These tensions escalated last year when a teacher disagreed with the superintendent’s decision to follow the advice of the school district’s lawyer and honor a transgender student’s request not to share their transition with their parents. The teacher went public and the results were swift and intense.

Hundreds of people descended on the next school board meeting. A local talk radio host said the superintendent wanted to “indoctrinate their children and … make them become gay and transgender.” Community members verbally accosted the schools chief in public saying, “You’re gonna go to hell. You never read the Bible.” 

The fiscal consequences were also considerable, forcing the district to divert funds from planned professional development. Ultimately, five educators left their jobs in response to the spreading unrest.

This small community’s turmoil is one of many accounts included in a new , which tries for the first time to put a dollar amount on the costs of the culture war conflicts that have consumed school districts over the past several years. The researchers estimate that the nation’s public schools spent approximately $3.2 billion in 2023-24 dealing with divisive public debates over race, gender and sexual orientation, forcing them to spend money on legal fees, security, public relations and employee hours responding to misinformation, disinformation and public records requests. 

And although the researchers said their figures don’t account for the emotional and social toll on educators and students, their numbers do include a significant and related expense: staff turnover.  

“There are many different costs that are really consequential and are undermining the ability of educators to support student learning and well-being,” said John Rogers, a professor at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies and the report’s lead author.

Data from the report comes from a national survey of 467 superintendents across 46 states conducted during summer 2024, followed by interviews with 42 superintendents across 12 states. Of those interviewed, 12 had taken the survey and reported moderate or high levels of conflict; the remaining 30 hadn’t taken the survey and were identified through professional leadership networks.

School districts were categorized as having either high, moderate, or low levels of conflict based on a series of questions about the nature of conflict related to culturally divisive issues, the frequency of and topics associated with personal or professional threats to superintendents and district staff and the financial and human resource costs.

Moms for Liberty, a high-profile parental rights group, was named specifically in the report in relation to board members they supported and other far-right groups accusing a western school district of indoctrinating students around sexual health issues. That superintendent cited having to spend roughly $100,000 to hire “armed plainclothes off-duty officers” and more than $500,000 in legal fees. Superintendents and school board members being attacked as pedophiles, groomers or sexual predators was a common refrain in the report.

Moms for Liberty did not respond to a request for comment. Closely aligned with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the group’s influence over school board elections is seen as waning even if battles over curriculum content and library books are still being waged.

Of the districts surveyed, roughly one-third experienced low levels of conflict, just over one-third experienced moderate levels and just under one-third experienced high levels. About 2.5% of superintendents reported no conflict. Overall, Rogers said those surveyed “look a lot like superintendents from the entirety of the (national) pool” in terms of their race, gender and whether they lead urban, rural or suburban districts.

Half of the schools chiefs reported that they experienced at least one instance of harassment in the 2023-24 school year. One in 10 said violent threats were directed toward them and 11% experienced property vandalism.

In order to calculate the overall fiscal costs, researchers asked superintendents about direct expenditures during the 2023-24 school year that were above and beyond what they previously would have spent for resources such as legal services or security; indirect costs, such as redeployed staff time; and employee turnover costs. 

To determine the cost of redeployed staff time, researchers took the number of hours that superintendents reported across these different activities and assigned them a dollar figure based on average district administrator wages from the . For each staff member that left the district, researchers assigned a dollar figure related to recruitment and new staff training based on research out of the .

Rogers noted that “there’s a certain imprecision” when it comes to calculating the cost of staff turnover because “you’re asking superintendents to draw upon the knowledge that they have to make this determination” of why educators and administrators left their positions. Follow-up interviews, he added, helped to bolster the reliability of these figures.

The researchers, who also include Rachel White of the University of Texas at Austin, Robert Shand of American University and Joseph Kahne of the University of California, Riverside, estimated that in their entirety, the conflict-related costs were more than enough to expand the national school breakfast program by 40% or hire “an additional counselor or psychologist for every public high school in the United States.”

Beyond the dollar figures, when speaking with superintendents, Rogers said he was particularly struck by the ways in which violent threats were playing out and how frequently it appeared there was a “concerted effort to disrupt, to foment conflict for the sake of fomenting conflict.”

