close
close

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

Culture wars cost schools an estimated .2 billion last year, harming student services – 74


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

In the years since Covid-19 first hit, the small Rocky Mountain community has increasingly come to grips with what the district’s superintendent called “scare tactics and half-truths” by “far-right” activists, ranging from allegations that “cat litter boxes” placed in school bathrooms for students identifying as cats to do so ban 1000 books from school libraries – although none of these titles was actually owned by the district.

Those tensions escalated last year when a teacher disagreed with the superintendent’s decision to follow the advice of a school district attorney and honor a transgender student’s request not to share information about his school transfer with his parents. The teacher went public and the results were quick and intense.

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

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

The turmoil of this small community is one of many accounts contained in the new one reportwhich is attempting for the first time to contribute a dollar amount to the costs of culture war conflicts that have been ravaging school districts for several years. Researchers estimate that between 2023 and 2024, the nation’s public schools spent about $3.2 billion to address divisive public debates about race, gender and sexual orientation, forcing them to spend money on legal fees, security, public relations and staff hours in response to misinformation and disinformation and public records requests.

And while the researchers said the numbers don’t take into account the emotional and social toll on teachers and students, their numbers do take into account a significant and related expense: staff turnover.

John Rogers is a professor at the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the lead author of The Costs of Conflict: The Fiscal Impact of Culturally Divisive Conflict on Public Schools in the United States. (University of California, Los Angeles)

“There are a lot of different costs that are really significant and undermine teachers’ ability to support student learning and well-being,” said John Rogers, a professor in the School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and lead author of the report.

The report’s data comes from a summer 2024 nationwide survey of 467 probation officers in 46 states, followed by interviews with 42 probation officers in 12 states. Of those surveyed, 12 took the survey and reported moderate to high levels of conflict; the remaining 30 did not participate in the survey and were identified through professional leadership networks.

School districts were classified as high, moderate, or low in conflict based on a series of questions about the nature of conflicts related to culturally divisive issues, the frequency and themes of personal or professional threats to superintendents and district staff, and financial and human resource costs.

The report singled out Moms for Liberty, a high-profile parental rights group, in reference to board members it supports and other far-right groups accusing the Western school district of indoctrinating students on sexual health issues. The superintendent said he had to spend about $100,000 to hire “armed off-duty plainclothes officers” and more than $500,000 in legal fees. A common theme in the report was the attacking of principals and school officials as pedophiles, touts or sexual predators.

Moms for Liberty did not respond to a request for comment. Closely associated with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the group’s influence in school board elections is seen as waning, even as battles continue over curriculum content and library textbooks.

Of the districts surveyed, approximately one-third had low levels of conflict, just over one-third had moderate levels of conflict, and almost one-third had high levels of conflict. About 2.5% of probation officers reported no conflict. Overall, Rogers said those surveyed “look very similar to superintendents across the (national) pool” in terms of race, gender and whether they lead urban, rural or suburban districts.

Half of school principals reported experiencing at least one incident of harassment during the 2023–24 school year. One in 10 people said they had been threatened with violence, and 11% had experienced property vandalism.

To calculate total fiscal costs, researchers asked superintendents about direct expenses in the 2023-2024 school year that exceeded amounts they would previously have spent on resources such as legal services or security; indirect costs such as reallocated staff time; and employee turnover costs.

Report on the costs of conflict

To determine the cost of redeployed staff time, researchers took the number of hours reported by superintendents for these various activities and assigned them a dollar amount based on the average salary of district administrators in Bureau of Labor Statistics. For each employee who left the district, researchers assigned a dollar amount associated with recruiting and training new staff based on research conducted in the district Learning Policy Institute.

Rogers noted that “there is some inaccuracy” when it comes to calculating the cost of staff turnover because “superintendents are being asked to rely on what they need to do to determine” why teachers and administrators left their positions. He added that further interviews helped increase the reliability of the data.

Report on the costs of conflict

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 the overall costs associated with the conflict were more than enough to expand the nationwide school breakfast program by 40% or hire “an additional counselor or psychologist in every public high school in the United States.”

Beyond the dollar numbers, in his conversations with probation officers, Rogers said he was particularly struck by the way violent threats emerged and how often there were “concerted efforts to disrupt, to incite conflict for the sake of inciting conflict.” “

For example, he has heard from several superintendents whose districts have spent enormous amounts of time pursuing public records requests that they believe were submitted in bad faith. Rogers said the materials collected often went unused.

The lasting consequences of these intra-district fights – beyond the fiscal costs – remain unknown and appear to change with the changing landscape. Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania reflected of his previous work on the impact of the culture wars on history teachers, writing, “It looks like I may have exaggerated it.”

However, as he noted in an interview with The 74 this week, the impact of this change on other teachers and administrators continues. During the culture wars, he noticed less focus on race and critical race theory and more on gender and sexuality, hypothesizing that this may mean that history teachers feel less influenced than English teachers, who may be more likely to teach directly about gender.

He said the report was a reflection of the country’s “fragile and abusive” political culture.

“This is a chapter on school policy that is part of a much larger story about how politics is done in America,” he said.

It seems that even if some of these more divisive players move on or are excluded, their political agendas may persist. That’s what happened in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, one of the most closely watched regions in these debates.

According to the latest New York Times. reportingeven though Democrats won the last school board elections, not all of the challenged books were returned to school library shelves, and teachers were not allowed to display identifying features such as rainbow flags. Nearly a year after the ouster of Moms for Liberty-backed candidates, their presence is still felt.


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