Published on Wednesday by the journal , of 850 high schoolers reports that 36 percent say their teachers either “often” or “almost daily” argue that America is a fundamentally racist nation. No less striking, roughly the same proportion of respondents said they frequently heard claims that African Americans are victims of discrimination by racist police officers and an unjust economic system, while whites contribute the most to racism in society. 

At the same time, large numbers of adolescents also absorb comparatively positive views about the United States, with 56 percent saying their teachers regularly discussed the progress made toward racial equality since the 1970s. 

The data offer a somewhat rare student perspective on a question that has roiled education politics for much of the last five years: whether the tenets of critical race theory, a contentious and little-understood academic field that scrutinizes the relationships between race and power, have trickled from university campuses down to K–12 classrooms. In both his 2020 and 2024 campaigns, President Trump warned that students were subjected to ubiquitous anti-American bias in their lessons and pledged to root out CRT from public school curricula.

University of Missouri professor Brian Kisida, the lead author of the polling analysis, said that the student responses made clear that teachings opposed by Trump and his allies had taken root in many schools as “the function of a certain progressive politics.”

“I’m sure there are schools where it’s not happening at all,” Kisida said. “I’m also sure that there are schools where it’s happening quite a bit, and it’s really ingrained in the approach that those schools take.”

While they burned especially hot between the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms, controversies over instruction on race, gender, and sexuality have quieted in recent months, subsumed by the larger disputes that helped power Trump’s reelection. But in his inauguration address Monday, the president signalled that he has not given up his aim of cleansing education of unpatriotic themes, at “an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves.” The commitment echoed his to defund schools that teach CRT. 

Whether Washington has the authority to meaningfully alter K–12 teaching remains in doubt; curricular choices ultimately rest at the local level, though that a GOP-led Department of Education could penalize school districts for teaching material deemed racially discriminatory. 

Further uncertainty clouds the true prevalence of indoctrination in American school systems. Even if significant minorities of students say they encounter progressive concepts throughout their time in high school, the authors of the report note that they are far from universal. 

Gary Ritter, Kisida’s co-author and dean of the Saint Louis University School of Education, said he was surprised by the occurrence of apparently ideological programming in high schools, but that he also believed teacher bias was not overwhelming or uniformly left-coded.

“I expected there to be roughly zero of this, and there’s obviously more than zero of it going on,” Ritter said. “Still, I don’t think it’s a problem.”

‘It doesn’t feel one-sided’

In an interview alongside Kisida, Ritter said he had been relieved by high schoolers’ responses to explicit questions about partisan animus and self-censorship.

Specifically, 77 percent of survey respondents said that they were either never or rarely made to feel uncomfortable about disagreeing with their teachers’ stated views. Over half of students, by contrast, said their teachers typically encouraged them to share different opinions. While 18 percent said their teachers had spoken negatively about Republicans, slightly more said that they’d heard Democrats disparaged. 

What’s more, he added, educators appear to deliver affirming statements about race in America with some frequency. Forty-two percent of students said their teachers cited the United States as “a global leader” in securing equal rights for its citizens, exactly the same proportion as said they’d heard their teachers express support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I wanted to know if these statements were made as much as people said, and if they were one-sided,” said Ritter. “We’re hearing various claims, and it doesn’t feel one-sided.”

Some of the messaging tested in the poll veers more toward advocacy than simple observation. Along with the sizable number of teachers who praised Black Lives Matter, considerable numbers argued “often” or “almost daily” that African Americans should receive an advantage in the hiring process (22 percent) or college admissions (21 percent), students reported. Nearly one-in-five respondents said their teachers made frequent calls for reparations to be made for slavery.

But it is a challenge to interpret the exact nature of classroom references to concepts such as institutional racism or white privilege. Majorities of students said they had heard teachers voice two phrases often held in tension with one another: “Black lives matter” (64 percent) and “All lives matter” (53 percent). 

Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and history at the University of Pennsylvania, said it was necessary to understand whether teachers were inviting open-minded discussion of such ideas or delivering an unsubtle form of propaganda. The wording of one poll question simply asked participants if their teachers had used one of a list of phrases — including “anti-racist,” “systemic oppression,” “decolonization,” and “the 1619 Project” — without specifying whether they were described approvingly, or even properly defined.

“Some of the kids saying that they heard the phrase ‘inherently racist country’ will have heard it in the context of a discussion, and some heard it as part of something resembling indoctrination,” Zimmerman said. “The question is the relative proportion of those.”

Thaw in the culture war?

Though the second Trump administration is only getting underway — the president’s nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, has yet to undergo a confirmation hearing — Republicans have loudly announced that they plan to attack what they view as unchecked political interference in K–12 learning.

When preparing his third run for the presidency, Trump himself from any school teaching critical race theory or “gender ideology,” a promise renewed in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” policy document. Meanwhile, during Trump’s four years out of office, GOP lawmakers across 18 states passed laws restricting the teaching of what they often call “divisive concepts.” Similar bills have been filed and debated in 25 other legislatures. 

Still, the uproar over equity efforts and identity politics in schools had appeared to be settling over the last year. The prominent parent advocacy group , which has energetically challenged library books and curricular materials it considers divisive, to win school board seats throughout 2023, and the pace of new anti-CRT legislation compared with the early days of the Biden administration. 

More evidence for the apparent thaw came in by the libertarian Cato Institute. According to policy researcher Neal McCluskey’s ongoing tracker of culture war disputes in school districts, 2024 saw the fewest such conflicts since 2020, when COVID-related school closures set off a wave of parental dissatisfaction. The gradual end of online learning, along with the spectacle of the 2024 campaign, may have diverted outrage away from local clashes, McCluskey argued.

Trump’s second term will likely bring a resumption of hostilities. Earlier polling has indicated of instruction on the facts of slavery and discrimination throughout American history, but also widespread skepticism of teaching strategies such as separating students into different identity groups to talk about racial matters. 

In Education Next‘s poll, 14 percent of students — more than one in eight — said they had been separated along racial lines for discussions of racism.

Kisida noted that good instruction must “walk a tightrope” between candor about the shortcomings of American society and an equally comprehensive accounting of the strides that have been made to overcome them.

“There’s a general idea that parents want their kids to learn a sense of pride and patriotism about the United States,” he said. “So there has to be a good balance where we’re able to talk about all of the struggles, but also talk about the successes.”

Dealt a harrowing blow by their loss of Congress and the presidency last November, Democrats may opt to formulate a new line of argument on cultural dust-ups in schools. At , the party spent much of the Biden administration attempting to counter GOP claims of political influence over schools. 

Zimmerman said schools should encourage discussion of thorny issues among older students, while cautioning that educators needed to recognize the line between teaching and preaching.

“It’s false to say that all teachers are telling kids to hate America and that America is racist. But it’s also false to say that none of those ideas have penetrated our schools.”

Timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end legal segregation in public schools, the research offers further evidence that integration hit its peak during the 1980s, only to recede somewhat in the time since. But it also poses questions about the true scale of that backsliding nationally, as well as the solutions that could be reasonably embraced to counter it.

Notably, the trend toward isolation has been underway even as Americans of different races and national origins are living in increasingly close proximity to one another. Ann Owens, a professor at the University of Southern California and one of the co-authors of the analysis, said that public policy was “undoing the decline in residential segregation.”

“While it’s true that school segregation is higher in places where residential segregation is higher, it can’t explain the increase over the last 30 years because residential segregation has not been increasing over that time,” Owens said.

Owens and her co-author, Stanford professor Sean Reardon, have spent years chronicling demographic changes in school through the lenses of both race and class. Their latest study has not yet been made public, though its findings were presented at a conference at Stanford in early May. The duo has also unveiled a new interactive data tool, the , which allows users to investigate patterns of segregation across schools, districts, cities and counties.

