   

For Evan Keith, 18 and a senior at Forest Hills High School in the southern, central North Carolina town of Marshville, it’s been difficult to see his peers feel discouraged by politics, with many thinking “even if we vote for a certain person, not a lot will change.”

At a time when educators and students are also fueling charges to curb the prevalence of school shootings, a Stein governorship feels like a safer choice.

“I hope that our governor, whoever it is, will really push to make safety a top priority, and mental health, as [they] really do affect everything: grades, performances on tests, and job confidence with our employers,” said Keith, also a first time voter this November. 

While it remains to be seen how Hurricane Helene recovery, early voting has yielded a. 

Education advocates are urging voters to to “do their homework and find the person that’s gonna help kids the most,” said Greene. “And if they don’t know, talk to somebody who works in education, because usually we’re happy to tell you.”

The state’s Republican attorney general twice accused Superintendent Ryan Walters of ignoring laws on and , actions he called “deeply troubling.” Members of Walters’s own party said he’d fallen down on his responsibility to get funds to school districts on time. And a series of media reports pointed to his role in a botched release of state test data: While it appeared student performance had skyrocketed, in reality the state had dramatically lowered the bar for success. 

But if Walters was feeling the heat, it didn’t show.

On the morning of Aug. 22, a phalanx of supporters waited for a chance to congratulate him for his headline-grabbing push to put a Bible in every state classroom. One even brought him a gift — a paperback copy of .

“We raise you up in prayer all the time,” another told him. “I thank you for what you’ve done.” 

Taking his seat in the cramped state Board of Education chambers, the 39-year-old Walters picked up a coffee mug with a Latin phrase that evoked his days as a small-town history teacher: Si vis pacem, para bellum. “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

In his 21 months as state chief, Walters has taken the battle to an array of foes. He labeled the state teachers association a “,” blocked from press conferences and moved to the licenses of “” teachers. He’s acted as a one-man publicity machine, a performance that’s earned him venomous foes and ardent fans who follow him with a near-religious fervor.

But in his focus on the culture war, his tenure has eschewed many of the mundane, unglamorous tasks of a typical superintendent. By summer, it appeared that one casualty of this approach might be a functional state education bureaucracy. Some pointed to inattention from Walters and the exodus of at least two dozen for a series of damaging missteps, from having to return in grant money to the federal government to keeping districts in suspense about .

Walters, who did not respond to requests for an interview, is used to fielding . But increasingly, he’s under fire from fellow Republicans.

The most visible sign of GOP impatience is an investigation sparked by House Republicans into whether Walters misappropriated state and federal funds. 

“Regardless of party, citizens want transparency, accountability and communication,” said Rep. Tammy West, a Republican running for her third term. “It’s their tax dollars. This is not the government’s money. This is not an agency’s money.”

The legislative probe comes on top of an August that required “urgent attention” in over 30 different areas. And earlier this month, a found “pervasive mismanagement” in the handling of two pandemic relief programs for students, one of which Walters administered.

The grand jury report shows “he’s not competent or qualified to handle millions of dollars, let alone … $4 billion,” said GOP Rep. Mark McBride, referring to the size of the state education department’s annual budget. McBride, who oversees the department’s finances and is one of Walters’s more persistent critics, said he expects the upcoming legislative report, due Oct. 29, to show “further examples of the incompetence of the department of education under his leadership.”

Even some of those who have supported Walters are openly saying that the steady drumbeat of controversy is not only hurting schools, but Republican chances at the polls in November.

Kendal Sacchieri is a former high school Spanish teacher now running as a Republican for state Senate. Like West, she is anti-abortion and pro-parental rights. Such views would typically place her firmly in Walters’s camp. But she said she was “floored” by his recent budget request for $3 million to purchase Bibles for schools.

“If Ryan Walters is trying to get a point across that we need to be teaching more Christian values, then he needs to go about it a different way,” she said. “Ryan Walters is not doing Republicans any favors.”

‘Talent drain’ 

Critics say he’s been busy building a national brand, fueled by he used to hire a publicist responsible for elevating his profile in conservative media. He is a frequent guest on and right-wing , where he’s opined on hot-button national issues seemingly far afield from running Oklahoma’s schools, like the war in and illegal traveled at taxpayer expense to Phoenix for a retreat with the in March and in July attended the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee

If his primary aim is self-promotion, he’s been “highly successful,” said Deven Carlson, a political science professor at the University of Oklahoma. 

“Everywhere you look, you see him gaining media opportunities and speaking engagements that no other secretary of education in the country has ever gained,” Carlson said.

Walters has said he inherited a   from predecessor Joy Hofmeister when he took office almost two years ago. But as students headed back to school in August, signs that the state’s school machinery was sputtering were hard to miss.

Services for many students with disabilities were disrupted for about a month when teachers and therapists couldn’t access with special education plans. The state also $250,000 for emergency inhalers to combat asthma, a condition suffered by about 10% of Oklahoma students. The education department blamed a software update for the technical glitch, while confusion over how to write for inhalers held up that purchase for a year. 

When confronted, Walters frequently gets personal. That’s what happened in a spat over Title I funding, a perennial responsibility for state chiefs across the country. It’s a particular concern in Oklahoma, where 1 in 5 children live below the poverty line and districts rely on $225 million in federal funds for tutoring and afterschool programs. Districts typically get estimates in the , allowing them time to recruit and hire staff for the fall.

When late July came without a word, Rob Miller, superintendent of the Bixby, Oklahoma, schools, couldn’t suppress his frustration any longer. , he attributed the delay to Walters falling down on the job amid a “talent drain” under his leadership. More than — over a third of the staff — have left or been fired under his watch, according to local news reports.

At a press conference four days later, Walters called Miller “a clown and a liar” and pointed — without evidence —to “all kinds of financial problems” in his district. 

The name-calling didn’t phase Miller, a former Marine major who participated in the 1991 operation to recapture the Kuwait airport from Iraqi forces during Operation Desert Storm. But the accusation of mismanagement rankled: The district had just received a . 

“We’ve checked with his folks, and they don’t know what he’s talking about,” said Miller, who calls himself a Reagan Republican. “It was obviously a false claim, and he’s made no attempt to retract it.” In turning down a request for comment for this article, department spokesman Dan Isett cited Walters’s “very busy schedule.” 

Responding to the controversy, a local business “I Stand with Rob” T-shirts, and former military members in the state House in a statement that they couldn’t “stand by while a respected leader and veteran is insulted and demeaned for simply doing his job.” 

Miller, meanwhile, has filed a , seeking at least $75,000 from Walters. The state ed chief has called the suit “frivolous,” adding that he should be immune from such litigation because he was acting in his official capacity.

‘Left-wing apparatus’

In with Blaze News Tonight, a conservative talk show, Walters made no apologies for promoting his priorities over maintaining a bureaucracy has turned schools into “state-sponsored atheist centers.” He said state employees who were fired or quit were part of a “” that has tried to undermine his agenda. He even plans to use from their departure to help defray the multimillion-dollar costs of his Bible initiative. 

It’s talk that has some appeal in Oklahoma, where two-thirds of voters chose Donald Trump in 2020 and many sympathize with the former president’s rhetoric about the bureaucratic “deep state” and “swamp” in Washington. 

And there are some lawmakers who haven’t lost faith in Walters’s ability to turn around an education system that consistently ranks among the worst in the nation. Rep. Chad Caldwell, a Republican from Enid, north of Oklahoma City, said career educators and the local media have treated Walters unfairly, accusing him, for example, of allowing political ambition to interfere with his job when spent over a year of her second term on a failed bid for governor.

He pointed to Walters’s announcement earlier this year that schools across the state had made enough academic progress to be removed from a list of 191 low performers — news, he noted, that his own local paper didn’t even cover.

Walters first connected with Caldwell over text.

The lawmaker was sponsoring a bill to eliminate the statewide salary schedule for teachers and let districts set their own rates. The plan was highly unpopular with teacher groups, who argued they would lose automatic raises. But Walters, no fan of unions, reached out to show his support.

During pandemic lockdowns, Caldwell worried about his kids falling behind academically as they learned from home. His thoughts turned to Walters, previously a popular AP history teacher from the southeastern Oklahoma town of McAlester and a 2016 finalist for state Teacher of the Year. Caldwell convinced his twins, then in high school, to log in to one of the award-winning teacher’s virtual classes. 

“My son, after one class, said, ‘Mr. Walters is the type of teacher that makes you want to go to school,’ ” Caldwell said. “I’m not a teacher, but I would think that’s about the best compliment that you could ever hope for.” 

But even he said he is eager for the release of the House investigation to separate suspicions of wrongdoing from actual misconduct. 

“I would have concerns if … he was intentionally thwarting the will of the legislature,” he said.

Caldwell was not among the 20-some House Republicans who signed a letter in August calling for an impeachment investigation into Walters. House Speaker Charles McCall rejected that idea, saying he would not “overturn the will of the people.” But he OK’d the into department finances. 

To some, such conflicts are evidence that Walters is enmeshed in a “spiritual battle.”

“He’s doing the right thing, and sometimes the right thing gets you bad press,” said Jackson Lahmeyer, who leads Sheridan Church and founded . Lahmeyer, who calls pro-LGBTQ positions “demonic,” met Walters when he was running for superintendent in 2022. At a church service in June, he thanked Walters for his push to put Bibles in every public school classroom — a plan that’s now the subject of from parents, teachers and faith leaders.

“I know it feels like … the world is against you right now,” Lahmeyer told the superintendent as Walters’s three youngest children clung to his side. The pastor while the congregation stretched their hands toward the altar. 

In October, news emerged that suggested the narrative of Walters’s Bible push may not be completely inseparable from his political ambitions. that the only versions of the Bible that would fit Walters’s criteria were those endorsed by Trump and his son, potentially stifling competition from other vendors. The former president earns endorsement fees from the God Bless the USA Bible, which costs $59.99. He’s taken in $300,000 in sales, according to a recent .

A week after the article was published, the department to allow more companies to bid.

A department ‘in transition’ 

One member of the education department exodus under Walters was Matt Colwell, who served as director of school success until the superintendent fired him for exposing internal emails intended to clamp down on staff members talking to the media. He’s and a top aide for wrongful termination. 

To Colwell, episodes like the Title I blowup fit a familiar pattern. “His strength is threatening; his weakness is administration,” he said of Walters. “There were tons of comments like, ‘I’ve directed my staff to do A,B,C and D on curriculum.’ And then I’d talk to the curriculum people, and they’re like, ‘We haven’t heard a thing.’ ” 

Staff turnover, he said, likely explains the sheer volume of findings in the recent federal audit. By the end of summer 2023, almost no one who had been overseeing federal grants was left. Staff that remained “didn’t know who to ask” when federal officials posed questions, Colwell said. “Each department would know their little slice of how that money was being spent, but nobody had the big picture.” 

The departed include those who once celebrated Walters’s ascent. , a veteran educator and conservative Christian, said she appreciated his focus on “the basics” and believed Oklahoma’s standing in national education rankings would improve under his watch. She was eager to join his administration and took a position in charge of monitoring grants in 2023. 

But she quickly grew disillusioned. He wouldn’t meet with her, Smith-Gordon said, and she was locked out of computer programs she needed to do her job. She recalled waiting weeks, sometimes in vain, for his signature on grant applications. Smith-Gordon said her only glimpse of him before quitting four months later was when she looked out the window one morning and saw him walking to his car. 

In a statement following her resignation, she described Walters as a “dictator” who publicly scolds and humiliates districts and said he spent more time “with cameras instead of in the halls of a struggling [department] in transition.”

‘Wear us down’

One of Walters’s frequent targets has been the LGBTQ community. A principal in the Western Heights district, for example, after an anonymous letter revealed that he performed in drag on the weekends. Walters called repeatedly for his removal. drove in from across the state and stood outside school board meetings and the principal’s school with signs that read “Got AIDS yet?” and “Homo sex is sin.” 

“It was terrifying for the kids,” said Nicole McAfee, executive director of Freedom Oklahoma, an LGBTQ advocacy group. “I think that teachers see that and worry that anything that might be perceived as supportive of queer kids could make them the next target.”

Some of his forays have run afoul of the courts. In June, the state  accused him of operating with “unauthorized quasi-judicial authority” when he and his like-minded state board against library materials with sexual content. He had tried to force the to remove by Khaled Hosseini and by Jeannette Walls from high school libraries. Some members of the community found the books too sexually explicit, but state law leaves those decisions up to districts. 

Walters responded to the ruling with a familiar counterpunch, “the face of pornography in schools.” 

Such rhetoric has contributed to an environment of “fear” and “exhaustion,” said Leslie Briggs, legal director at the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice. She represents a transgender student over his preventing districts from changing a student’s sex or gender in student records without the state board’s OK. 

Until recently, most district leaders were cautious about publicly criticizing Walters, and in Facebook groups, teachers warn each other to keep their social media accounts private. 

“Obviously,” Briggs said, “it’s to his benefit if he can wear us down or wear the community down.” 

