Courtesy of UCLA IDEA
For the nation's public school districts, heightened conflict over culturally divisive topics like efforts to ban books and teaching about race, racism and LBTQ issues has disrupted operations, negatively impacted classrooms and cost billions of dollars that could have been better used serving students, according to a study published today by the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at UCLA.
Based on a survey of 467 public school superintendents across 46 states, the study found that nearly 66% of districts experienced moderate to high levels of conflict across several cultural issues — conflict many times characterized by incidents of harassment, the spread of misinformation, vandalism, and violent rhetoric or threats.
