Culture wars cost schools an estimated $3.2 billion last year, hurting student services – The 74

Get stories like this straight to your inbox. Sign up for the 74 newsletter

In the years since COVID first struck, a small Rocky Mountain community has increasingly faced what the county’s superintendent called “scare tactics and half-truths” by “far-right” activists, ranging from accusations that “litter boxes” placed in school bathrooms for students who identify as cats to attempt to do so Ban 1,000 books from school libraries – even though none of these titles were actually owned by the district.

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

Hundreds of people showed up for the next school board meeting. A local radio host said the superintendent wanted to “indoctrinate their children and … make them become gay and transgender.” Community members verbally confronted the principal of the school in public, saying, “You’re going to hell. You never read the Bible.”

The fiscal impact was also significant, forcing the district to deduct funds from planned professional development. Ultimately, five teachers left their jobs in response to the spreading unrest.

The unrest in this small community is one of many stories included in a new report reportwhich for the first time is attempting to put a dollar amount toward the costs of the culture war conflicts that have consumed school districts in recent years. The researchers estimate that the nation’s public schools spent about $3.2 billion over 2023-2024 addressing divisive public debates about race, gender and sexual orientation, forcing them to spend money on legal costs, safety, public relations and labor hours in response to disinformation and disinformation. and public records requests.

And while the researchers said their numbers don’t take into account the emotional and social toll that teachers and students must pay, their figures do include a significant and related cost: employee turnover.

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

The report data comes from a national survey of 467 superintendents in 46 states conducted in the summer of 2024, followed by interviews with 42 superintendents in twelve states. Of those interviewed, twelve had completed the survey and reported moderate or high levels of conflict; the remaining 30 did not complete the survey and were identified through professional leadership networks.

School districts were categorized as high, medium, or low conflict areas based on a series of questions about the nature of conflict related to culturally divisive issues, the frequency of, and topics related to, personal or professional threats to superintendents and district staff, and the financial and personnel costs.

Moms for Liberty, a high-profile parental rights group, was specifically mentioned in the report regarding board members they supported and other far-right groups who accused a Western school district of indoctrinating students around sexual health issues. That chief said he had to spend about $100,000 hiring “armed off-duty plainclothes officers” and more than $500,000 in legal fees. The report attacked superintendents and school board members as pedophiles, groomers or sexual predators.

Moms for Liberty did not respond to a request for comment. Closely linked to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the group’s influence on school board elections is seen as waning, even as fighting continues over curriculum content and library books.

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

Half of principals reported experiencing at least one incident of harassment in the 2023-2024 school year. One in ten said violent threats had been made against them and 11% had experienced property vandalism.

To calculate total budget costs, researchers asked supervisors about direct expenses during the 2023-2024 school year that exceeded what they would have previously spent on 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 superintendents reported on these different activities and assigned them a figure based on the average wages of district administrators from the region. Bureau of Labor Statistics. For each staff member who left the district, researchers awarded a dollar amount related to the recruitment and training of new staff based on research from the district Institute for Learning Policy.

Rogers noted that “there is some inaccuracy” when it comes to calculating the cost of employee turnover because “you’re asking superintendents to use the knowledge they have to make this decision” about why teachers and directors have left their positions. Follow-up conversations, he added, helped increase the reliability of these figures.

The researchers, who also included 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 the total conflict-related costs were more than enough to justify the scale of the war. to expand. cut 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 Rogers spoke to regulators, he said he was particularly struck by the ways in which violent threats played out and how often it appeared there was a “coordinated effort to disrupt, to incite conflict for the sake of fueling conflict. ”

For example, he heard from a number of superintendents whose districts spent an enormous amount of time complying with public records requests that they felt were made in bad faith. Once the materials were assembled, they often went unused, Rogers said.

The lasting effects of these battles in the districts – beyond the budgetary costs – still remain unknown and appear to be changing with the changing landscape. Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, recently reflected about his previous work on the impact of the culture wars on history teachers, writing, “It seems I may have exaggerated them.”

But, he noted in an interview with The 74 this week, the effects on other teachers and administrators are ongoing. Within the culture wars, he has noticed less attention to race and critical race theory and more to gender and sexuality. He hypothesizes that this could mean that history teachers feel less of an impact than English teachers, who may be more likely to teach gender directly.

He 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 politics is done in America,” he said.

It appears that even if 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 the recent New York Times reportingDespite Democrats winning the last school board election, not all disputed books have returned to school library shelves, nor have teachers been allowed to display identity markers such as rainbow flags. Nearly a year after the Moms for Liberty-backed candidates were ousted, their presence is still felt.

Get stories like this straight to your inbox. Sign up for the 74 newsletter