‘A tough position’ 

No one has felt Walters’s wrath more than the Tulsa Public Schools, the state’s largest district, with 33,500 students. He demanded that Tulsa “stop emphasizing woke policies” like . And he pushed for former Superintendent Deborah Gist , which she ultimately did in an effort to preserve the district’s accreditation and avert a .

For a year, he required Tulsa’s new leaders to drive the hour and a half to Oklahoma City to give monthly updates on their progress in academics, teacher training and financial management. So when he visited Tulsa’s Will Rogers High School in April, with only a couple days’ notice, and asked to teach a lesson, district leaders were apprehensive. 

“It’s a tough position,” said Stacey Woolley, Tulsa’s school board president. “But we live in a place where making him angry certainly feels as though our students will potentially suffer.”

She watched him walk into an AP World History class that day and comfortably slip into his former role as teacher. In under 11 minutes, Walters packed in an analysis of political cartoons and seamlessly wove together perspectives on imperialism from Rudyard Kipling, Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson. Surrounded by students sitting three or four to a table, he urged them to play the game Risk to better understand world domination and explained why America’s founders took a different path. 

Every other country was “trying to be big and powerful and take over other countries,” he said, according to a recording of the lecture provided to The 74. “But America had this Declaration of Independence, so we’re going to protect people’s rights.”

It was a strange moment. Being in Walters’s , Woolley said, has been stressful for staff and families. But she couldn’t deny his expertise.

“He is a teacher, a very good one,” she said. “I sat there in a state of cognitive dissonance.”

That day, Walters showed a side of himself that few have seen since he entered politics. It was the same enthusiasm for teaching that first impressed Rep. McBride when he met him six years ago. A home builder, McBride was new to education policy in 2018 when House Speaker McCall appointed him to chair the appropriations subcommittee on education. He wanted to better understand teachers’ concerns, so he reached out to Walters after catching him on the radio.

“Walters was such a breath of fresh air,” the lawmaker from Moore, south of Oklahoma City, told The 74. “He was just happy to be a teacher.”

Now, they regularly spar in the media, with Walters counting McBride among the “liberal Republicans” who “ in your kids’ schools” and McBride saying it’s his responsibility to search for “.” Those nightly soundbites, however, don’t reflect their complicated relationship. 

“We don’t hate one another,” said McBride, who will in November after serving the maximum six terms. During an exchange earlier this summer, he said Walters asked when they were getting together for biscuits and gravy. He agrees with some of the superintendent’s positions, like having fewer strings tied to federal funds. But as a “practical” Republican charged with monitoring the department’s fiscal affairs, he said he’s grown weary of Walters’s “political theater.”

“You can’t have that kind of ego and not eventually get caught up in your own self-worth,” he said. “You know it says in the Bible, ‘Pride comes before the fall.’ ”

American education, both K-12 and postsecondary, has long needed to reboot and reemphasize instruction in civics and citizenship. But that need has never been greater than today, as disunion, disruption and disbelief come to characterize so many elements of American life. Schools alone cannot cure society’s ills, but they could do far more to rectify people’s ignorance about the principles, practices and origins of our democratic republic and the responsibilities and rights of its citizens. 

A number of worthy efforts to address this challenge are underway, including the development of new academic standards and curricula for the public schools. Among the most prominent of these are , a curricular roadmap created by a bipartisan team of scholars and educators under the aegis of , and the “” K-12 social studies standards created by the under the aegis of the .

While the roadmap concentrates on inquiry and understanding, posing myriad questions about civics and history that students should grapple with, “American Birthright” is chockablock with content — names, dates, events and concepts that students should know. Each offers a framework on which to hang a complete K-12 curriculum, and I believe an amalgamation of their divergent approaches would tap into a nascent consensus among American parents about .

But instead of seeking common ground and striving for a unified approach to revitalizing this essential subject, some seem to prefer conflict. Call them culture warriors or not, they work at finding fault. From the right, for instance, the Civics Alliance the College Board’s excellent Advanced Placement course in civics and American government — developed with the National Constitution Center and anchored to Supreme Court decisions — because it includes an “action” component. The lead author of “American Birthright” gave Educating for American Democracy’s roadmap an with the accusation that it harbors “a very large amount of radical action civics.” He similarly denounces all forms of “bipartisan cooperation” in this realm because “the radicals conceive of ‘civics’ as a means to eliminate their political opponents from the public square.”

The roadmap has been also faulted by progressive academics, for leaving curriculum (and test) development to state and local sources, rather than propagating a national plan, and being too soft on social justice issues. And EAD is trying to initiatives from the left that it sees as incompatible with the more-or-less centrist path it is trying to follow. For example, Biden administration’s priorities for a grant program meant to foster civics education, seek more attention to “racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives” than the consensus-minded supplies. 

Educators, too, sometimes add to the discord and suspicion, because many teachers don’t view these subjects the same way many parents and voters do. As Frederick Hess and Michael McShane note in their new book, , drawing on a RAND survey of social studies teachers, “Barely half deemed it essential that students understand concepts like the separation of powers or checks and balances.” A broader RAND survey of K-12 instructors found “that more … think civics education is about promoting environmental activism than ‘knowledge of social, political and civic institutions.’ ” 

Is the potential juice — a consensus-based reboot of civics education — worth so many squeezes? Why keep struggling to fend off culture warriors and redirect instructors? at have had meager impacts, petered out or been reversed, and the quest for concord is slower and a lot less fun than hurling brickbats.

So why persist? The country has muddled through for decades despite the fact that Americans know next to nothing about civics or history — what editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant once called a “forest fire of ignorance.” Never mind that just scored as proficient in civics on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress and of college-age Americans know that the vice president breaks ties in the Senate. (More think that’s the responsibility of the speaker of the House!) How much does it really matter in the real world that they understand so little about government?

Yet, having muddled through yesterday is no guarantee of successful muddling tomorrow. The nation’s citizenship woes grow more consequential as people’s faith in democracy itself falters. YouGov late last year that almost a third of young Americans agree — many of them strongly — that “democracy is no longer a viable system, and America should explore alternative forms of government.”  

Why believe in something you barely understand or were never taught and feel you have no role in? 

Civic ignorance is a silent killer, akin to high blood pressure, easy to ignore or take for granted even as it accompanies and hastens the onset of more serious maladies. Deteriorating norms of behavior, vulnerability to fake news and conspiracy theories, inability to compromise, isolation from civil society — all are associated with not knowing or caring much about the functions of government, the principles that underlie it or the historical saga that explains why we have the kind we do, where it has succeeded, where it has faltered, how it has changed.

Over time, like persistent hypertension, accumulated ignorance makes a difference. As Americans huddle in separate ideological (and socioeconomic and ethnographic) silos and accustom ourselves to cruder language and worse conduct, especially in the public square — “defining deviancy down,” as famously phrased by my mentor, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan — civic and citizenship challenges mount. It’s no surprise that people, especially the young, grow more cynical and pessimistic, more open to alternatives such as strong leaders who don’t have to bother with messy elections of the ”free and fair” variety.

Because people’s attitudes and actions in the civics-and-citizenship realm are shaped by a hundred forces, schools bear limited responsibility. But when it comes to old-fashioned ignorance, formal education has a big role — and was playing it poorly before anyone heard of culture wars. For decades, civics has loomed small in the curriculum, standards have been low, requirements few (and declining), instructors often ill-prepared. In few places are schools, teachers or students held to account for whether anything gets learned. Rare is the college that requires its students to study civics, and almost as rare are colleges that even offer such courses.

Yes, most high schoolers must take a course in civics or government — though a dozen states have no such graduation requirement, and most of those that do mandate just a single semester. Some administer a statewide end-of-course exam, but almost nowhere do students actually have to pass it. In Maryland, where I live, the test score counts for 20% of a student’s course grade, while teachers determine 80%. (Until recently, passing the exam itself was a prerequisite for a diploma, but that was seen as too onerous and punitive, particularly for poor and minority students.)

When the Thomas B. Fordham Institute state academic standards for civics (and U.S. history) in 2021 — an effort the “American Birthright” author criticized for its alleged advocacy of “action civics” — reviewers gave A ratings to just five jurisdictions while judging 21 to deserve a D or F. Common failings, said the reviewers, included “overbroad, vague or otherwise insufficient guidance for curriculum and instruction” and neglect of “topics that are essential to informed citizenship and historical comprehension.”

Weak standards, low expectations, few requirements, practically no accountability, poorly prepared (and oft-misguided) teachers and too little time spent on the curriculum. A mess, to be sure. Yet it’s hard to muddle through with a population that’s gradually untethering from democracy, that knows not how a Senate tie gets broken and that’s more engaged with video games than understanding elections or attending to issues before the town council. Nor should we look forward to a day when schools, to the extent that they teach the subject at all, are confined either to progressive “action civics” or MAGA-style “patriotism civics.” It’s one thing for the country to evolve politically toward blue and red but quite another for young Americans not to know enough to see what they have in common.

Whether the renaissance that K-12 civics urgently needs is likelier to emerge from a curriculum based on the government’s , an arranged marriage between EAD and “American Birthright” or something entirely different, it’s important to persist. Instead of getting depressed by the challenges ahead, let’s recall once more that in this realm there’s far greater agreement than argument across the land on fundamentals. It’s a ceasefire most Americans would cheer.

How about a ceasefire in the civics wars? Possibly even a peace treaty? This could turn out to be easier to achieve than pausing the conflict in Gaza (or Kashmir or Sudan).

The world’s big fights generally arise from opposed interests and disputes over fundamentals, and looking from afar at American civics education, one might think the same: hopeless divisions over what should happen in classrooms, textbooks and assessments. Should it focus on “how government works” or “what can I do to change things?” Is this subject about knowledge or action, information or attitudes, facts or dispositions? Rights or obligations?

Yet, unlike disputes that pit country against country and terrorist against nation state, much of the civics conflict is unnecessary, driven more by cultural combatants and politicians than by vast divides among parents and citizens regarding what schools should teach and children should learn. If those who inflame these debates would hold their fire, cool curricular heads — there are plenty around — could successfully build on the latent accord among parents and taxpayers who are the consumers of civics education. 

The evidence has been rolling in for years.

The University of Southern California’s Dornsife Center, for example, 1,500 K-12 parents in 2021 and reported that respondents, “across political parties feel it is important or very important for students to learn about how the U.S. system of government works (85%), requirements for voting (79%), the U.S.’s leadership role in the world (73%), the federal government’s influence over state and local affairs (72%), how students can get involved in local government or politics (71%), benefits and challenges of social programs like Medicare and Social Security (64%) and contributions of historical figures who are women (74%) and racial/ethnic minorities (71%).”

A year later, the Jack Miller Center, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit that focuses on civics and history, parents of elementary and secondary school students and found that “89% agree that a civic education about our nation’s founding principles is ‘very important.’ ” This semi-consensus also extends to history class: “Over 92% of parents believe that the achievements of key historical figures should be taught even if their views do not align with modern values — cutting against the narrative that America is firmly divided on how to teach students about the founders and the country’s history.”

As is clear from Dornsife’s percentages, there isn’t total consensus, just widespread agreement on fundamentals. Get into hot topics like gender, abortion and racism, and plenty of Americans want their kids’ schools to convey a one-sided view or avoid the issue altogether. Yet nearly everyone wants students to learn how to analyze issues, to understand why people argue about them and how a democratic republic attempts to navigate them. Nearly everyone wants kids to understand those mechanisms — why the United States has the kind of government it does, where it came from, how it works and the principles that drive it. And everyone, I’m pretty sure, wants their children to grow up to be good citizens.

The hard part — even after professional warriors drop their weapons — is turning that latent consensus into concrete standards, curricula and pedagogy. As Frederick Hess and Matthew Rice in 2020, after leading a series of bipartisan discussions at the American Enterprise Institute, there is “widespread agreement on many … of the goals of civics education” but “little agreement on how to get there.”

To that end, several recent initiatives have revisited what should be taught. Probably the two best known are the , launched — with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities — by with a broad-based group of academics and K-12 practitioners, and “,” a set of “model K-12 social studies standards” produced by the convened by the . 

The roadmap claims to offer “a vision for the integration of history and civic education throughout grades K-12.” This 40-page document abounds with questions that students should grapple with, not things they should know. (“What can we learn from historical leaders even when we disagree with their actions and values?” “What fundamental sources and texts in American constitutionalism and history do you invoke to help you understand current events? What gives those sources credibility and authority?”) It’s squarely on the inquiry side of the curriculum — not a list of people, events and structures — which is why it’s thought by many to represent the progressive side of the civics debate. Yet the questions it poses can’t be answered very well unless one also knows stuff, so it furnishes a framework on which to hang a thorough and ambitious curriculum. That is, provided someone adds the content that teachers and their students will need.