For example, he heard from a number of superintendents whose districts spent an immense amount of time fulfilling public records requests they felt had been filed in bad faith. Once the materials were compiled, they often went unused, Rogers said.

The lasting implications of these in-district battles — beyond the fiscal costs — still remain unknown and appear to be shifting with the changing landscape. Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the History of Education at The University of Pennsylvania, recently on his previous work around the culture wars’ impact on history teachers, writing, “It seems like I might have exaggerated them.” 

But, he noted in an interview with ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ this week, the effects on other educators and administrators are ongoing. Within the culture wars, he’s noticed less of a focus on race and critical race theory and more on gender and sexuality, hypothesizing that this may mean history teachers feel a lesser impact than English teachers, who might be more likely to teach directly about gender.

His sees the report as a reflection of the country’s “brittle and abusive” political culture. 

“This is the school politics chapter of a much broader story about the way that politics is conducted in America,” he said.

It appears that even as some of these more divisive players move on or are voted out, their political agendas may persist. That’s been the case in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County, one of the most closely watched regions for these debates. 

According to recent New York Times , despite Democrats sweeping the last school board election, not all contested books have been returned to school library shelves nor have teachers been allowed to display identity markers, like rainbow flags. Nearly a year after the Moms for Liberty-backed candidates were ousted, their presence is still felt. 

For the first time, a majority of Ivy League schools will soon be led by women.

Starting July 1, 2023, will assume the role of president at Harvard University, at Columbia University and at Dartmouth College. They will join current female presidents at Brown University, Cornell University and University of Pennsylvania.

, an associate professor of higher education at Old Dominion University, explains what this means for gender equity in the college presidency – and why U.S. colleges and universities still have a long way to go.

Why does this matter?

While women make up about as well as in the U.S., only about of American colleges and universities are women.

However, the Ivy League is not new to selecting female presidents – they have been doing so for a few decades. Judith Rodin was the first, in 1994, when she became president of the University of Pennsylvania. She was followed by and , both in 2001. Rodin was succeeded by another woman, , in 2004.

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Still, one reason this moment may be one to watch is that Ivy League institutions are often seen as exemplars of elite, complex institutions. So seeing what one could consider a critical mass of female leaders in the Ivy League could signal the benefit of women in leadership to other boards that are hesitant or slow to hire women as presidents.

How unusual is this across higher ed?

I think it would be more surprising to see mostly female presidents at the majority of large public research universities, or at a majority of the schools in the .

Despite what may seem like a boom in women leading institutions, the percentage of women in the presidency at colleges and universities more broadly has plateaued at for the past decade. This was after increasing from to .

A number of factors contribute to this low percentage, including – such as exclusion from networks that provide mentorship – reward and that are not equitable across genders, and .

A recent analysis of explains how this bias against women occurs, specifically when it comes to academic leadership roles. This is important because college presidents typically through such as deans, vice provosts and provosts.

What are the biggest challenges that college presidents face?

The biggest priority or challenge really depends on the individual college or university. However, all institutions must ensure they are financially healthy and identify opportunities to strengthen their financial resources. College presidents have reported that they spend the most time on , followed by fundraising.

Particularly in the current , where the average cost of college runs , college leaders must work to keep their institutions fiscally strong and also competitive and affordable. This may involve, for example, , creating new programs and cultivating new sources of funding.

What effect does having a woman in the top seat have?

For colleges that have only ever had a man in the president’s role, hiring their first woman as president can signal that the institution embraces change and evolution. This can be an especially important message to send to funders, alumni donors, philanthropists, state legislators and corporate partners, who all play a role in ensuring a particular college’s financial vitality.

Female presidents add to the diversity of the college presidency. They to conversations that shape practices and policies both within their college and across higher education. They might, for example, provide their particular perspective regarding compensation for female faculty members of color, who tend to on campuses.

Organizational scholars and business leaders affirm that made by organizations and . A more diverse group of decision-makers can generate than a homogeneous group that may be susceptible to group think.

And lastly, having women at the helm of academic institutions that it is indeed possible.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Some educators and therapists have signaled their approval, arguing that the freedom to stay home from classes could allow kids to restore their energies and come back ready to learn. But other experts warn that, in itself, absence from an academic setting may not be a useful tool to address the issues facing troubled young people. The prospect of time off might also prod some students to miss class who otherwise wouldn’t.