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the analysis measures children’s exposure to peers of different racial backgrounds, comparing the average African American student’s proportion of white classmates with the average white student’s proportion of African American classmates in the same district. The difference between the two figures, measured on a 0–1 scale, is deemed the district’s “segregation level.” 

As previous historical studies have shown, after falling dramatically in the wake of federally led integration efforts in the 1960s and ‘70s, school segregation began creeping back up in the late 1980s. Between 1991 and 2019, Owens and Reardon calculated, the segregation level rose by over one-third in the 541 U.S. school districts that enroll at least 2,500 African American students. 

But Owens cautioned that, even accounting for that shift, schools are vastly more racially mixed than in the days before Brown. When examined over the last half-century, the growth in segregation is much harder to perceive. The total increase in segregation levels amounts to less than five percentage points since the presidential administration of George H.W. Bush.

Brian Kisida, an economist at the University of Missouri, said that it was critical to monitor changes in cross-racial exposure over time. In his view, however, existing evidence did not constitute “anything that sets off alarm bells compared with the history of this issue.”

“I think segregation is an incredibly important problem, and one we’ve had terrible trouble with in this country,” Kisida said. “But I don’t know if I would look at the trend from 1990 to 2020 and characterize that as ‘resegregation.’”

The charter factor

Kisida added that the paper’s evidence of charter schools’ role in driving racial isolation made for a “very solid finding” that dovetailed with his own prior work.

In 2019, he examining the same phenomenon, incorporating an even wider swath of data than Owens and Reardon. That study showed that charters exerted a meaningful, if modest, impact on the racial composition of the surrounding districts; eliminating the charter sector entirely would lead to a 5 percent decrease in the segregation of Hispanic and African American students, they found. (Kisida added that the effect was substantially counteracted by charters’ propensity to draw students into more integrated environments than their residentially zoned school, lessening segregation between districts.)

The newer research estimates that total growth in segregation would have fallen between two and three percentage points — from around 19 percent on their exposure index to a little under 17 percent — had charter schools not rapidly expanded after the year 2000. 

Another, smaller factor in pushing back integration, the authors argue, was the gradual eclipse of desegregation orders that began in the 1990s. As federal courts from injunctions requiring them to evenly balance racial groups across schools, campuses became about 1 percentage point more segregated than they otherwise would have been. 

Boston College professor Shep Melnick, who published last year on the halting efforts toward desegregation that began in 1954 with Brown, said that the lifting of injunctions accelerated during the early 2000s, eventually releasing more than half of the districts that had previously been under court oversight. In some instances, though, local enforcement — or even awareness — of the orders was so paltry that their sunsetting would not have made much difference.

“Some of these schools that were formerly under court order didn’t even realize they were under court order,” said Melnick. “So the effects of the orders in those cases probably were not that great.” 

Melnick and Owens agreed that the public needed to be conscious of the differing definitions of racial segregation that underlie research studies. For example, multiple waves of immigration from Asia and Latin America have made the U.S. population significantly more diverse than it was in the middle of the 20th century. Efforts to quantify desegregation simply as the exposure of African American students to white classmates must account for the fact that white students represent a much smaller share of the total student body.

“When you say, ‘Black students attend school with fewer white kids than they did 50 or 60 years ago,’ that’s true,” Owens concluded. “But it’s also true that white kids attend school with fewer white kids — because there are fewer white kids around.”

First circulated as a working paper before the pandemic, the article was accepted for publication at the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Its conclusions are difficult to ignore after both schools and the arts world were rocked by COVID-19, with to the creative economy totalling millions of jobs and tens of billions of dollars lost in 2020 alone. Arts education in some states had to be sustained through the infusion of emergency funds from Washington.

The study will also inform public policy decisions as school systems look to get back on their feet. Just a week before its publication, voters in California approved a ballot initiative that will provide nearly $1 billion annually to increase access to arts and music programs in schools. The sizable new appropriation, which isn’t funded by new taxes, amid advocacy by celebrities like Dr. Dre and Katy Perry.