Content is what “American Birthright” is all about. Its 115 pages also offer a framework — up to a point. They abound in names, events and dates, which is why these model standards are widely viewed as coming from the traditional side. The document also poses explanatory and discussion challenges but tends to frame them as simplified admonitions about big, complicated topics: “Explain why free people form governments to defend their liberty.” “Describe how citizens demonstrate civility, cooperation, self-reliance, volunteerism and other civic virtues.” Those are obviously important things to do, but really hard unless one has already acquired roadmap-style analytic skills as well as factual knowledge.

In my view, an amalgam of the best of the roadmap and “American Birthright” would make for an awesome social studies plan, albeit one that would occupy far more school time than is typically allotted to these subjects. Such a blend would also take advantage of the latent consensus about what kids should learn.

Another approach is to build, as has done, on the test that immigrants must pass in order to become U.S. citizens. Administered by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, it consists of 100 knowledge-centered questions about history and civics. (“What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful?” “Why do some states have more representatives than other states?” “Before he was president, Eisenhower was a general. What war was he in?”) Those taking it face only 10 questions — but since nobody knows which 10 they’ll get, preparing for the test means learning the answers to all 100. 

Knowing those things is just a start on real citizenship, but not a bad threshold to ask people to cross. And the university team has amplified it into the beginnings of actual curriculum by adding original sources, study guides, teacher materials and other supplements meant to “exceed the USCIS test in helping students learn not just the facts tested but [also] the underlying concepts, ideas and events.”

Nobody expects civics classes in Dallas to be identical to civics in Seattle. There’s no reason to expect matched curricula or teaching styles across a vast nation with a decentralized K-12 system governed almost entirely by states and communities. Yet the country needs some shared understanding of what it means to be an American and what’s changed — and hasn’t — over these several centuries. That’s why a ceasefire is necessary as well as feasible.

The results come from a that polled 1,506 parents of K-12 public school students conducted by the National Parents Union between Feb. 6-8.

For the past four years, the organization has surveyed parents leading up to the State of the Union address, “because we want parents to be able to give their own State of the Union,” said founding president and 74 contributor Keri Rodrigues. All questions are written by parents who serve on the group’s Family Advisory Council, composed of delegates across the country that represent different intersections of American families.

While some results were unsurprising — like parents welcoming more financial support — they are still important, according to Rodrigues, because they serve as an essential message to policymakers about what parents care about. “We have these little, ‘We told you so moments.’ I think this is yet another one.”

Rodrigues said that voters are repeatedly and inaccurately told that parents are angriest about hot-button, culture war issues.

“We have consistently said to people, ‘Please, listen. Look at the data …’ It is clear,” she said.
“Parents are struggling with economic issues … Inflation, the cost of living, people living on the edge. Parents and families are scared and they’re hurting.” 

“We are obviously focused on education justice but economic justice for families is equally important to us,” Rodrigues added later, “because we really deal with the intersectional issues … we just don’t think you can separate those things.”

Overall, surveyed parents ranked K-12 education as the third most important issue for the president and Congress to address, behind the economy and immigration.

“In education, we think we’re the center of the universe, and we’re not,” Rodrigues said. “We’re a piece of the puzzle. It’s relevant, it’s in the mix, it’s definitely a concern. But we have to understand the intersectionality of the larger political context and where we fall in it and how it competes with other issues for the average voter and for the average American family.”

According to another released by the organization in November 2023, voters trust Democrats slightly more on education and Republicans by a small margin on the economy. The majority of parents reported wanting policymakers to work together to find bipartisan education policy solutions, even if it means compromising with people they disagree with.

“It just makes me crazy that our elected officials don’t listen,” Rodrigues said. “There are really big, important things that American families want us to do,” including the child tax credit, which during last week’s State of the Union, and stronger, evidence-based reading and literacy programs. 

“We can do big things,” she continued. “We can have unity … The majority of us can agree on some big, important things.”

Of parents surveyed in February, 87% were in favor of expanding the child tax credit and 85% were in favor of expanding subsidies to reduce health insurance costs. The vast majority were also in favor of providing funding directly to families of K-12 public school students to help them pay for supplemental resources such as tutoring. 

The survey did not include questions about more controversial vouchers, which let parents use taxpayer money to send their kids to private schools. The National Parents Union is known for both its criticism of traditional public schools, including teachers unions, that is sometimes seen as aligning with pro-school choice education reform forces and for elevating the voices of parents, especially lower-income parents of color.

Over 80% of surveyed families want the federal government to support all K-12 public schools via counseling and mental health services, free school lunch, free, high-quality preschool programs and increased funding for schools in low-income communities.

Among the 484 parents who responded to demographic questions, 27% consider themselves to be conservative, 24% liberal and 43% moderate. They were also socioeconomically and geographically diverse. About half of respondents were white, 15% Black, 24% Hispanic or Latino and 3% Asian. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

While the vast majority of school districts across the country have received additional federal funding to address COVID-related challenges, only 27% of parents reported having seen or heard anything about how these ESSER dollars were being used in their kids’ schools.

Just over 70% of parents, though, did report that their child’s public school had provided laptops or tablets for students since 2021 and about 45% said schools were offering additional tutoring or counseling services, which could have been supported by pandemic relief funds.

The ESSER funding results, Rodriguez said, reveal that parents did not get the voice they were promised in how that money was spent and that “a lot of things that we actually wanted — like additional mental health support — were not realized.” 

“Are we whipping laptops and chromebooks at kids? Hell yes we are. Is that necessarily a good thing? I mean a lot of parents would argue that that’s not actually getting us to the outcome.” 

Pro cell phones, wary of social media use 

To help inform the survey’s focus, Rodrigues said the National Parents Union presented data to their Family Advisory Council around student use of social media and its impact on mental health. 

A new understanding emerged from these discussions: Parents view cell phones and social media as separate issues, yet the two have become convoluted. This reframing was a lesson for her, she said, both as president of the organization and as a mother.

This same distinction was borne out in the survey results, she said: Parents want their kids to have access to their phones during the school day so that they can stay in touch with them, but they also recognize the dangers of social media and its negative impact on their children.

The top reasons kids use their phone, according to surveyed parents, is to contact family members, play games, contact friends, listen to music and take videos. A majority of parents (65%) also reported that their children used their phones for social media and 83% said there should be a minimum age limit on when kids are allowed to have their own social media accounts, with the largest share (20%) citing age 13. Just under 30% of parents said their children spend somewhere between four and five hours a day on their phone. 

Despite social media concerns, nearly half of parents said their child’s cell phone use had a positive impact on them and an additional 42% said phones have about an equally positive and negative impact. 

Parents listed a number of reasons they want their kids to take phones to school, with about 80% saying it was so they could use it in case of an emergency. About half of parents said it was an important tool for coordinating transportation to and from school, and 40% said they want their kids to be able to communicate with them about their mental health or other needs throughout the day. 

Just over half of parents believe that kids should sometimes be allowed to use their cell phones in school, while about a third believe students should be banned from using phones unless they’re needed for a medical condition or disability. There was very little parent support for locking up students’ cell phones in secure pouches or containers. 

“I think it goes back to something that we have been talking about since the beginning of the pandemic and the Great Parent Awakening,” Rodrigues said, “which is that the implicit trust that parents have in schools— that they’re going to tell us what’s going on and the communication — a lot of that has eroded. And that’s not toothpaste you can put back in the tube.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to the National Parents Union and to The 74.

Then, 2020 happened. 

Over the past three years, there has been a political shift from “How will this policy help students?” to “How can I make sure my side wins?” Battle lines drawn in state legislatures impact local school board meetings, with superintendents often forced to play mediator. Students’ educations can become collateral damage.

As someone who has been a superintendent for more than 20 years (and who comes from a political family), I know how it can feel to be caught in the middle — juggling federal, state and local legislation that doesn’t always align with your philosophy as an educator or meet students’ diverse needs. But there are ways to make a difference while remaining apolitical if you stand true to your mission and message.  

First, build relationships with and get buy-in from legislators. 

School choice has become a sensitive topic for legislators across the country. It has grown increasingly difficult for public school educators to fight the falsehoods about their schools. This misinformation can be used to steer families away from public education. It is the duty of K-12 district leaders to demonstrate to local and state officials why public schools are the right choice — that they provide multiple opportunities for students to succeed, prepare them for careers in the community and do both without any political agenda.

Through events such as weekly school board luncheons, board members in my district remain engaged and connected to our overarching focus — to educate every student at the highest level while standing strong in our convictions and being open about the challenges we face. We regularly invite state and national legislators to visit our schools and engage in programs, classroom walkthroughs and roundtable discussions with teachers.

After working closely with local and state leaders, I’ve discovered we can usually find commonality on most issues and focus collectively on the betterment of all students. Those politicians return to their legislative bodies with real-life, on-the-ground information — that they gathered from conversations with us — which they refer to when bills are proposed and budgets are set. 

Second, assemble a team of advocates.

Business and industry leaders are among the most powerful voices in advancing educational opportunities. The Springdale School District has 125 career and technical education teachers serving about 9,000 students daily in four middle, four junior high and four high schools. They routinely work with and learn from community and corporate partners. 

The district collaborates with these partners to create a solid foundation for students, from coordinating paid apprenticeships to connecting parents to local jobs. By addressing ongoing workforce issues, helping to lift families out of poverty and creating stability in the community, we’ve been able to help lessen many barriers to students’ education. 

These business leaders are also some of our best advocates. When they step into our schools and see all the good things that are happening — as well as the challenges — they can tell our story in the community in a powerful and deeply personal way.    

Third, embrace transparency and authenticity. 

Like most districts, Springdale has been on the receiving end of negative and controversial comments from people in the community. But I’ve found that they often say these things without having all the facts, or are repeating talking points from others who are trying to further agendas that aren’t always in the students’ best interests.

When I have the opportunity to discuss our circumstances, it’s amazing how people’s frustrations subside and their focus shifts to what they can do to help alleviate the district’s challenges. Over and over, I’m asked why we didn’t tell them about our issues sooner. The fact is, many times we have — but people aren’t always ready to listen. 

One way we combat misinformation is to be authentic, timely and transparent. For example, during legislative sessions, I travel weekly to the state Capitol to engage directly with elected representatives. I then disseminate information through newsletters, meetings with principals and our district’s residents, and through school board meetings. Most important, we make sure no parent is left out of the conversation and left to seek out details from other sources. Our communications office delivers school information in English, Spanish and Marshallese, to speak to families in their first language. We’ve built relationships with local media to stay visible, get information out quickly and respond immediately to issues that arise. 

We have also created a guiding coalition of administrators, instructional specialists, teachers and support staff, who analyze school data, help set school goals and assist with the development of the district’s strategic action plan. Additionally, they work to strengthen our Professional Learning Communities — teams of educators who share ideas to enhance their practice and create a learning environment where all students can reach their fullest potential. This helps to ensure our collective focus is on student achievement. 

Lastly, stand your ground — and pivot when needed. 

As frustrating as navigating changing laws can be, it’s important to remember that most people want the best for the students. While striving to make everyone happy is an exercise in futility, superintendents have to find ways to navigate the politics — while remaining completely apolitical — to ensure every student has great opportunities that pave the way for success.

Elena Chin, a former school counselor at a Department of Education elementary school in Queens for 23 years, founded the group after feeling increasingly alarmed by COVID closures, LGBTQ+ inclusion, and required diversity and equity workshops which she felt framed staff as “white supremacists.” 

“What we hope to accomplish is minimize it before it even starts and is full blown into the schools,” Chin said. “Raise awareness. Get a parent at every school board meeting to watchdog. We can’t normalize this stuff.”

Meeting by Zoom for about six months, the new Queens, New York chapter is following the same agenda as the organization, hoping to accomplish what some of the 285 other chapters already have: Limit or remove books and content featuring LGBTQ+ identities, racism and sex, which they believe can harm children. 

Some education experts were doubtful the New York City chapter will find much support in the overwhelmingly blue metropolis, but acknowledged people have always been in the city. Other parent groups with similarly conservative ideals have already gained a foothold locally.

Across the country, Moms for Liberty — making the Queens launch unsurprising to Michigan State researcher Rebecca Jacobsen, who’s been tracking the groups’ presence at school board meetings nationwide. 

“Their explicit mission says to represent voices that feel unheard. So in some ways, a really strong liberal location might lead to a small group of parents feeling like they don’t have a voice,” Jacobsen said. “Moms for Liberty has stepped in and said, ‘we’re here to represent you.’ And that’s a powerful feeling.” 

Chin was particularly concerned by the use of preferred pronouns, the number of children who told her they were gay, and the fact that she . 

“We’re telling children, you can tell me [you’re gay], and not your parents. That sounds like grooming to me,” Chin said. 

As a term, “grooming” has often been appropriated by conservatives to describe LGBTQ+ inclusion — a trend experts say minimizes real threats of child sexual abuse and vilifies queer people. 

Chin believes the number of children claiming they were gay and posters celebrating diversity was a “social contagion” at P.S. 64, for kids she said were just looking for more acceptance or to fit in with friends. 

