Searching for Common Ground: Teaching Contested Topics in American Schools

• In Event: Education, Socialization, and Political Preferences

Abstract

In recent years, public education has re-emerged as a political battleground, as politicians, particularly in Republican-controlled states, have supported legislative efforts designed to severely curtail public educators’ autonomy, modify educational standards and curriculum to remove putatively contested episodes in American history, and remove books from school libraries perceived as containing inappropriate content for students. Divisions around these topics mirror the growing political polarization of American political elites and their constituencies. Despite the growing salience of public education in the American political discourse, however, there is a dearth of empirical evidence investigating the magnitude of polarization between partisans, or whether opposition to injecting potentially controversial topics into educational programming is moderated by other factors. To address this omission, we leverage novel survey data gauging Americans’ opinions about the role of public education in introducing students to potentially sensitive, controversial content and subjects using the Understanding America Study (UAS), a nationally representative, longitudinal internet survey administered to nearly four-thousand panel members during the fall of 2023. We estimate survey respondents’ ideological ideal points for three separate dimensions of controversial education topics in American classrooms, including the appropriateness of LGBTQ-related content, sex education, and the importance of race in understanding enduring disparities American society. Overall, although we find minimal ideological overlap between liberal and conservative survey respondents across all educational constructs measured through the survey, and we isolate classroom scenarios where partisan cohesion decomposes and polarization widens.

Author

• Marshall Garland, University of Southern California