Brian Kisida, a professor at the University of Missouri’s Truman School of Public Affairs and one of the paper’s co-authors, said that its results showed that the arts are a kind of “secret sauce” in keeping young students interested and involved in school. Particularly as schools try to lead a revival after years of lost, delayed, or incomplete learning, he added, arts instruction shouldn’t be cast aside in favor of core subjects like math and English.

“The key question is, how do you keep students engaged in their own learning in such a way that they are intrinsically motivated to want to go to school — and when you present them with the idea of going to college, it doesn’t sound awful?” said Kisida, who acted as a technical consultant to backers of California’s Proposition 28 campaign.

The study examined the impact of participation in Houston’s Arts Access Initiative, a coalition of more than 50 cultural institutions, philanthropies, and other local organizations dedicated to providing more arts resources in schools that previously lacked them. One of the initiative’s earliest priorities was conducting a comprehensive audit of the Houston Independent School District — one of the largest in the country — that revealed that roughly 30 percent of the city’s 209 elementary and middle schools offered neither a full-time arts specialist nor any arts programming outside of school hours.

Given the widespread gaps in availability, it came as no surprise that demand for the program outstripped its initial resources, with 60 schools applying to fill just 21 slots for the initiative’s initial rollout. Kisida and co-author Daniel Bowen, a professor of educational administration at Texas A&M, worked with the district to follow two groups of schools randomly selected to either participate in the initiative or act as a control group. In all, just over 10,000 children from grades 3–8 participated. 

Among those that took part, results were strong. Compared with the control group, they experienced about five additional “school-community partnerships” (a broad category encompassing everything from a half-day trip to the Houston Ballet or the Museum of Fine Arts to a semester-long collaboration with a full-time artist) each year. The learning opportunities represented a hugely varied sample of workshops, residencies, and excursions: 54 percent related to theater, 12 percent to dance, 18 percent to music, and 16 percent to visual arts.

Those experiences generated significant academic and social-emotional rewards. Participants earned significantly higher scores in writing on Texas’s standardized test, with particular gains in expository writing. They were also 3.6 percentage points less likely to be involved in a behavioral infraction. In accompanying surveys, elementary students also showed higher levels of emotional empathy (as measured by agreement with statements such as, “I want to help people who get treated badly”) and demonstrated more engagement in school and interest in potentially attending college. 

Those effects are broadly similar to those detected in other research on the effects of arts education, much of which has focused on field trips to cultural institutions like museums and theaters. But Bowen said the Houston study offered particular value in emphasizing experiences that predominantly occur within school buildings, the way most K–12 students tend to encounter the arts. 

“Virtually all of these experiences were happening during the regular school day and in their regular school environments,” Bowen said. “We’re hoping this will provide research that tells us more about the impact of the arts in more typical learning environments.”

The findings also contribute to public understanding of school-community partnerships, which are an increasingly common strategy to bring creative opportunities to schools where they have traditionally been in short supply. Over the past decade, such partnerships — which typically enlist a wide range of cultural partners to write grants and provide staff to school art programs — have sprung up in large districts like New Orleans, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, and Seattle. 

A similar study conducted by Kisida and Bowen on behalf of found that participants in Boston Public Schools’ Arts Expansion Initiative were less likely to be absent from school and more engaged with their studies. Parents also reported higher levels of engagement with their children’s education.

Even for districts located far from major urban centers, resources abound for potential collaborations with local museums and dance troupes. According to , American museums devote roughly $2 billion each year to educational programming, with roughly three-quarters going to K–12 schools. That funding is like low-hanging fruit for schools and districts that have trouble financing their own arts offerings, Kisida said.

“It’s a policy development that is very rich and may be flying under the radar for a lot of education policy folks,” he argued. “What makes this such a unique opportunity for schools is that they are able to tap into the passion that already exists in these mission-driven nonprofits to supplement their services.”