Gender Queer was the only title Chin referenced in an interview with The 74. The memoir, which won two American Library Association awards, the Alex for young readers and the Stonewall for nonfiction, has become a around the country for parents and politicians looking to ban school discussions about gender identity. 

In setting up the New York chapter, Chin has met roadblocks when attempting to open a bank account and finding a venue for in-person meetings. Two major banks declined her request. Only a third accepted, a smaller, local one which she declined to name. 

About 20 adults have “joined the movement” since April, Chin said. Outside of Queens, four members of the new Moms for Liberty chapter are from Brooklyn and one is from the Bronx. Every major racial group is represented. 

Yet not all are parents: Many are retirees, grandparents who “can have a voice without fear,” said Chin, who believes more parents with children in the city’s schools are staying away. 

“Many people are fearing for their jobs, fearing the association,” she said, “… and they fear retaliation against their kids.”

She is currently searching for a local location to screen an anti-trans documentary. The chapter plans to organize to oppose . While New York City goes beyond current state requirements to offer sex ed to its middle and high schoolers, the expansion would bring modified lessons to K-6 graders.

The group will also challenge curricula with an “anti-American message,” she said, that might make some children believe they are “victims” and others “oppressors.” 

Because the city’s schools are not governed by traditional school boards, where other chapters have exercised power to oust superintendents, the Queens chapter will advocate through media, political connections and gaining membership.

“That’s really my goal. To get people motivated everywhere,” Chin said. “I would love to see a chapter in every borough, minimally.” 

Moms for Liberty has been characterized , which Chin said is, “not a bad thing at all.” 

Even after the characterization, more members have joined nationally, Chin claimed. “So just twirl away,” she said. A spokesperson for Moms for Liberty’s national arm confirmed the group “saw a bump in membership and chapter openings,” after the SPLC’s hate group distinction in June 2023.

Maya Henson Carey, a research analyst with SPLC, said the organization’s rhetoric and work disproportionately hurts Black, brown and LGBTQ+ students, already some of the nation’s most vulnerable student populations. 

“By taking out books and parts of history that reflect who they are, they’re really seeking to erase their identities from public spaces and the classroom,” Henson Carey said. 

Though about 76% of New York City voted for President Joe Biden in the last election, have always thrived, particularly in parts of Queens, Staten Island and southern Brooklyn. It’s those pockets where Chin has already found support.

But some experts doubt the group’s conservative agenda will find much of a home in the city at large.

“When they get into the issue of book banning and attitudes towards gay and trans people, it’ll resonate with some folks, but I think the outcry against them will be very strong,” said Joseph Viteritti, public policy and education scholar at Hunter College. 

“If they’re going to lead with that kind of stuff, they’re going to realize very soon that we’re not Florida here,” added Viteritti, who served as a senior advisor to schools chiefs in New York City, Boston and San Francisco.

Yet already this year, parents of all races preferring more conservative education policies have made waves in the city, including in lower , a historically liberal block of neighborhoods. 

Via , conservative have found more power — 40% of candidates endorsed by Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum and Education were elected this cycle. Only 2% of public school parents voted in the election, according to . 

PLACE, while not affiliated with the Queens Moms for Liberty chapter, shares some similar values. Particularly in wanting to preserve and expand merit-based admissions policies to the city’s most coveted schools — a practice research suggests reinforces racial imbalances. 

“I know that the things [Moms for Liberty] are talking about are things that I hear parents here in New York talking about all the time,” said Maud Maron, co-president of PLACE and community education council member in lower Manhattan’s District 2. 

In a dramatic reversal, the district, where seven of 10 community council members were PLACE-endorsed, has just announced it . 

Parents often say, ‘I’m 100% there, I just can’t tweet under my own name,’ or ‘I just can’t say it, because of work ramifications,’ Maron said.

For scholars who track Moms for Liberty’s work, despite hesitance or fear parents may feel in aligning with the organization, it’s clear small networks of parents are effective and organized at making their voices heard, sharing strategies via social media from coast to coast. 

As a result, New Yorkers may soon see the same language and challenges levied in Florida once the Queens chapter begins to act on its agenda.

“We would have thought, wow, those are really different,” Jacobsen said, referencing the Queens launch and other regions that would have seemed unlikely. 

“… That’s really what’s different today,” she said, “the ability to very quickly move the same message to really disparate places.”

Hundreds of are pending in 44 states, and laws or executive actions have been passed in 18 states that are intended to restrict or ban teaching about race, racism, gender and sexuality. Virulent attacks have targeted districts, school boards, schools, libraries and individual administrators, teachers and librarians. They are often led by non-parents and outside agitators working for political groups such as Moms for Liberty.

Whether these efforts are understood as the ,  or  targeting supposed woke education, the  on teachers and school leaders is real. Educators are confused about whether their state has passed laws that restrict teaching, what those laws say and how they might be affected by them. They are getting mixed messages as restrictions on teaching contradict the charge to strengthen the teaching of ,  and .

How can educators navigate often unanticipated attacks and strengthen curriculum, teaching and safe spaces that truly benefit all students and a democratic society? 

We recommend an approach called . This involves working toward democratic aims in education while managing the risks of controversy. Teachers and school leaders promote about significant issues so students learn how to examine, think critically about and discuss these issues with open minds. The curriculum teaches honest history that includes the experiences of traditionally excluded groups. At the same time, educators use strategies, such as selecting and framing for classroom inquiry and discussion, carefully choosing resources and pedagogical methods, and guiding discussion, to manage the risks that accompany teaching in this political climate. 

This , derived from a on preparing teachers for controversial issues, embodies contained risk taking and encapsulates these strategies. The research examined how four educators at universities in Northern Ireland, England and the Midwestern U.S. prepared teacher candidates for controversy in history, social studies and citizenship classes, and what those student teachers learned and put into practice. The framework is now used by K-12 teachers, school leaders and teacher educators. Here is specific guidance for educators based on five of its elements.

1. Prepare Thoroughly: If your state, local government or school district has relevant laws or policies, make sure you read them completely. Also know your state standards and be able to cite them as a guiding document. If your teaching or curriculum is ever challenged, you’ll have the standards, legal text and/or local policies to show that what you are teaching is justifiable. Know your students and school community. Anticipate potential challenges and rehearse your responses to them.
2. Communicate Proactively: Keeping open lines of communication with stakeholders, including students, parents and administrators, can head off many potential challenges before they begin. Be transparent about your goals, their educational purposes and the standards they align to, and respond to any concerns before teaching. Collaborate with colleagues and enlist support from school leaders. Turn potential challenges into active parental engagement and address misunderstandings and mischaracterizations of your curriculum directly.
3. Choose Resources and Teaching Methods: Use sources and approaches to inquiry and discussion that foster an exchange of ideas among students and develop their . Discussion formats such as seminars or , which provide models for exploration of texts and deliberation on issues, are effective at cultivating student voice and evaluation of different perspectives. Be sensitive to which formats are best for different kinds of issues, especially those connected to student identities. Clear goals for the discussion and procedures that keep students focused on those goals help develop vital skills and knowledge while limiting derailing comments from students. 
4. Cultivate a Supportive Environment: Safe and supportive classrooms and schools make students more open to learning how to engage in civil discourse across differences on significant issues. Take time to develop expectations (with student input), relationships and community. Creating room for students’ opinions and emotions, and pausing if rhetoric becomes potentially harmful or offensive, makes students feel heard and welcome. An in which students feel they can express themselves and discuss concerns with educators demonstrates caring helps to ward off complaints from students and families and contributes to development of young people’s civic participation.
5. Think Through Teacher Stance: Given accusations of indoctrination, educators must reflect on their own perspectives and consciously decide when and how to express them. As moral leaders, they must stand up for human and civil rights. But on specific issues requires ethical and practical judgment about the purpose and how those opinions will be received. Individuals react toward information that aligns with their own beliefs, and educators are no different. Knowing your own perspectives and understanding other viewpoints can help you respond to comments you disagree with in ways that educate and seek common ground rather than alienate people. 

We understand the confusion, anxiety and outrage educators are experiencing. We hope these steps will help teachers and school leaders be especially thoughtful, strategic and mutually supportive while they continue to serve the best interests of all young people and a diverse democratic society.

Illinois leaders have taken deliberate action to ensure our schools respect the role of the teacher, our laws respect the rights of women and our curricula honor the contributions of Black, Indigenous and people of color and LGBTQ+ leaders to our nation’s collective history.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker recently signed legislation making Illinois the first state in the nation to . Our state values your expertise as an educator and believes that engaging with challenging texts under your guidance ultimately prepares students for success navigating and understanding the world.

Here in Illinois, we do not shy away from our complex histories or identities. While Texas tries to ban discussions about race and Florida forbids teachers from “saying gay,” we have revised our in the opposite direction. We encourage dialogue from multiple perspectives. We require schools to teach about the of Asian Americans, Black Americans, Native Americans and LGBTQ+ Americans. We protect the freedom and professional judgment of educators to choose instructional materials that represent and affirm the diversity of Illinois’ students. 

Illinois has charted a compassionate path to embrace children and educators of every background and identity and codified it into law, affording educators the professional freedom to do their best work.

According to the , women make up 77% of the teaching profession. While states across the nation have gone backward in the wake of Roe v. Wade, Illinois continues to trust women. Our lawmakers have codified , bodily autonomy, and access to contraception and abortion in state law.

Illinois requires insurers to cover gender-affirming health care medications at no cost to the consumer. We require schools to provide menstrual products in bathrooms. Illinois guarantees the availability of health care and a safe place to have a family.In Illinois, we are serious about our commitment to bolstering a diverse educator pipeline. We have state-supported for teachers of color and statewide access to for all educators. We have for students of color and bilingual students looking to join the profession. We have programs to help diverse educators gain access to administrative roles.

And thanks to strong collective bargaining rights, Illinois teachers receive commensurate pay for the increasingly critical role they play in our society. Illinois teachers are deservedly some of the .

Last month, the governor signed a state budget committing $45 million a year for three years to support districts’ initiatives, including incentives like signing bonuses or relocation support and reimbursement of fees for transferring teaching licenses to Illinois.

Illinois offers full to educators accredited in any other state, competitive pay and benefits, and career advancement.

Illinois’ commitment to the fundamental principles of public education — inclusion, equity and instructional rigor — pays off in student outcomes. U.S. News & World Report Illinois sixth in the nation for pre-K-12 education, and we have 10 of the in America. Of the in the nation, six are in Illinois, including the No. 1 and No. 2 spots. Thousands upon thousands of teachers have joined the profession in Illinois over the past five years.

We have made education our top priority as a state, increasing public school funding by billions over the past five years. We’re investing in a plan to offer universal access to within the next four years. We rank for growth in the percentage of high school graduates who scored a 3 or higher on Advanced Placement exams.

So, teachers, if you also want great schools for your children, come to Illinois. In Illinois, we welcome and embrace educators and families of all stars and stripes from across the country who are looking for a hospitable place to live and work. From towns nestled amid natural beauty, like Galena, Elsah and Marion, just outside Shawnee National Forest; to the college-town charm of cities like Bloomington and Champaign; to bustling and cosmopolitan Chicago; Illinois is proud to be a safe haven for your rights and your excellence as educators. Come to Illinois.

Over the last three years, hundreds of bills seeking to strip protections from LGBTQ youth have rolled through statehouses.

In the opening weeks of the 2023 legislative season alone, more than of — most of them targeting schools — were introduced throughout the country. 

It’s no surprise that queer students in where these laws have passed are profoundly impacted. But less visible is the dramatic effect the steady drumbeat of headlines has had on youth in places with even strong anti-discrimination laws. Newly released data from the advocacy groups GLSEN and The Trevor Project show increases in hostility, victimization and discrimination experienced by students in blue states as well as red.

The effects are devastating. of LGBTQ 13- to 17-year-olds considered suicide last year, as opposed to of high school students overall, according to The Trevor Project. Eighteen percent actually attempted it. Seventy percent report anxiety, and 57% experienced depression.

Strong in-school relationships are a well-known protective factor. LGBTQ students who say their teachers care a lot about them are to consider suicide and 43% less likely to be depressed than those who don’t feel cared for, according to The Trevor Project. 

Rates of self-harm are much lower among students who feel affirmed in school, and acceptance of LGBTQ students had risen steadily — if unevenly — following legal recognition of same-sex marriage. But the number of youth who see their schools as affirming has fallen dramatically over the last four years. 

In California — where the first gay couples married in 2008 and schools began teaching LGBTQ history a decade ago — found that the number who reported hearing homophobic remarks from adults in school rose from to 49% in 2021. That’s an increase of 408%.

, where same-sex marriage has been recognized for almost 20 years, the number of youth exposed to anti-LGBT remarks is up 686% over the same time frame.

In Minnesota, where queer youth are protected by strong human rights laws, the number is up 520%. In Connecticut, it’s 482%. In New Hampshire, 545%.

The increases are so big in part because acceptance had been on the rise in many places. In red states, the rise in anti-gay and anti-trans speech is smaller — but only because the starting numbers were much higher.

