Study finds partisan divide over teaching sensitive topics
USC researchers found that more Democrats supported lessons on gender and race than Republicans.
A study published Feb. 21 by USC researchers at the Dornsife Center for Applied Research in Education has revealed that adults show bipartisan support for public education, but disagree on which topics should be discussed in class, including gender, sex and race.
The study, conducted from September to October 2023, surveyed 3,905 adults from a wide range of political backgrounds about their opinions on controversial topics taught in public schools. Researchers found that Democrats were more likely to support LGBTQIA+ and race related discussions than Republicans.
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Debates over classroom curriculum and parental control in recent years have coincided with a rise in proposed legislation that would remove books from schools or libraries.
Anna Saavedra, a co-author of the study and co-director for the Center for Applied Research in Education, said she hopes the study’s findings will help public schools foster an open dialogue about teaching controversial topics and create an agreed-upon process for handling disagreements with the curriculum.
“It’s really important to learn about the other perspectives that we don’t hold ourselves. That’s the common starting point,” Saavedra said. “Local communities have work to do to come up with common processes. This is a microcosm of democracy.”
The study found bipartisan support for funding public education, with 73% of participants supporting spending to improve the quality of public schools. There was also bipartisan agreement for the purposes of education, with 86% of participants agreeing that “teaching children subjects like reading, writing, and math” was an important purpose of education.
“The most surprising result of the entire study was strong bipartisan support for public education,” Saavedra said. “It’s the common ground to get started from … but with that common ground, I am cautiously optimistic.”
The potential purpose of education provided by researchers with the most partisan division was “teaching children the importance of embracing differences,” with 74% of Democrats selecting this purpose as very important versus only 35% of Republicans.
There was a greater partisan divide when asked about LGBTQIA+-related scenarios. Participants were asked to indicate the appropriateness of 24 LGBTQIA+-related scenarios, such as discussing same-sex marriage rights and “LGBTQ American history.” Democrats were more likely to show approval than Republicans in every LGBTQIA+-related scenario.
Just over half of Democrats and 9% of Republicans expressed approval of discussing that love can be between individuals of the same or different genders at an elementary school level.
Morgan Polikoff, a co-author of the study and associate professor of education, said he attributes this divide over LGBTQIA+ topics to partisan individuals within the Republican party.
A study by the Dornsife Center for Applied Research in Education found bipartisan support for funding public education and teaching reading, writing and math despite partisan divides elsewhere in the survey. (Emma Silverstein / Daily Trojan)
“These right-wing partisans pick out extreme edge cases that are really very uncommon and then amplify them, and then you take Republican elected officials … trying to use those as wedge issues,” Polikoff said.
At a high school level, approval of LGBTQIA+-related scenarios was higher but still divided. Seventy-five percent of Democrats versus 30% of Republicans approved of discussing a book about two women in love, and 41% of all participants approved of a teacher asking students to share pronouns in high school classrooms.
The study noted that no scenarios related to transgender issues received majority approval at either education level, including a teacher being openly transgender.
In each of the 18 race-related scenarios provided by researchers, Democrats were more likely to show approval of race-related scenarios than Republicans. Democrats had an 88% approval rate for an assignment discussing how policies harm Black and Hispanic Americans, compared to 41% among Republicans.
Stella Horns, a junior majoring in political science and narrative studies, said they have seen a similar divide in discussing race at the University level. Many of the political sciences classes they have taken did not engage in discussions about race unless the class was explicitly centered around the subject, Horns said.
“I don’t think that [professors] are timid or scared to talk about it. My perception is more that they don’t think it’s relevant or important,” Horns said.
Polikoff said universities across the political spectrum are facing a tension over discussions of controversial topics.
“The academy is very left-leaning so there’s a lot of pressure to adopt left-wing views on these issues,” Polikoff said. “There is some pressure back in the opposite direction, which is to make sure that classrooms are places where people of all backgrounds can feel comfortable expressing their views.”
While the study mainly revealed great partisan divides, participants showed wide support for direct parental engagement when a parent disagrees with the content of a lesson.
However, there was a split when it came to how schools should respond to a parent voicing disagreement. Thirty-four percent of all participants supported the school teaching the lesson as planned, while 29% supported the school modifying the lesson to accommodate the parent.
Four percent of participants supported the school canceling or completely changing the lesson with 7% approval from Republicans and 1% approval from Democrats. Saavendra said one of the study’s key findings was that there was a division on how disagreements should be handled by schools.
“Communities need to really work on coming to some sort of commonly agreed upon process with which to advocate disagreement,” Saavendra said.