“It seems perfectly reasonable, and nothing new, for parents to decide their kids can stay home from school for a day because they’re tired or don’t feel well,” said Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington Bothell. “But I just don’t see a reason to make it some official category, or give kids a number of days they can tap into. All that does is encourage absenteeism.” 

Barbara Solish, director of youth and young adult initiatives at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, countered that mental health days offered students “the opportunity to pause, check in, and recharge physically and emotionally.”

“If a kid was feeling physically crummy, we wouldn’t hesitate to give that kid a day to rest and recover. The same goes for emotional wellbeing,” Solish said. “This time can be helpful for children who struggle with anxiety or depression, or even kids who’ve just had a rough week.”

Abundant evidence shows that the havoc inflicted by two years of COVID-related learning disruptions has left an ugly mark on students’ emotional wellbeing. In President Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, he specifically referred to the setbacks afflicting schoolchildren, noting that their “lives and education have been turned upside-down.”

Curbing truancy

The push for student mental health days began in 2019, when Oregon Gov. Kate Brown expanding the state’s category of excused absences to include those related to mental as well as physical health. The reform was drafted by a group of high schoolers known as Students for a Healthy Oregon, which recommended it as a salve for the long-running deterioration in teen mental health that has become undeniable in school districts around the country. 

The advocacy effort was the first of several led by , stressed by both world events and the everyday cares of childhood and adolescence. Hailey Hardcastle, one of the leaders of Students for a Healthy Oregon, said in a TED Talk that she suffered from clinical depression herself and that her mother informally allowed her to skip school up to three days per semester to cope. The new policy would essentially codify that option in state law and provide relief to hundreds of Oregon students she’d met who dealt with psychological crises of their own. 

“This not only will start teaching kids to take care of themselves and practice self-care and stress management, but it could also literally help save lives,” Hardcastle said.

States could benefit from approaching mental health absences in the same way that Hardcastle’s mother did, according to researcher Michael Gottfried. An economist studying absenteeism at the University of Pennsylvania, Gottfried said it was likely that some families are already keeping their children home multiple days each year as a result of emotional issues they experience at school. Adopting an Oregon-style policy — a few states have specified the number of absences students can take, whether two, three or five, while others simply direct districts to accept mental health as a valid reason to be absent — wouldn’t necessarily change the behavior of those families, but it could prevent them from being thrust into state truancy systems. 

“With this policy, what’s so great is that previously unexcused absences could now be coded as excused,” Gottfried said. “That’s important because unexcused absences lead to truancy, they get kids into trouble, they get parents into trouble, and they can lead to juvenile justice outcomes.”

Some evidence that at-risk youth often suffer from a range of psychological challenges that make them more likely to become truant. One South Carolina study found that children worsen in the aftermath of court oversight and other truancy sanctions. Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of the advocacy group , said that when it comes to students dealing with adversity, “it’s just not been shown that the hammer gets kids to show up to school.”

“What improves attendance is when you identify why kids aren’t showing up to school and then resolve those barriers. Often, a legal threat doesn’t allow you to engage and form a trusting relationship with a family so that you find out what’s going on and improve it.”

‘Not really doing anything for those kids’

Millions of students have reported experiencing more negative emotions during the pandemic, when their in-person contacts with peers and teachers have been continuously unsettled. A in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, examining 36 studies in 11 countries, pointed to a strong connection between school closures and emotional distress among children. A released by the Centers for Disease Control in February found that among adolescent girls, the proportion of emergency room visits related to eating disorders doubled during the pandemic, while the proportion related to motor or vocal tics tripled. 

The evidence of COVID’s harmful effects on child well-being is clear. But if those harms are related to the disruption of school, some experts wonder, why would the answer be to offer students more time away?

Various methods for tackling mental health in schools have been validated , with some of the most successful organized that aim to make schools more welcoming and connected settings for kids. School climate can be improved by training teachers and staff to identify students under strain, or by emphasizing social and emotional learning that prepares students to communicate their own emotions more fluently. Even changes enacted by state legislatures, such as anti-bullying laws, have been linked to significant declines in self-harm.

But by definition, when students are absent from school, they can’t access the resources available there. Gottfried said that schools would need to keep careful track of students who took repeated mental health days, reintegrating them into their classes and offering support where necessary.