According to the surveys, anti-trans remarks are pervasive. , the number of students who report hearing transphobic remarks from school staff rose 235%, from 34% to 80%. , the number rose by 190% to 76%. In Missouri, 197% to 73%.  

In fact, when reports of hostile speech by peers are added to the rate of problematic adult remarks, there is no state in the nation where fewer than 93% of LGBTQ students reported hearing slurs in school. Nationwide, 83% were harassed, 54% were sexually harassed and more than 12% assaulted. 

Kids in the crosshairs

A new data analysis by The 74 shows how this , aimed at a relatively , is having an outsize effect. The number of youth who identify as something other than cisgender is growing, but it’s still a tiny number of children. 

Of the approximately 16 million high school students in the United States, an estimated 1.8 million, or 11.6%, identify as LGBTQ. Just 300,000 are gender-nonconforming. 

Ten years after became widely recognized, a sizeable majority of Americans with gay, lesbian and bisexual co-workers and neighbors. Experts say it’s harder to attempt to undo LGBT rights overall than to about the experiences of a very small subset of people.     

And unlike past campaigns to vilify LGBTQ people, this time, the rhetoric targets kids, not adults. Even though some of the new policies take aim at bathrooms and gymnasiums, the impact spills over to classrooms, hallways and libraries, affecting a much larger number of children.

They are bullied and assaulted; subjected to increasingly negative remarks even from teachers who are supposed to protect them; silenced from raising LGBTQ topics — even talking about their families during class discussions; discouraged from participating in sports or other activities; forbidden from wearing with supportive messages or forming gay-straight alliances or other affirming student clubs; disciplined for identifying as LGBTQ and for wearing clothes deemed “inappropriate” for their gender.

And while queer students often consider their schools safer than even their own homes, too often, they don’t report victimization or discrimination is because they don’t believe the adults will do anything about it. 

“They rely on these peer support groups, they rely on sympathetic teachers, counselors, coaches,” says Austin Johnson, a sociology professor at Kenyon College and director of the Campaign for Southern Equality’s Research and Policy Center. “Folks who are meant to be their resources, institutions that are meant to serve them and provide resources to them, actively rejecting them, stigmatizing them — those kinds of things are really damaging.”

Nor can kids simply decide — without repercussions — to stop attending a school that no longer feels safe, he says: “They’re stuck in this environment of hostility and negativity, with no way out.”

Despite the role an affirming school culture plays in protecting LGBTQ students’ mental health, policies prohibiting bullying and discrimination and newer laws requiring positive representations of gender and sexual minorities in classroom materials are poorly implemented. The reasons range from local political pressure to a lack of state and federal oversight. Too often, laws on the books are no match for negative rhetoric and the fear that comes with it.

by Educators for Excellence found that the number of teachers who say their schools are meeting the needs of their LGBTQ students is falling. The survey showed a sharp decline in educators’ perceptions of how well schools are serving LGBTQ youth, with 41% of respondents in 2020 saying their schools often meet these students’ needs, versus 22% this year. The survey also found that teachers of color and older educators were more likely to approve of  instruction on LGBTQ people and topics and to criticize their schools for not doing enough.

Using and the Movement Advancement Project, The 74 created a series of interactive maps. The first shows the increase in the number of youth who are the targets of hostile remarks from school staff, with state-by-state breakdown of the percentages and the status of laws and policies affecting LGBTQ students.

Student Experience Map

Increase in Homophobic & Transphobic Remarks from Educators Heard by Students Between 2019 & 2021

Data from the Movement Advancement Project and GLESN’s 2021 National School Climate Survey; downloaded May 18, 2023.

Administered since 1999, GLSEN’s school climate surveys are among a few datasets that include information about LGBTQ youth, although a 2022 Biden administration executive order has directed federal agencies to begin collecting and disseminating information on gender and sexual minorities. 

GLSEN’s findings are echoed by data collected by organizations that measure the well-being of all young people, not just LGBTQ students. In Fiscal Year 2022, the U.S Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights received 633 allegations of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and/or gender identity, according to a department spokesperson. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has long found gay, lesbian and bisexual youth of in-school harassment and violence. 

In short, researchers say, regardless of whether the so-called culture wars are a coordinated political strategy aimed at voters, they are endangering queer students’ sense of safety even at schools with strong anti-discrimination protections.

‘Don’t Say Gay’ and mental health

Four years ago, for the first time, The Trevor Project, a queer youth suicide prevention group, started asking questions about the political climate and kids’ mental health on its annual survey of LGBTQ youth. Eighty-five percent of those said they pay attention to news stories about LGBTQ rights. A third said their well-being was poor most or all of the time because of the legislation and policies, and 2 in 3 said hearing about potential “Don’t Say Gay” laws make their mental health worse.

Teens in the survey felt the impact regardless of where they live. For example, 86% of respondents in and — both sites of over LGBTQ rights — as well as in progressive said the rhetoric has affected their well-being. 

Nine in 10 teens in Minnesota and Massachusetts, states with strong civil rights laws, said politics weighs on them — the same number as in Oklahoma, where a number of policies curtailing LGBTQ youth rights have been adopted. 

“It’s not enough anymore to say, ‘These laws don’t exist here,’ ” says Johnson. “Even when a law doesn’t exist, the rhetoric around it creates this environment of hostility, fear and confusion.”

According to GLSEN, more than four-fifths of queer teens have experienced in-person harassment or assault and almost as many say they feel unsafe in class and avoid school functions. A fifth have changed schools because of the climate, and a third miss one or more days a month. 

Research has long established that the resulting student absenteeism, lack of participation in sports and other school activities, depression and stress are direct causes of lower grade-point averages and graduation rates, dramatically higher discipline rates and other factors that can impact a student’s life trajectory. 

A 2023 Trevor Project survey of found of LGBTQ students who said they were affirmed at school than at home: 54% vs. 38%. Youth who perceived either setting as supportive were 4 percentage points less likely to attempt suicide.

Queer adults and their supporters often describe the political furor as a backlash against steadily expanding civil rights protections. But the current wave of legislation targets kids — and the schools where many find a supportive community. 

Proponents cite a number of reasons why the new laws are needed. They seek to shield students from materials they deem inappropriate; to combat supposed “indoctrination” and “grooming” by sexually predatory educators; to stop children from using a new name or pronouns in school without their parents’ consent; and to protect cisgender girls from trans girls in bathrooms and locker rooms, among other reasons. 

But LGBTQ-rights advocates counter that the impact of the laws is much broader. To understand how both restrictive and protective policies trickle down — or don’t — to affect LGBTQ students, GLSEN regularly asks queer teens throughout the country about their experiences in school. 

The maps below, based on an analysis by The 74 of data from GLSEN’s 2021 National School Climate Survey — the most recent available — depict more than 22,000 students’ responses regarding 10 key experiences, broken down by state. Five of the maps focus on episodes of discrimination and harassment, five on access to in-school support.

2021 National School Climate Survey

Discrimination & Harassment

Percentage of students who experienced at least one form of anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination at school

Unchanged since 2019, 59% of queer students nationwide experienced at least one form of discrimination in school, ranging from assault to being stopped from talking or writing about an LGBTQ topic or person. That average, however, obscures a wide variation. Almost 80% of queer students in Tennessee, the state with the highest reported incidence, experience discrimination in school — twice the rate as in Massachusetts, the lowest, at 40%. 

The numbers are , researchers say. Students are hesitant to report harassment and discrimination, while school systems frequently don’t fulfill state and federal reporting requirements. Students may not be out and often fear reprisals, particularly when complaining about a teacher.

“The barriers that young people face to speaking out are very real,” says Aaron Riding, GLSEN’s deputy executive director for public policy and research. “At the school level, there’s still a lot of stigma and shame.”

But research also has found that non-LGBTQ staff may not recognize that something they are doing or that’s taking place is discrimination — even in their own classrooms. Educators in schools with policies specifically prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ people are more likely to receive training and may be better able to recognize bias.

Percentage of students who say they reported victimization and received effective staff intervention

A common reason students don’t report victimization or discrimination is that they don’t believe the adults in their school will do anything about it. 

“What we’ve learned over the years is that oftentimes, young people will speak out and the adults will turn around and say that they’re not going to do anything about it,” says Riding. “That is particularly harmful, because educators are the ones who set the tone for the experiences that young people have in schools.”

A 2015 GLSEN survey of educators found that only 26% said they had engaged in efforts to support LGBTQ students. Of the rest, more than half said they did not think those efforts were necessary or appropriate. More than a quarter said they feared a backlash from parents or administrators. 

Historically, when “Don’t Say Gay” laws and policies are enacted, many educators are unsure if all in-school speech about LGBTQ people is outlawed and whether intervening in victimization constitutes a prohibited show of support. Twelve years ago, confusion over a policy in Minnesota’s largest school district, Anoka-Hennepin Public Schools, prevented educators from intervening against bullying, contributing to at least . 

Adding to the uncertainty, guidelines handed down in some states go beyond their new laws. For example, last year, Florida lawmakers passed a “Don’t Say Gay” bill prohibiting in-school discussion of LGBTQ topics in elementary grades. In April, the state Board of Education — whose members are appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis — extended the ban through high school. Soon after, the state legislature voted to enshrine a K-8 ban in law. It was not immediately clear whether the board’s policy remains in effect.

Adding to the confusion, rules handed down by the state Department of Education have taken aim at a number of in state law, such as allowable library and classroom books, student access to anti-bullying materials, and school- and district-level guidance on supporting LGBTQ youth. 

In some places, officials send mixed signals. For example, Virginia law specifically prohibits discrimination against sexual and gender minority students. But in September 2022, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin requiring schools to restrict trans students’ bathroom access and preventing students from using a new name or pronouns without parental permission, among other changes. 

Critics have said Virginia’s new rules, which have , are likely unenforceable. Some districts have said they will not follow the guidelines if they are put into place. But individual educators may not understand this legal and regulatory landscape. 

Percentage of students who were prevented from discussing or writing about LGBTQ+ topics in assignments

Seven states require schools to include LGBTQ history and culture in lessons. Yet, up to 15% of sexual and gender minority students in those states still report being prevented from discussing or writing about queer people or topics in class assignments. Similar numbers of youth were prevented from introducing LGBTQ topics in extracurricular activities. 

The message students hear, Johnson adds, is, “We don’t want LGBTQ people to be a part of our society.” If a child’s parents are not accepting, the new laws choke off their other sources of support. They may no longer turn to their doctors or find a safe haven at school.  

“Think about that,” he adds. “You’re not even allowed to write about your personal experience in a class where it may be relevant, or allowed to see yourself in books that are in your library…. Where can you exist?”

The youth surveyed by GLSEN are teens, but separate research suggests younger kids hear the same message, albeit likely in different ways. from the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute found that 15% of queer Florida parents surveyed say their children — the vast majority under age 18 — worry about talking about their families, drawing pictures of them or completing writing assignments that depict their parents. 

Percentage of students who say their school’s anti-bullying/harassment policy includes sexual orientation and gender identity

Arkansas is one of 22 states with a law on the books specifically outlawing bullying and harassment of gender and sexual minority students. Yet, only 8% of youth there believe they attend a school with a policy prohibiting such victimization. 

The existence of the policy, then, doesn’t make Arkansas youth any safer than students in Missouri, one of two states that has a law prohibiting schools and districts from including LGBTQ children in local anti-harassment policies. There, 6% of students say their schools have anti-bullying rules. 

Most state anti-bullying laws require districts to develop their own policies, create procedures for reporting harassment and make sure students and educators understand the system for addressing complaints. When young people don’t know the policies exist, by definition there is an implementation problem, says Riding. 

“School districts have a lot of autonomy and not a lot of enforcement in terms of adopting a policy and implementing it in schools,” he says. Surveying students to gauge awareness, Riding adds, “helps us know that districts and schools are ignoring those standards.”

While there is no federal anti-bullying law per se, the U.S. Civil Rights Act prohibits in-school discriminatory harassment. Sexual and gender minorities are , which outlaw hostile environments that interfere with a student’s ability to benefit from a school’s activities and opportunities.

Percentage of students who were prevented from wearing clothing deemed ‘inappropriate’ based on gender

In Louisiana, 40% of students surveyed said they were prevented from wearing clothing school staff did not think was appropriate for their gender. Rates were nearly as high in Mississippi and Alabama, and above 30% in numerous other Southern states. Slightly lower numbers say they were told they could not wear clothing with LGBTQ-supportive messages. 

To queer kids, this sends the same message as excluding LGBTQ topics and people from assignments and class discussions, says Johnson. “If you wear a rainbow shirt to school, and you are sent home for it, or you are made to change that shirt, it’s not just about the shirt,” he says. “It’s about saying, ‘People like you … are not welcome here. And not only does it say it to the one kid who is forced to take a button off their backpack, it says it to all the other kids: That kid isn’t welcome here.’”

