Attacks targeting American public schools over LGBTQ+ rights and education about race and racism cost those schools an estimated $3.2bn in the 2023-24 school year, according to a new report by education professors from four major American universities.
The study is believed to be the first attempt to quantify the financial impact of rightwing political campaigns targeting school districts and school boards across the US. In the wake of the pandemic, these campaigns first attempted to restrict how American schools educate students about racism, and then increasingly shifted to spreading fear among parents about schools’ policies about transgender students and LGBTQ+ rights.
Researchers from UCLA, UT Austin, UC Riverside and American University surveyed 467 public school superintendents across 46 US states, asking them about the direct and indirect costs of dealing with these volatile campaigns. Those costs included everything from out-of-pocket payments to hire to lawyers or additional security, to the staff member hours devoted to responding to disinformation on social media, addressing parent concerns and replying to voluminous public records requests focused on the district’s teachings on racism, gender and sexuality.
The campaigns that focused on public schools’ policies about transgender students often included lurid false claims about schools trying to change students’ gender or “indoctrinating” them into becoming gay. This disinformation sparked harassment and threats against individual teachers, school board members and administrators, with some of the fury coming from within local communities, and even more angry calls, emails and social media posts flooding in from conservative media viewers across the country.
In addition to the financial costs of responding to these targeted campaigns, the study revealed other dynamics, the researchers said. “The attack on public officials as pedophiles was one I heard again and again, from people across extremely different parts of the country: rural, urban, suburban. It speaks to the way that this really is a nationalized conflict campaign,” said John Rogers, an education professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the lead author of the study. The frequency with which both school board members and school superintendents were “being called out as sexual predators – it was really frightening”, Rogers said.
Superintendents from across the country told the researchers how these culture battles had affected their schools, and cut into resources they would have preferred to spend on education.
One superintendent in a Rocky Mountain school district told researchers that he faced intense public backlash after trying to protect the privacy of a transgender student. The school district had to divert money from planned professional development programs for teachers in order to pay for outside consultants to deal with PR, communications and legal issues, the superintendent said. Five educators left the district, and school staff felt “caught in the crosshairs of a societal war”, he said.
A southern school district consumed by debates over critical race theory and book bans started to require that community members go through a metal detector in order to attend school board meetings, and spent “several hundred thousand dollars for additional security personnel, communications professionals and attorneys”, its superintendent estimated.
In a western school district, after new “extremist” school board members supported by Moms for Liberty and other outside groups began accusing schools of “indoctrinating kids” about sexuality, the district had to spend $100,000 to hire “armed plainclothes off-duty officers”, another half million in legal costs, and a total of $1m in staff hours dedicated to responding to the conflict, the superintendent said.
In that district, 20 staff members had spent 20 hours a week “responding to media inquiries, addressing misinformation and falsehoods, fulfilling public records act requests and more”, he estimated.
“The fiscal costs to the district are enormous, but [so are] the cultural costs of not standing up to the extremists,” that superintendent said.
Rogers and the other researchers estimated that an average district that experienced a relatively low level of political conflict in the last school year had to spend around $250,000 to address the direct and indirect costs and staff turnover, while districts with the highest level of conflict were faced with costs of more than $800,000.
The largest portion of that money came from the “turnover costs” of replacing staff members who left their jobs or retired early because of personal attacks or the broader demoralizing school climate, they said. The money school districts had to spend on responding to political attacks was “meaningfully impacting the quality of education students received”, the report concluded.
Nationwide, that per-school cost added up to an estimated $3.2bn for one school year. The researchers noted that was a significant amount of money: for just under $2bn, they estimated, “it would be possible to expand the national Free Breakfast program budget by 40%”, or, alternatively, “hire an additional counselor or psychologist for every public high school in the United States”.
Rogers, who interviewed several of the superintendents in more depth, said that many of them “felt like they were at the end their ropes”.
It wasn’t that they were “being challenged because they weren’t doing their work correctly, or following a vision that someone thad set out. They were being called a pedophile, or their staff members were being called pedophiles, or their school board members,” he said.
The researchers’ $3.2bn cost estimate only looks at the financial cost of these school-focused campaigns, not the broader emotional toll on students, teachers and administrators. The national survey found that half of superintendents had been personally harassed, and one in 10 had been threatened violently. Multiple superintendents told researchers they had seen an increase in staff members taking medication for mental health issues.
“What people don’t talk about is how fearful everybody is,” one superintendent from the north-east told the researchers.
While disagreement, debate and dealing with angry parents are a normal part of local public school administration, the researchers noted, the political campaigns that schools have faced in recent years have been anything but normal. Many of them have been driven by “a small number of active individuals on social media or at school board meetings”, and fueled by misinformation.
The school-focused campaigns, which started with claims that elementary and middle schools were harming white students by teaching critical race theory and later shifted to attacks on schools’ policies for transgender students, were nationally organized, with “common talking points” that could be traced back to conservative foundations and rightwing legal organizations, and were intensely amplified by rightwing media coverage, Rogers said.
Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon had highlighted this Republican strategy early, in a May 2021 podcast, “The path to save the nation is very simple – it’s going to go through the school boards,” he said.
The goal of the campaigns, Rogers said, “trying to foment conflict for the sake of disruption, and to energize a certain base of voters”.