“Putting them right back in the classroom after they’ve had a mental health departure from school is not really doing anything for those kids,” he said. “You just let them deal with their mental health off-site. If you really want to address mental health, maybe what we should do is think of school more as a community and provide services there, rather than simply giving students another way to not be at school.”

State policymakers have raised some of the same concerns. When Connecticut last year to allow students to be absent from school up to four days each year for mental health reasons — on top of the 10 days already allowed for physical illness — state education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker said that simply excusing absences would​​ “not necessarily achieve the outcome of improving the student’s well-being.”

“We are concerned that the extent of a student’s mental state may not be known if they are not in school, and there may be adverse outcomes if the child is allowed to remain out of school,” Russell-Tucker wrote in public testimony.

The policy was later adopted, though the number of excused mental health absences was reduced to two nonconsecutive “Mental Health Wellness Days.” A spokesman for the Connecticut State Department of Education said that the office has not yet begun collecting data on student use of the sanctioned days away from school, though it had issued to school districts encouraging them to consider ways to communicate with families and screen students for additional aid.

“We know our students are best served when they are present in school and have access to the supports provided there — including as well as academic supports,” the spokesman said in an email.

Chang, of Attendance Works, called the argument in favor of mental health days debatable, adding that being absent could potentially worsen the apprehension of a student already avoiding school for other reasons. While the proposal could work as a strategy for taking the problem of absenteeism out of truancy hearings, she argued, it might not actually improve students’ wellbeing.  

“The danger is that we think we’ve solved the problem when we haven’t,” Chang said. “What you’ve solved is making sure it doesn’t lead to courts. What you haven’t solved is making sure kids have the resources to address their anxiety.”

Effects on learning

With several large states already implementing K-12 mental health days, experts will be able to gather data on their effectiveness at reducing academic and interpersonal stress. But we will also learn more about their impact on school attendance — and whether they induce more students to miss time in school.

In the years before COVID fundamentally reshuffled their priorities, education leaders at the state and district levels were increasingly relying on attendance rates as a proxy for school quality. This focus resulted partly from the 2015 passage of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which charged states with developing a “non-academic indicator” in their accountability frameworks. chronic absenteeism, generally defined as students missing 15 or more days in one school year.

The pandemic-era switch to online learning has proven a disaster for efforts to improve attendance, particularly among disadvantaged or low-performing students. Data from states like Connecticut and California, as well as big urban districts like Cleveland, show chronic absenteeism surging as much as 200 percent. Black and Hispanic students, disabled students, and English learners have all been disproportionately more likely to miss school over the last year.

Gottfried, whose research has closely examined the academic consequences of student attendance, theorized that excusing mental health absences might not alter the behavior of kids who already missed a great deal of school each year, or who missed none at all. But for those somewhere in the middle, being offered a free mental health day — or five, — could encourage them to take it, whether or not it’s actually needed.

Regardless of whether an individual absence is truly warranted, its effect on learning can be harmful. Gottfried considered the case of two students: one suffering from severe emotional problems, the other simply undermotivated to attend class. Each could be tempted to use their mental health day, particularly during periods on the calendar marked by unusual stress.

“They’re both missing school, and the pace of instruction is just going to continue moving forward without them,” Gottfried said. “And I’m guessing that a lot of this might happen at a time of year when it’s high-pressure — a lot of exams or finals coming up. That’s when we would be likely to find these opportunity gaps widening.”

If that’s the case, days spent outside of class could be felt in measurements of student achievement. In examining the specific timing of student absences, Gottfried discovered that missed school days in the spring (especially those that fell within 30 days of the administration of state exams) were more closely tied to test performance than those coming earlier in the year.

The National Alliance on Mental Health’s Solish rejected the idea of a tradeoff between academic participation and self-care, calling it a “false choice”; if we accept that children need to take time away due to physical illness, the same principle should apply to ailments of the mind.

“If a child had the flu and was coughing and sneezing and feeling terrible, they’re not absorbing what’s going on in the classroom. The same is true for a mental health issue: If a child is overcome by anxiety, or is so depressed that they can’t function, they’re not absorbing their lesson.”

How will this chaotic school year have affected them?

Recent findings from the University of Pennsylvania warn that over the next three decades, our recent COVID-related U.S. school closures, as well as the shift to virtual schooling, could massively impact our national gross domestic product (GDP), putting a huge dent in future workers’ earning potential.