But it also reinforces traditional gender roles, he says. In Utah, which last year banned transgender students from playing on girls’ sports teams, officials have heard from parents who say their daughters lost to competitors who did not seem feminine enough to be cisgender. 

2021 National School Climate Survey

Access to in-school support

Percentage of students who have access to a gay-straight alliance

Gay-straight alliances — in-school clubs for queer kids and their allies — have flourished since the late 1980s, in part because courts have repeatedly ruled that federal law guarantees students at public schools the right to form them. Virtually all the relevant lawsuits were brought by students.

GSAs provide a supportive network of peers for students who are exploring their identity or attempting to survive discrimination or harassment. They are organized by students, who typically approach a sympathetic staff member — often the school librarian — to be the club’s adviser. 

A trove of research confirms the clubs’ positive impact for non-LGBTQ students, too. found that all students at schools with GSAs have 30% lower odds of experiencing homophobic victimization than peers at schools without a club, 36% lower odds of fearing for their safety and 52% lower odds of hearing homophobic remarks. Other reports have found GSAs on a school’s overall environment. 

The first GSAs were started in Massachusetts, where 68% of teens now report having access to one. In several Southern states, that number drops as low as 8%, but there are some red states with strong GSA movements. A third or more of students in Florida, Arkansas, Kansas and Arizona, all of which recently have passed anti-LGBTQ laws, report their school has a GSA.   

Percentage of students who can identify six or more supportive school staffers

Even in the most inhospitable schools, most LGBTQ students can name one teacher they believe to be supportive. The number drops, though, when youth are asked whether they can identify six. While it’s not an exact barometer — small schools or schools in small districts may not employ enough teachers for six to be LGBTQ-accepting — this survey question is a rough measure of school climate. A student’s ability to name one affirming teacher can mean that individual student has a lifeline, but the existence of several suggests a school welcomes queer adults and kids alike.    

In Louisiana, 91% of LGBTQ students surveyed could name one supportive staff member, while only 37% could identify six or more. In Washington state, 99% could name a single staffer, while 73% knew of six.

One possible factor, says Ryan Watson, a professor of human development and family studies at the University of Connecticut, is that the schools that have several are places where LGBTQ-supportive teachers want to work. Teachers who themselves are sexual and gender minorities also risk repercussions in schools with hostile climates. 

In a 2020 GLSEN survey, 75% of LGBTQ teachers said they had implemented affirming practices such as serving as a GSA adviser, making sure stickers and other signs of support are visible, advocating for inclusive practices or informally discussing queer topics with students. Of non-LGBTQ educators, 49% had engaged in a supportive activity.

Percentage of students who reported their school administration was supportive

Surveys have consistently found that in the face of possible parental backlash, district and school administrators often tell teachers to limit classroom discussion of hot-button topics. Even when they don’t, teachers frequently fear that their department head or principal will not back them if there are complaints from parents and anti-LGBTQ protesters. 

A 2022 RAND Corp. found it did not matter if the opposition came from just “a vocal minority” of parents. Some said their administrations have limited the materials they can use, instituted vetting processes and begun conducting — or allowing parents to conduct — classroom “audits.” 

In 2020, GLSEN found that a third of LGBTQ teachers and one-fifth of non-LGBTQ educators said community backlash and fear of it prevented them from supporting sexual and gender minority students. Ten percent of straight, cisgender educators and 21.5% of queer ones cited unsupportive administrations.

More than a third of LGBTQ teachers said they feared they would lose their job if they came out to an administrator, despite a Supreme Court ruling that this is illegal discrimination.

Percentage of students who were taught positive representations of LGBTQ+ people, history or events

Attending a school in one of the seven states that mandate positive depictions of LGBTQ people and history in classroom instruction is no guarantee a student will receive it. In Massachusetts and Oregon, slightly less than a third of youth reported being exposed to such material, a rate that falls to just 7% of students in California, which 10 years ago became the first state to require inclusive curriculum.

There are a host of reasons for this disconnect. Large publishers balked at revising their textbooks to meet California’s standards, for instance. The companies said they were unable to verify how historical figures might have identified, but critics pointed out that the change would have impacted their bottom line, since they could not sell the same materials in states that explicitly forbid LGBTQ content. 

A found that half of English language arts teachers said they are comfortable using literature that contains LGBTQ characters or storylines in their lessons, but only 24% of them actually incorporated such materials.

More educators — 61% — were comfortable with students choosing queer-themed books to read for pleasure, the report noted. While this may be a safer choice for a teacher who is unsure what book to assign, it’s not ultimately as helpful to students as having everyone read and discuss the same text.  

Separately, a report published last summer by the group Educators for Excellence found 1 in 3 teachers doesn’t think LGBTQ history and experience should be taught in schools, while 11% believe their school does not enroll any gender or sexual minority students.   

Percentage of students with access to inclusive library resources 

Libraries have long been sanctuaries for queer youth, and in part because of the special training they typically receive, school librarians often serve as GSA advisers. The American Association of School Librarians has an entire division devoted to evaluating the quality, content and age-appropriateness of LGBTQ books and other school resources. 

According to the free-speech advocacy organization PEN America, between July 2021 and June 2022, there were , with the largest number occurring in Texas, Florida, Tennessee and Pennsylvania. Forty-one percent were of books featuring LGBTQ themes or characters. 

The ferocity with which the bans are pursued can create the impression that school libraries are replete with LGBTQ titles. But even in Maine, the state where the most students have access, one-third say their school library lacks books with queer characters or themes. 

Interactive maps and graphics by Eamonn Fitzmaurice / The 74.

A former Colorado schools chief, whose 2022 ouster by his board’s new conservative majority made national headlines, quietly settled his unlawful termination and retaliation claims against the Douglas County district last month for nearly $833,000.

The district agreed to pay Corey Wise $270,733 for the remainder of his contract and $562,000 to resolve his unlawful termination claims. While Wise’s attorneys initially described the source of the money differently, school board trustee David Ray said Thursday the district paid Wise for the remainder of his contract when he was terminated in February 2022 and is now responsible for covering its $150,000 deductible from the $562,000 the former superintendent will receive from the district’s insurance company.

“Had these funds not been expended, the dollars could have been reallocated to another area such as student learning,” Ray said. “This marks a dark day in our district when disrespect, political agendas and refusal to take ownership for mistakes negatively impact much needed financial resources for our students.”

A popular superintendent who served the school system for 26 years, Wise was fired  at a special meeting last February that barred public comment and came after the school board’s conservative majority reportedly met to plan his removal — a move that prompted yet another court battle over alleged violations to the state’s Open Meetings Law.

Wise had strong support among students and educators alike: Just a day earlier, some 1,500 employees staged a sickout to protest his impending removal, forcing the state’s third-largest school district to close. 

Wise said board members Becky Myers, Michael Peterson, Christy Williams and Kaylee Winegar terminated him without cause and targeted him for advocating for students with disabilities and minority youth. 

The battle in predominantly white, affluent Douglas County mirrored those being fought in the pandemic’s wake. Conservative parents, pushing back against what they saw as government overreach, organized politically and ran school board candidates who opposed COVID-related protocols and teachings around race and gender. At the same time, other groups began to rise up to counter those views.

In Douglas County, the board members’ actions violated Wise’s First Amendment and due process rights in addition to state and federal laws, according to a statement released last month by his attorneys. Peterson, the school board president, did not return requests for comment. 

Amy Valentine, a district parent and a part-time substitute teacher at a local charter school, said she wasn’t surprised by the hefty payout. 

“School boards must be held accountable for their actions, and I’m glad that was the case in Douglas County,” she said. 

Wise’s attorneys said their client’s story might serve as a lesson to other school districts, many of which have seen right-wing groups gain control over local boards of education as a means to counter cultural movements with which they disagree, fighting against equity and inclusion efforts and social-emotional learning, among other issues. 

“Hopefully, his story sheds light on the dangers of politicizing student education and spreading misinformation about students, personnel, curriculum, and school policies,” Wise’s attorneys wrote. They added the four board members “put their success over the success of students,” and have “destroyed trust between community members, engendered hate within our county, and degraded the quality of education for our students.”

Wise’s case isn’t the district’s only legal headache. Bob Marshall, an active community member with no children in the school system, filed a lawsuit against the school board as a whole and the four majority members with the Colorado District Court on Feb. 4, 2022, trying to get a temporary restraining order to keep them from meeting and ousting Wise.

Marshall, an attorney, was hoping “everyone could have gone to their corner, settled down and done it the right way.” He said he had no allegiance to Wise and no opinion about his leadership, but filed the lawsuit because he believed the board violated the law by meeting in secret. , a longtime Republican who now describes himself as a conservative Democrat, was elected to the state Assembly in November 2022. 

Unless it is settled before that, Marshall said his case could go to trial in June. 

Whether Wise’s support for a controversial district equity policy played a role in his termination was also scrutinized by his lawyers. Before the school board was set to discuss the policy last week, a biracial student told the trustees he and his siblings faced at school. One student posted that Black people should be removed from the planet and called for bringing back the Holocaust. The slurs leveled in person and over social media were so frequent and hate-filled that his mother said she could not envision sending him back to campus. 

The district is also facing other challenges: Voters rejected a bond request for construction improvements and another measure to boost teacher pay, which remains among the lowest in the state — and nation. 

The three seats held by the board members who are not part of the conservative majority are all up for election for this year.

“We have three outstanding minority board members now,” Marshall noted. “Anything other than getting three equivalent board members will be a loss.”

Correction: The source of the funds paid to ousted Douglas County Superintendent Corey Wise was incorrectly reported in an earlier version of this story based on information provided by his attorneys.

Since state legislators in 2021 passed a ban on lessons teaching that any one group is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive,” one unprecedented provision tucked into the bill has triggered a massive fallout for civics education statewide.

A brief clause on Page 8 of the legislation outlawed all assignments involving “direct communication” between students and their federal, state or local officials. Educators could no longer ask students to get involved in the political process, even if they let youth decide for themselves what side of an issue to advocate for — short-circuiting the training young Texans receive to participate in democracy itself.

Zamora-Garcia’s 2017 project to add student advisors to the City Council, and others like it involving research and meetings with elected representatives, would stand in direct violation.

Since 2021, have passed laws restricting teachings on race and gender. But Texas is the only one nationwide to suppress students’ interactions with elected officials in class projects, according to researchers at the free expression advocacy group .

Practically overnight, a growing movement to engage Texas students in real-world civics lessons evaporated. Teachers canceled time-honored assignments, districts reversed expansion plans with a celebrated civics education provider and a bill promoting student civics projects that received bipartisan support in 2019 was suddenly dead in the water.

“By the time we got to 2021, civics was the latest weapon in the culture wars,” state Rep. James Talarico, sponsor of that now-defunct , told The 74.

Texas does require high schoolers to take a semester of government and a semester of economics, and is one of nationwide that mandates at least a semester of civics. But students told The 74 the courses typically rely on book learning and memorization.

Talarico, a former middle school teacher and the Texas legislature’s youngest member, came into office during a statewide surge in momentum to deepen civics education. A out of the University of Texas highlighted dismal levels of political participation — the state was 44th in voter registration and 47th in voter turnout — and Democrats and Republicans alike were motivated to reverse the trend. Meanwhile, academic research found lessons directly involving students in government could . 

So when the freshman legislator proposed that all high schoolers in the state learn civics with a project-based component addressing “,” colleagues on both sides of the aisle stamped their approval as the bill sailed through the House. Although the legislation then stalled in the Senate, Talarico said he came away “very optimistic” the policy would become law next session.

But in the two years before the next legislative session, he watched as the political tides turned. Flashpoint issues like George Floyd’s murder and the Jan. 6  insurrection brought on a “disagreement over democracy itself,” he said. And when his conservative colleagues passed a 2021 bill limiting school lessons on race and gender, he mourned as a few brief clauses dashed all his hopes for project-based civics.

“Students are now banned from advocating for something like a stop sign in front of their school,” Talarico said.

A battle over civics

The sections of the 2021 law limiting civic engagement pull directly from authored by the conservative scholar Stanley Kurtz, whose seek to link an approach called “action civics” — what he calls “” — with leftist activism and critical race theory.  Critical race theory is a scholarly framework examining how racism is embedded in America’s legal and social institutions, but became a right-wing catch-all term for teachings on race in early 2021. 

Kurtz the practice is a form of political “indoctrination” under the “deceptively soothing” heading of civics, a cause long celebrated on both the right and the left. 

The action civics model was popularized by the nonprofit and is used in over a thousand classrooms across at least eight states. It teaches students about government by having them pick a local issue, research it and present their findings to officials.

The central philosophy is that “students learn civics best by doing civics,” Generation Citizen Policy Director Andrew Wilkes said.

Generation Citizen’s method has been studied by several academic researchers who found participants experienced and like history and English.

Kurtz, however, contends the projects “tilt overwhelmingly to the left.” 

“Political protest and lobbying ought to be done by students outside of school hours, independently of any class projects or grades,” he said in an email to The 74.

Civics experts, however, argued otherwise.

