As Republican legislators have passed laws banning the teaching of “critical race theory” in schools, and teachers have argued that the left-wing “indoctrination” this legislation targets doesn’t actually exist, researchers are trying to bring clarity—by attempting to map the ideological spectrum of K-12 classrooms and understand exactly how race, gender, and other hot-button issues are actually discussed.
Reviews of course materials and surveys of teachers have found little evidence of widespread left-leaning bias. Now, a new study of high school students confirms that most schools aren’t presenting a one-sided picture of American politics and history. But it also finds that kids say teachers aren’t shying away from discussing controversial topics in class.
The research, published today in the journal Education Next, analyzes the results of a nationally representative May 2024 survey of 850 U.S. high school students.
The findings show that politics regularly make their way into the classroom. More than half of students say their teachers have used the phrases “Black lives matter,” “all lives matter,” “anti-racist,” and “white privilege,” for example.
Some students say that the kinds of ideas anti-critical-race-theory advocates disparage are present in their classrooms. Thirty-six percent report that their teachers have often made the “claim or argument” that “America is a fundamentally racist nation.”
Still, more than half of all students, 56 percent, say that their teachers often claim or argue that “the U.S. has made a lot of progress toward racial equality over the last 50 years.”
And regardless of their teachers’ opinions, most students say they feel that open debate is welcome in their classrooms. More than three-quarters of survey respondents say their teachers never or rarely make them feel uncomfortable sharing opinions that differ from their teachers’.
The results paint a nuanced portrait of American classrooms and doesn’t suggest “any systemic or obvious one-sidedness” to classroom conversations, said Gary Ritter, the dean of Saint Louis University’s School of Education, and one of the authors of the report.
Students are just as likely, for example, to say that their teachers have made disparaging remarks about Democrats as Republicans.
And while it’s possible that some observers could take the findings as evidence that teachers place too much emphasis on America’s faults and divisions, others might take the opposite view, he said.
Students say teachers mention controversial issues
The “anti-CRT” movement started in 2020, not long after a white police officer in Minneapolis killed George Floyd, a Black man, spawning weeks of protests and unrest. In response to a raft of workplace and school efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, Republican state legislators began to introduce measures aimed at curtailing discussions of race and gender in U.S. schools.
Lawmakers said they were trying to prevent schools from teaching kids to hate their country or feel bad about their racial background. They labeled these ideas “critical race theory,” a term originally coined in legal studies to describe how systemic racism operates in law.
Many teachers countered that schools didn’t teach the ideas outlined in these bills, and that the proposed legislation was actually a thinly veiled attempt to shut down inclusion of diverse perspectives and any conversation about how race and gender operate in American society.
Because “good-faith” anti-CRT advocates worry that this instruction is affecting students, “we wanted to ask the students,” said Ritter.
The authors—who included an ideologically “heterodox” group of researchers in education and political science, Ritter said—chose a selection of phrases and claims that advocates and popular media have associated with “critical race theory” in the context of K-12 schools.
Researchers used the words that the “harshest critics” used in their claims, said Brian Kisida, an associate professor at the University of Missouri’s Truman School of Government and Public Affairs, and the lead author on the paper. For example, students were asked whether their teachers had claimed that “capitalism inherently favors white Americans and discriminates against Black Americans,” or that “white people should feel guilty about their privileges.”
Some of the findings are ambiguous, not shedding much light on how certain topics are discussed. For instance, 64 percent of students said teachers have used the phrase “Black lives matter” in class.
But simply mentioning a phrase in class “can mean 100 different things,” said one social studies teacher in Virginia, who asked that her name be withheld to maintain her position of political impartiality in her classroom and school community.
“Teachers might talk about this in the context of a current political and cultural climate,” she said, without asking students to embrace the slogan and its meaning.
Even when students say their teachers have made the claim that “America is a fundamentally racist nation,” it might not always mean that teachers are telling students to believe that, said Ritter.
A thoughtful civics teacher might have structured a lesson asking students to investigate that claim, he said. (This isn’t so far off from prompts included in national guidelines for social studies—for instance, the Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy, a framework developed by a panel of academics, educators, and civic nonprofits, asks high school students to explore the relationship between race and American social structure.)
Still, said Kisida, “I don’t doubt that some of these things are happening in ways that parents and the public don’t approve of.”
Teachers have limited influence on students’ political beliefs
Other research has shown most Americans across the political spectrum say that high schools should teach about some controversial issues, including racial inequality, gun control, and abortion.
Still, they differ on the details. Republicans, for example, are less likely than Democrats to say that they support lessons that investigate current, instead of past, racial inequalities, according to a 2024 survey from researchers at the University of Southern California.
Nationally, efforts to stymie discussions of these issues may gain renewed momentum during President Donald Trump’s second term. Throughout his campaign, Trump promised to get rid of “wokeness” in U.S. schools.
In addition to finding no strong, one-sided bent to classroom conversations, the study underscores that what students learn in school may not have that big of an effect on their future political leanings.
When asked how influential different sources were to their political beliefs, students in the survey put teachers low on the list, with only 17 percent saying educators were “very influential”—above only podcasts, print media, and radio.
Much more important, students reported, were their parents and family, as well as social media.
