Leading a school district — especially in the suburbs — has become a bitter political battle for some education leaders, and the discord is bad for schools, a new report concludes.
Political battles over critical race theory, LGBTQ rights and COVID policy are disrupting K-12 education and increasing the time educators spend responding to public records requests seeking information on the so-called “culture wars” problem, according to a survey of school district leaders released Thursday.
These tensions could put some educators at risk. About one-third of district leaders who responded to a survey last year said educators in their school systems have received verbal or written threats about hot-button issues since the start of the 2021-22 school year.
Fights appear to break out more frequently in suburban school districts that serve large numbers of white and wealthier students. The exception is school systems located in cities where local politics lean in a different direction than the state in which they are located.
“These types of actions may be more prevalent in more favorable districts, as more favorable community members are more likely to use their voice and sense of effectiveness to call their school board members,” said Ashley Jochim, lead author of the report . The report, “Responding to Political Tensions in School Education: Findings from a Fall 2022 Panel Survey of American School Districts,” was released Thursday.
“It’s only associated with higher levels of agency and efficiency among community members with more resources.”
But a city supervisor in a Democratic stronghold also told researchers his district avoided local backlash because “issues of identity politics or culture wars” didn’t energize the community.
A nationally representative panel of school district and charter network leaders was polled last year as the national debate on these topics dominated the election cycle and elevated public education to a major election issue in a way it hadn’t in more than a decade .
While there has always been political tension in K-12 — whether it’s about Common Core state standards or charter school expansion — the current debate is taking on a different flavor, Jochim said.
“One is that the partisan character of the debate has changed over time,” Joachim said. “In some ways, there has always been conflict about schools, in some cases more than others. But over the past few years, this conflict has become increasingly partisan or ideological. And, in part , and as a function it also draws more state and national actors into the political conflicts happening on the ground.”
State-level legislation and interest groups are also driving some of the increased attention and partisanship, Jochim said.
Suburbs
Overall, 51% of school district leaders in the survey agreed or strongly agreed that inconsistencies about critical race theory, issues related to lesbian, gay, transgender and queer student rights, and COVID are impacting how they educate students ability.
In school systems that serve mostly white students, 56% of leaders say political tension over one of the issues is disrupting schooling, compared with 37% in systems where the majority of students are students of color .
Forty-five percent of district leaders said they have received more open records requests than in previous years beginning with the 2021-22 school year.
Even though school districts have rolled back most COVID mitigation strategies nearly three years into the pandemic, it remains a divisive, if less potent, issue. Thirty-five percent of district leaders in the survey said COVID polarization was impacting education last fall, compared to nearly three-quarters in fall 2021.
But as divisions over COVID lessened, concerns about LGBTQ issues and critical race theory began to rise. By fall 2022, 46 percent of district leaders say political polarization around LGBTQ issues is affecting education. Forty-one percent said concerns about critical race theory were affecting schooling.
The report speculates that this timeline coincides with action on these issues by state legislatures across the country.
Verbal and written threats against educators were higher in the suburbs, with 43 percent of district leaders saying educators had been threatened. They are also more common in wealthier districts, with 41 percent of district leaders reporting that their educators have been threatened by these divisive topics.
Threats were also more likely in districts serving majority-white students than in districts with majority students of color, 35 percent versus 17 percent.
About 25 percent of regional leaders in conservative or red states said they had received threats about divisive topics, a lower percentage than regional leaders in more liberal or blue states and more politically mixed or purple states .
Suburbs are also more likely to receive requests to remove books from libraries or courses and to pull students out of classes. They were also more likely to make formal complaints about the way they were taught or trained on controversial topics, the report said.
Some regional leaders reported that they were also making adjustments to calm tensions.
While the majority said they had not changed teaching in response to the tension, 32% said they had modified, suspended or changed one or more subject areas. The subjects most commonly affected were social emotional learning, health and sexuality education, and mental health services. Some of the changes are minor — like changing the terminology used by school districts.
Social studies, American history and civics education — while the subject of intense national debate — are unlikely to be changed or revised, the report said.
coping with tension
Forty-six percent of regional leaders said they had taken steps they considered successful in resolving tensions. Some have created new procedures for teachers to follow in response to parents who want to keep their children out of the classroom. Others told researchers they held one-on-one meetings with parents to dispel misinformation and defuse controversy.
“Sadly, none of this is surprising,” said Susan Enfield, superintendent of Washoe County Schools in Reno, Nevada, who was superintendent of Highline Public Schools in Brienne, Washington, at the start of the pandemic. “I wish we could start standing up and saying, ‘No, this won’t work. This will not work. “
District leaders are feeling fatigued, Enfield said, but the tensions also affect the quality of children’s education in the long run. (Enfield is chair of the Education Week board.)
“It’s absolutely exhausting—the job is hard enough without the extra burden of figuring out what you can and can’t say,” Enfield said. “I think it raises the question, at some point, are we drifting away from factual guidance, especially around history and social issues? Are things being watered down to the point where students aren’t really engaging with history, historical issues and us all in a factual way? The extent of the current problem that should be worked on?”
Rico Munn, a former principal of Aurora Public Schools in Aurora, Colorado, said the report’s findings were not surprising to him, even though they did not reflect his personal experience. He stepped down as superintendent in December.
But he said he knew of co-workers who were doxxed, their homes were picketed and others were threatened. Some also had to fight their own school boards. Others left the job, he said.
But Moon also said not all of the discord can be attributed to the apparent liberal-conservative divide. In some cases, this is a real trust issue.
As superintendent of Aurora, he disagreed with the school board and teachers’ union on when and how to return to in-person schooling. He emphasized that it’s not about politics, but about people’s own sense of what is safe to do.
“People feel like they don’t know who to trust, who to listen to,” he said. “It caused people to retreat to different sources for a sense of authenticity. It caused a lot of fear and division.”
But arguments and disagreements made “everything more difficult”.
“It distracts educators from their core job of caring for and educating students,” he said.
One way regional leaders can counter political tensions is by focusing on building good relationships with their communities.
“The point is you have to have a constant and close connection with your community,” Moon said, “because if your community doesn’t know who you are and fundamentally has a level of trust in you, then you can’t navigate these challenges.”
Among other things, the report recommends more research into whether some strategies used by district leaders are effective in shielding educators and other frontline workers from political tensions, training school board members to mitigate disruptions This may be due to school board members focusing on an issue, as well as training for district leaders—including readiness programs and professional development—to help them navigate political challenges.
The report, from the Center for Reinventing Public Education, a group of American school districts comprised of RAND Education and Arizona State University, is based on a survey of 300 district and charter leaders conducted between October and December of last year. It also draws on 22 interviews with seven executives between January 2021 and November last year.