The notion that “it’s activism happening in classrooms … that’s just so far from the truth,” said Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University in Boston.

Rep. Steve Toth and Sen. Bryan Hughes, the GOP lawmakers who sponsored the 2021 anti-CRT legislation, did not respond to requests for comment.

The 74 reviewed over three dozen action civics projects in Texas from before the 2021 legislation and found that the vast majority dealt with hyperlocal, nonpartisan issues.

Students most often took up causes like bullying, youth vaping, movie nights in the park or bringing back student newspapers. A handful in Austin and nearby Elgin could be considered progressive, including projects dealing with gun control or school admissions prioritizing diversity, topics educators said students selected based on their own interests.

Under the 2021 law, all of those projects now must avoid contact with elected officials. The restrictions have resulted in initiatives more contained to schools themselves like advocacy for less-crowded hallways or longer lunch periods, educators said.

“This particular legislation … ties [students’] hands as to how involved they can get while in high school,” said Armando Orduña, the Houston executive director of .

His own political awakening, he said, came three decades ago growing up in Texas when a teacher assigned him 10 hours of volunteering on a political campaign of his choice. He opted to work on the 1991 Houston mayoral campaign of Sylvester Turner, then a young state representative who lost his bid that year but went on to become the city’s mayor in 2016.

“Back then, the attitude was how to fight teenage apathy regarding politics and now it’s quite the other way around,” Orduña said. Now politicians are working to “tamp down the next generation of leaders.”

Young progressives have become a in American politics, fueling recent electoral wins in the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Chicago mayoral race and a base-rousing standoff in the Tennessee legislature. In the eyes of some members of the GOP, their activism is seen as a threat.

‘Everything got turned upside down’

Though some project-based civics lessons in Texas continue with a pared-down scope, others have disappeared altogether.

One school district north of Dallas decided “out of an abundance of caution” to reverse years of precedent and stop offering course credit to students involved in a well-regarded national civic engagement program, first reported.

And Generation Citizen, too, has seen its footprint in Texas dwindle. 

After a 2017 launch in the state, the organization underwent several years of steady growth, with more than a half dozen districts using its programming or curricula. At the time, districts in San Antonio, north Texas, the Rio Grande Valley and several rural regions had expressed interest in beginning programming, former regional director Meredith Stefos Norris said. She spent most of her days criss-crossing the sprawling state meeting with interested school leaders. Austin schools expanded their contract with the nonprofit to $58,000, according to records The 74 obtained from the district through a Freedom of Information request. And Dallas said it wanted to bring Generation Citizen programming to every high schooler in its 153,000-student district, Norris said.

“It felt at the time that we were just going to keep going and keep growing and there was no reason that we weren’t going to be a statewide organization,” the former Texas director said.

Then came the 2021 legislative session and “everything got turned upside down,” said Megan Brandon, Generation Citizen’s current Texas program director. It zapped their efforts and districts backed out of partnerships.

The organization now primarily works with just three Texas districts, including an updated contract with Austin schools for $3,000 — a tiny sliver of the sum from a few years prior. The other two are Bastrop Independent School District and Elgin Independent School District.

Meanwhile, across the state’s northern border in Oklahoma, where Generation Citizen also operates, lawmakers passed a classroom censorship bill around issues of race and gender, but one that did not limit students’ contact with elected officials. The organization has been able to maintain all its programs while “following the letter of the law,” Oklahoma director Amy Curran said.

“This isn’t organizing about big culture wars, national stuff,” she said. “This is, literally, the sidewalks are unsafe around our school.”

Brandon, a former social studies teacher herself, grieves not just for the Texas branch of her organization, where the nature of the projects are similar, but for the youth in her state. Her former students in Bastrop ISD outside Austin, most of whom did not have parents who attended college, never had access to civic engagement opportunities before her class, she said.

“Students in Texas need civics more than students in many other states,” she said. “It feels like we’re going backwards in time.”

Opportunity cost

Zamora-Garcia remembers striding to the dais of the Bastrop City Council in 2017 with seven of his peers — the boys clad in too-big blazers and bow ties, the girls in dresses and laced-up heels. For a project they began in Brandon’s civics class, the team sought to boost youth voices in their local government. After meeting with officials, researching models and drawing up bylaws, the students eventually made history by passing a in the Austin suburb to add student advisors to the City Council.

“It made me feel more important and more involved, actually being able to have a voice that can make a change,” said Zamora-Garcia, now a junior at Texas State University studying business. 

The course activated his potential in class and in the community, he said. Before the experience, school had felt more like being a “cog in a machine,” he said. 

Mabel Zhu, who took the same class two years later, said the experience was “life-changing,” igniting her passion for civic engagement for years to come.

After the class, she began working with a local nonprofit, then organized a youth summit bringing awareness to the issues of mental health and substance abuse. She eventually joined the Youth Advisory Council that Zamora-Garcia and his classmates helped launch and worked with the Cultural Arts Board to put up a new mural that will define her city’s downtown space for years to come. A waving flag on the painting proclaims, “The future is ours!”

“Without [the class], I wouldn’t have been able to make such an impact within my community,” Zhu said.

The loss of such opportunities are what Rep. Talarico calls the unseen “opportunity cost” of the culture wars. 

“What are we missing out on that we could be doing if we weren’t playing political games with our students’ education?” the Democratic lawmaker asked.

Many students in Texas either learn how to engage with the political system in school or not at all, teachers said. Kyle Olson, an educator at an East Austin high school that serves predominantly immigrant families, taught his students that, as constituents, they could write letters to their elected representatives.

“They didn’t know that that was even something that was possible,” he said. 

Neutering those lessons flies in the face of American democracy itself, argues Alexander Pope, who leads the Institute for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement at Maryland’s Salisbury University.

“Part of the job that schools have in this country is to help prepare people for democracy,” he said. “The idea that, in a representative democracy, you’re going to literally ban … people from writing their elected representatives is just backward.”

The risk, believes ​​Tufts’s Kawashima-Ginsberg, is that a generation of Texans may grow up with a stunted sense of citizenship.

“It’s going to really damage their idea of what democracy is,” she said.

Michael Hinojosa left one job this year as superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District only to take on a few more. In one, he’ll be coaching superintendents on how to survive the culture wars and stay focused amid broadsides from local school boards. In another, he’s taken a leading role with a consulting group that he said alleviated some of the “pain points” he faced in Dallas. 

He also seriously weighed a foray into big-league urban politics, citing a desire to give back to the city that raised him. But on Dec. 4, he announced that he won’t run against Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson. Aside from the incumbent’s strong odds of winning reelection, Hinojosa said he’s got enough consulting work to . 

But colleagues who know Hinojosa well have no trouble seeing him as a politician. He already has a track record of staring down powerful opponents, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s May 2021 that banned districts from mandating masks.

“He’s a respected voice in the legislature,” said Chris Wallace, president and CEO of the North Texas Commission, an organization devoted to developing the 13-county Dallas region. “People listen when he speaks because he really excels in empowering people. That’s a leadership art.”

A Mexican immigrant, Hinojosa is a product of the Dallas schools and worked as a teacher and basketball coach until moving into administration. He started out leading smaller Texas districts before landing his dream job of heading up the Dallas schools in 2005. After one term, he left to lead the Cobb County district in metro Atlanta to be , who lived in the area. But in 2015, he returned home for another run as chief.

He originally planned to stay through the end of this year, but chose instead to leave in July, saying he had confidence in successor Stephanie Elizalde, who was chief schools officer in Dallas before serving as superintendent in Austin.

Recognizing leadership potential in educators is one of his strengths, said Chaundra Macklin, principal at Joseph J. Rhoads Learning Center, a pre-K site in the district. He interviewed her for her first principal’s job in 2007. She worked at a top-rated school, but then he tapped her to lead one that was struggling.

“He encouraged me as a leader even in my darkest moments, when it wasn’t going so well,” she said. “He said, ‘You just keep doing what you need to do.’ ”

He’s currently serving as the new chief impact officer for , which guided the Dallas district through several challenges, including passage of a $3.2 billion bond issue the fall after the pandemic began. 

He’s also “head coach” of a new effort by the Council of the Great City Schools to support superintendents at a time of unprecedented turbulence in the profession. 

“His commitment to urban education has been proven time and time again,” said Ray Hart, executive director of the council. “He is already playing a pivotal role in the organization’s efforts to train the next generation of leaders and ensure educational equity in the nation’s big-city school districts.”

In an interview, Hinojosa discussed his 27 years of leadership and his desire to share his expertise with other superintendents. He also had tough words for charter schools, discussed the “pitfalls of big urban systems,” and recounted the controversy that drew protesters to his house (It wasn’t mask mandates or critical race theory).

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Why did you leave six months before originally planned? 

Michael Hinojosa: There’s never a right time. I love being superintendent. I love the city, and I love the district. But I finally had an epiphany. I could do this to the end of my contract in 2024, but I couldn’t do it for another 10 years. I was being selfish. I didn’t want to be just some guy chasing some kind of record. I’ve seen too many people hang on too long, and they ruined the good they did. I didn’t want to be that guy.

There was an expectation that Susana Cordova [who left the superintendent’s job in Denver to become deputy in Dallas in 2021] would be your successor. But that job went to Stephanie Elizalde. What happened there? 

The board put in my contract to bring in somebody for a succession plan, and I chose Susana. I told her from the beginning that I don’t get to make this decision. She knew that on the front end. The board gets to hire the person they want, and they were very fortunate they had two great candidates, obviously Susanna, and Stephanie, who had worked for me before.

I’ve always argued that if you don’t know Dallas, you can get eaten up alive. They had five superintendents in the 1990s — five superintendents in five years, and went to prison. If you don’t know the pitfalls of big urban systems, and particularly Dallas, then you can really stumble. The board had options, and I thought they both were ready. I was upfront with Susanna, but it was a bit of a surprise to me that she didn’t get that opportunity.

What makes Dallas unique? 

It’s had a history of and you have some very strong, powerful stakeholders. Some of the previous superintendents did some things that were . Everybody was upset and they deserved to be. Performance was not good, so there was very little trust. 

In big cities, you deal with the media, and even though Texas is a right-to-work state, you’ve got to work with labor. If you don’t know the players in the community, that can eat you alive. Not every district is like that, but Dallas is. Now, we’ve had some stability. I was there for 13 years over two terms. Dr. Elizalde knows the community. She was there for five years, so she understands where the landmines are. 

Would you consider a run for mayor in the future? 

I am keeping all options open. The only thing I have going against me is that I am 66 years old but as healthy as ever.

How much did the political battles of the past two years influence your decision to leave the district?

None at all. In fact, I don’t get stressed. I give stress. I’m a carrier. I love being in the fight, and I enjoyed every bit of that. First of all, there was the pandemic. In Dallas, we also had . Other people [in Texas] have had hurricanes, and then you have the cultural wars. As urban superintendents, we’re used to taking the heat, but that’s not true in the suburbs. In fact, now I’m consulting with the Council of the Great City Schools and out of their 77 members, only 20 of them have been in the chair since 2020.

They’ve got all these people lined up, yelling at the school board, yelling at the superintendent.

You’ll be a superintendent-in-residence with the Council. Can you describe your role a little more?  

Since so many superintendents are brand new, there’s going to be a great need out there. One superintendent may need operational help. We’ll have someone who has that expertise. A lot of them may need instructional help. A lot of them have never dealt with school boards. We’re going to have a variety of tools that can help superintendents have a fighting chance to be successful in this environment.

You worked with Engage2Learn in Dallas, and now you’re going to be consulting with them. What did they help you accomplish?

People want problem solvers. They don’t want whiners, so if you don’t have the capacity, you’ve got to have someone help you do it. That’s why I’ve taken these opportunities. Even with the talented team I had in Dallas, there were things we couldn’t pull off. Engage2Learn helped us develop a long-range technology plan. That was the backbone for our bond program. Engage2Learn helped us talk to people — students, staff, community members. They synthesized all that information and put it together into something that was actionable for us. 

We have a partnership with Apple to redesign all of our libraries to look just like Apple stores. They’re going to do 50 schools a year over the next four years, and the goal is to make the library the center of traffic for students and community members. Engage2Learn was able to pull in people to help develop and execute on those plans.

The third thing they helped us with is (an improvement initiative focused on middle schools). We’ve done great with our high schools because of our (a STEM-focused program in which students can earn a postsecondary degree or certificate while still in high school). We’re doing very well with our elementary schools, but our last frontier was middle school achievement. Parents make decisions from grades four to eight, and they’re going to vote with their feet. One time I asked leaders, “What’s our best middle school?” And it was like crickets in the room. 

On the library redesign, did you get any pushback from librarians?

Some of our principals quit using the libraries, and then they traded in the librarian for another instructional coach or the assistant principal. This is bringing the librarians back. They’ve had to rethink how they do business, but it’s gotten them very excited about the library. Even the principals that gave up librarians now want librarians because it’s going to be a way-cool model. 

I’m sure with all these superintendents you’re going to be coaching, the topic of enrollment loss and how to attract families into district schools will come up. Talk about your work in Dallas to reverse that trend.