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The damage from all that reduced schooling could hurt productivity and shrink the U.S. economy 3.6 percent by 2050, economists say. The results will be even worse for workers’ personal earnings.

The new estimates come from the nonpartisan Penn Wharton Budget Model, an initiative that examines public policy through an economic lens. The suggests an expensive remedy: extend the school year.

Adding just one month of summer school, they say, won’t be cheap: about $75 billion, likely financed through the federal government taking on more debt. But they note that the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill passed in March provides to K-12 public education, with about $22 billion already earmarked for summer school, extended school days, an extended school year, after-school programs and “other enrichment.”

Spending billions on extending the school year, the economists say, could help mitigate learning losses, shrinking GDP loss about half a percentage point, from 3.6 to 3.1 percent. That smaller GDP reduction would produce a gain of $1.2 trillion over the next three decades, equal to about $16 for every dollar spent on more summer school.

That affordance “gives the kids a few extra hours for them that they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise,” said Penn’s , the brief’s lead author. “We include that in their productivity, in their learning capacity. And then, once they come to adulthood, that gets incorporated in their ability in the labor market — that is, the wages they were going to make.

Her team estimated the relative effectiveness of virtual versus in-person schooling using previous studies that looked at the math skills of students enrolled in the different learning modes.

They also estimated how much a year of learning loss corresponds to later productivity. Looking broadly at and federal , they estimated that graduates’ future labor income shrank by 10 percent for those who missed a year of middle school or high school. For those who missed a year of elementary school, it was even worse, 13 percent.

Recently approved federal aid could actually make the Penn prescription happen, in at least a few places. The American Rescue Plan includes for K-12 schools with high levels of low-income students. Districts must spend at least 20 percent addressing learning loss. States, which can hold on to 10 percent of the money the federal government gives, must also spend at least 5 percent of it on learning loss, and at least 1 percent on summer learning.

Thomas Dee, an economist and Professor at Stanford University, said he’s glad researchers are conducting analyses like this, but said the Penn analysis “seems to embed the assumption that an extension to the school year will have the same effects as a school does on average.” That may not be a valid assumption, he said.

Dee said the framing of the policy choices “seems to preclude other options” like tutoring and conventional summer learning programs. Extending the school year could also be difficult, since it requires schools to restructure curricula and figure out staffing, among other challenges. And it ignores well-researched summer and tutoring programs that are proven to support students, he said.

Dee and two colleagues last year looked at a long-established that serves low-income middle school students “and features unusual academic breadth,” as well as a social emotional curriculum. The researchers found that participating in the program led to fewer unexcused absences, lower chronic absenteeism and suspensions, and a modest gain in reading scores.

Acosta, the lead author of the Penn analysis, said the “what-if” of extending summer school presented an interesting exercise. Normally, economists would ask what happened if a group of students got more education. “In this case, because of the whole COVID environment, it’s the opposite,” she said. “We want to know what happens if you give up one year of your education.”

Acosta’s team tweaked the formula to account for the benefits of virtual schooling, which were enjoyed more by some students than for others. Then they “fast-forwarded” nearly 30 years and compared projected wages to what could have been.

“People are making less money — that means that they are less productive,” Acosta said. “And in an aggregate model, where we want to see what happens to the full economy, it’s as if we said, ‘Well, you didn’t have enough education. You don’t know how to perform some of the tasks, or something was disturbed in your learning process.’”

The team actually proposed a series of interventions, from extending both the 2021-22 school year and the 2022-23 school year, just extending the 2021-22 school year, or narrowly targeting the aid to offer a longer school year just to “economically disadvantaged” students nationwide. That more focused aid would reduce the cost to $25.6 billion, though the benefit would be slightly smaller.

But it could benefit individual students powerfully: The economists project that today’s low-income middle- or high school students could earn, on average, 8.2 percent less in 2050 because of the closure. Today’s low-income elementary school students could earn 10.9 percent less.

Though the results are surprising, Acosta said, she hasn’t had any peers in academia challenge the figures so far “because they’ve been fairly in line with what the literature has said” about education, productivity, and the experiences of students the past year during the pandemic. “It’s an entire generation that lost almost a full school year.”