We had this mantra that if you had 300 students or less in your school, you were on the endangered species list. People aren’t picking you. Some Democrats whine about charter schools. I’m not a fan of charter schools. I’m a fan of great schools. I just don’t happen to think that many charter schools are great schools. We have more capacity, we have more intellect, we have more horsepower. We need to beat the charters at their own game and provide Montessori schools, STEM schools, single-gender schools, biomedical schools. 

We have a northern suburb, and every year, we would lose about 75 students to them and we would gain about 75 students from them because they went to our specialty magnet schools. This last year, during the pandemic, we lost about 60 kids to them, but we gained 500 kids from that school district. We stopped the hemorrhaging.

Those are some tough statements about charter schools. Is that just your experience or your view of charters in general?

We don’t get to pick our kids. We take all of God’s children. That’s my belief system, but I don’t whine about them. I just try to beat them at their own game. 

What was the roughest period you went through as superintendent?

The low point was 2008 when I had to lay off 1,000 teachers. Luckily, the board let me stay. I told him they could have fired me, but I said, “If you fire me, then you’re going to argue for six months about who’s going to be the interim. You’re going to argue for six months about who’s going to do the search. You’re going to argue for six months over who’s going to get the job. I could solve this thing in nine months.”

In fact, we re-hired 600 of the 1,000 teachers that were laid off. We just had to make sure we were solvent. I didn’t eat for two months until we figured it out. I had to go face the music. People were protesting at my house. It had an impact on my family, but I was very blessed that the board let me stay. And then when I left, they brought me back.

That was a lower point than the pandemic and your conflict with the governor?

The pandemic was tough, and we didn’t have a playbook, but that’s what leaders do. Leaders step up in a crisis. The board criticized me a little bit because they were finding out about stuff on CNN. So the next time I took on the governor, I had to step back, pause, and call every board member and tell them what I was about to do.

Command decisions are easy to make, and hard to implement, and consensus decisions are messy. They take a long time, but the implementation is much deeper. When you’re in a crisis, you’ve got to make command decisions, but you also still need to inform people of why you’re making these decisions.

His was overheated for the topic: , the now-familiar academic concept as a slur to attack lessons they deem too critical of American political institutions. His anger wasn’t unique. Controversies at school board meetings have unspooled into national news for much of the past year. The pandemic has been awful for our social cohesion, deepening divisions that were already well frayed. 

And yet, schools are sadly appropriate forums for these flare-ups. The educational divisions we’ve tolerated for so long — that facilitate , wide variance in school safety and quality, and the like — aren’t just terrible for kids, they’re deadly for American democracy. These systemic biases reveal the substantive rot in what our country professes to offer all members of its community. 

On the one hand, schools exemplify the universal promises of American society. Long-time teachers union leader Al Shanker once explained public schools as “created for the purpose of teaching immigrant children reading, writing and arithmetic and what it means to be an American with the hope that they would then go home and teach their parents.” Schools are perhaps the country’s most visible public investment in its citizens — a clear contribution of collective resources to ensure that each of us gathers the knowledge and skills necessary to make a career in the economy, to practice learning and living together with our peers, and to participate in the various systems shaping American life. 

But schools are also where the country perjures those promises, where many of the biases of American life are systematically transmitted and enshrined. The country says, “Work hard here, succeed here and you’ll rise up through American society.” But when children of color, when children from low-income families arrive on campuses, is too often scarce, is abundant, and real opportunities for advancement are largely missing. And then, years later, their children arrive at these same campuses, only to find much the same conditions. 

When researchers write about “historically marginalized” children and communities, these are the cruel mechanics that define the people they mean. These are the means of marginalization. So, is it any wonder that kids from these schools, from these backgrounds, grow into jaded skeptics of American society and its economy? It’s hard to believe in, let alone support, let alone trust, a system that promises meritocracy while delivering gilt-edged opportunities by the truckload to the privileged — and repeatedly consigning children to dysfunctional, under-resourced campuses. The inequities of our school system make a mockery of the gauzy rhetoric of the American Dream. 

Worse, the pandemic further sharpened divisions between those for whom the system has historically worked and . English learners (ELs), who are disproportionately likely to attend , were often of and became more likely to be chronically absent from school. Students in high-poverty schools during the pandemic than peers in wealthier schools. were, on aggregate, during schools’ many months of scrambling through virtual and/or hybrid learning plans. 

As my colleague Kevin Mahnken put it in a recent article summarizing new data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, “At all performance levels across [math and reading], 9-year-olds experienced statistically significant declines in their scores; but even with the identical downward trajectory, struggling students lost so much ground that disparities still expanded.”

Incidentally, what is the core claim underlying critical race theory? It goes something like this: Racism can be detected in public systems, and the design and structure of social policies contribute to social disparities. In other words, it charges that the laws, regulations and institutions shaping public life perpetuate and entrench racial divisions across generations. Seemingly neutral systems are rigged — and they’re rigged in ways that substantially harm particular communities of people. 

So whether you like the term “critical race theory” or not, it offers a pretty accurate description of the unjust reality of U.S. public education. The pandemic is a universal experience that imposed roughly equivalent risks and constraints on all U.S. schools. But in our country, public schools and communities are not universally alike, universally supported, or of universally high quality. So the impacts of the pandemic weren’t equally felt; COVID-19 took a public education system that was already unfairly tilted against historically marginalized children — and heightened its inequities. 

So now, more than ever, these divides are driving the broader culture wars invading American education debates today. People for whom the system — the broader American socioeconomic system, its markets, schools and beyond — has generally worked are defensive about the notion that it isn’t, in fact, wholly fair and meritocratic. It’s intuitive to them that the system must be defended from books and curricula that suggest otherwise. Things worked out fine for them, after all! 

And yet, the past two years have provided tragic, predictable proof that American public education remains systemically unfair for families of color, low-income families, English learners, and other historically marginalized groups. Members of these groups have ample evidence that they should not, at base, trust that U.S. schools — or society — will routinely prioritize their best interests. 

So here we sit, from Brainerd to , from to , arguing over whether or not it should be legal to discuss this fact. We have mostly white, mostly privileged people anxiously demanding that schools not talk about the ways that the country’s public institutions have unfairly served marginalized communities through history — instead of directly addressing the consequences of the unfair treatment marginalized communities received during the pandemic. We’re not only debating how U.S. schools teach the sins of the American past. We’re deciding whether we, as communities, are ready to address the facts of America’s unequal present. 

For years, Americans have struggled to pull together in common cause — to solve political problems, to face public health crises, to respond to injustices in our collective community. Our separate, divided society derives in part from our separated, segregated schools. The pandemic made clear that educational inequities linked to these divisions are why we’re not — whatever the particular collective challenge — all in any of this together. How could we be? Americans learn from the start that we are not actually in community with those other citizens. 

There’s no short-term fix. But the long-term solution to our incohesion isn’t about requiring kids to chant the Pledge of Allegiance or read fables extolling George Washington’s virtues and excising his slaveholding from the public record. It’s about rebuilding our schools in a way that treats all children with the care and respect they deserve, in a way that enrolls all children into schools that resemble the diverse society they’ll someday inhabit as adults.

Democrat Wes Moore cruised to a 22-point victory over Republican candidate Dan Cox. He will become Maryland’s first Black governor. In an election night interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, the governor-elect touted “big things” in store for Maryland, including “offer[ing] a service year option for every single high school graduate.”

Throughout the Maryland gubernatorial race, GOP candidate Dan Cox has done his best to keep education culture wars issues front and center. 

The state legislator named a right-wing parent leader as his running mate after her group lobbied to remove a Queen Anne’s County schools superintendent who . And in his only public debate against Democratic challenger Wes Moore, the Trump-endorsed candidate railed against “transgender indoctrination in kindergarten,” a problem he blamed on books that “depict things that I cannot show you on television, it’s so disgusting.”

The approach takes its cue from several recent GOP campaigns, most notably that of Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The Republican’s 2021 win over high-profile Democrat and former governor Terry McAuliffe was propelled largely by controversy over K-12 curricula and COVID school closures, said University of Maryland political science professor Michael Hanmer.

“You don’t have to go too far to see what happened in the Virginia governor’s race. There, education was a really big deal,” the professor said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cox campaign was trying to leverage some of the same themes that the Youngkin campaign was able to.”

But so far the strategy has not traveled well across state lines.

As of late September, Moore led Cox by a 2-to-1 margin with a 32-percentage point advantage, according to a of 810 registered voters carried out by the University of Maryland and The Washington Post.

“The times are different, the candidates are different and there’s a lot of differences between Maryland and Virginia,” said Hanmer, whose Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement co-sponsored the poll. “It’s a really steep climb for Cox.”

Democratic candidate Wes Moore is a Rhodes Scholar, combat veteran, anti-poverty advocate and best-selling author. Sporting an endorsement from the state’s largest teachers union, he says he plans to boost educator pay, reduce the number of youth that schools send into the criminal justice system and fund tutoring initiatives to help students recoup learning they missed during COVID.

In their Oct. 12 debate, following Cox’s attack on what he called queer “indoctrination” in schools, Moore locked eyes with the camera and delivered an alternate message.

“I want to say to all of our LGBTQ youth and families, I see you and I hear you and all policies that will be made will be made in partnership,” he said.

On the issues

Nearly a quarter of Republican voters say they plan to cross the aisle and cast their ballot for Moore, which could prove a death blow for Cox in a state where there are already twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans.

Among the Frederick County lawmaker’s GOP opponents is the state’s popular term-limited incumbent Gov. Larry Hogan, who has repeatedly called Cox a “” and “.”

Cox did not respond to requests for comment, but his running mate Gordana Schifanelli said public opinion surveys do not phase their campaign.

“I am not paying attention to the polls, which are very biased and steered towards narratives some people want to promote,” she said in an email.

In a race that “revolves around people/parents who are very concerned about education,” she said the GOP ticket is advocating a pivot away from “BLM [Black Lives Matter] curriculum and equity outcomes” in schools. Instead, “turning back to basics: logic, foreign languages and, yes, cursive writing.”

sharlimar douglass, leader of the Maryland Alliance for Racial Equity in Education who does not capitalize her name, doubts whether Cox’s and Schifanelli’s “parental rights” agenda includes the rights of Black families like hers.

“This whole piece about the ‘parents’ rights’ to me falls into what we’ve seen nationally, like white parents’ fear and people not wanting children to learn the true history,” she said.

The lieutenant governor candidate dismissed the criticism.

“This is not about Black or white,” she said, explaining she does not oppose kids learning about slavery but rather the “political push to segregate children into oppressors, oppressed and depressed.”

Moore’s education agenda largely steers clear of curricular concerns around race and gender, focusing instead on policy issues like addressing the state’s teacher shortage and expanding access to early childhood education. 

“We are going to … honor the people who fight for our kids — teachers, administrators, custodial workers, cafeteria workers — the people who make our schools places where children can thrive,” Moore said in a statement emailed to The 74.

He also says he plans to by creating $3,200 savings bonds for every Maryland baby born on Medicaid, lifting the prospects of children who are disproportionately Black and Latino. He has not said how he plans to pay for the roughly $100 million-a-year program.

The Democratic candidate’s campaign has not been without setbacks. In early October, the reported Moore’s Baltimore home had an unpaid water and sewage bill of over $21,000, which was then paid off within hours of the story’s publication. And details regarding his Baltimore roots presented in his 2010 memoir have been .

However, if those issues don’t dissuade voters and Moore cruises to victory, not only will it be his first time in elected office, he also would become the Old Line State’s first governor of color and quite possibly the following the midterms.

Investing in education: Maryland’s Blueprint

Moore has promised to fully fund the , landmark legislation that, when fully implemented in 2032, will infuse an additional $4 billion annually to help schools in the state boost achievement and close equity gaps. 

“My opponent is a danger to our state. His plans would certainly defund our schools, and I’m going to do the opposite by ensuring that every Marylander has access to a world-class education,” Moore said.

Robert Ruffins, who has advocated for the Blueprint for years as assistant director of state advocacy at EdTrust, said there are “incredibly high stakes” for education in this gubernatorial election because the implementation of the 10-year plan could hinge on whether it sees support from the state’s top officeholder. In Maryland, he explained, the governor has broad power over funding levels because they put forward the state’s working yearly budget.

“The governor being committed to the Blueprint, and to the funding of the Blueprint, and to being a partner in having it implemented properly is going to be absolutely critical to our success,” added William Kriwan, who chaired the legislative commission that crafted the policy and is now vice president of the board responsible for overseeing its rollout.

As a member of the House of Delegates in 2020, Cox the legislation. Even so, it passed with bipartisan support.

But while the Maryland policymakers orchestrating the Blueprint’s implementation have their eyes on plans a decade or more out, the Democratic governor hopeful said he’s focused on what happens between now and Nov. 8.

“We’re not taking anything for granted and will continue to run as if we’re 10 points behind,” Moore said.