As elections approach and political tensions mount, K-12 educators in America are bracing themselves for intense scrutiny. Educating the country’s future citizens about contemporary social issues, while modeling informed, civil debate and avoiding a partisan stance has never been easy. But it’s becoming increasingly difficult.
The nation’s political culture grows ever more divisive. Parents and elected officials, emboldened by the echo chambers of social media, are readier than ever to bully and even prosecute educators whose policies and practices provide a convenient target for cheap identity politics. Principals and superintendents are increasingly caught between the need to protect the rights of all teachers and students in their charge and the need to placate board members and local politicians who seek to turn their school into the next battleground in America’s culture wars.
To teach effectively under such conditions requires great courage and creativity. While many teachers and administrators possess these virtues, the environments in which they operate are becoming inhospitable to them. A 2022 survey found that a majority believed that most parents and elected officials held more rigid, either-or views about K-12 education than they did three years previously. And that’s just the immediate environment. American society more generally is seen as increasingly polarized, both relative to previous periods in history and to other countries.
These days, the term “polarized” is often used as a synonym for “divided” or “aggressively oppositional.” However, strictly speaking, polarization is more than a tendency to gravitate toward extremes or to demonize one’s opponents. By analogy with the physical phenomenon from which it draws its name, polarization is a process whereby people’s beliefs and opinions form predictable clusters. Just as polarized sunglasses filter out all but vertically-oriented light waves, so do individuals in polarized societies tend to filter out beliefs and opinions that don’t align with their in-group’s values.
One of the most interesting things about polarization in the United States may be our tendency to overestimate it. America’s two-party system and its overlapping distributions of religious, ethnic, and political affiliations create ideal conditions for polarization. Politicians exploit these features of the social landscape to drive wedges between their supporters and their opponents. Nevertheless, when Americans are surveyed on many topics, including the nation’s core values, they are often found to agree on more than they disagree.
There are many reasons why, despite this underlying consensus, many perceive the nation to be increasingly divided. First, that’s what partisans want us to think; they fan the flames of division to increase their chances of getting elected. Second, the mechanisms by which we receive our news, namely, the algorithms of social media, reinforce our prejudices by information that confirms them. Third, outrage sells; fear and anger generate more clicks than reasoned debate.
Whether real or perceived, polarization directly impacts how educators behave. When accusations of bias or partisanship (sometimes accompanied by legal proceedings) on topics ranging from gender identity to race to religion to foreign policy are easily launched at educators from very different perspectives, the stakes of teaching contentious topics can often seem too high. To avoid such accusations, many educators have learned to sidestep certain topics altogether and to look away from student ignorance and incivility rather than tackle them.
Such responses are understandable—and wrong. First, they are a dereliction of duty. If K-12 educators will not teach tomorrow’s citizens how to argue civilly, who will? Second, they miss an opportunity. Schools remain one of the few public spaces in which children and adolescents are held accountable to shared standards of evidence and argumentation and in which disrespectful discourse has palpable consequences. In a world in which TikTok and Reddit are significant sources of “news” for many young people, schools have an especially important role to play in teaching students how to distinguish fact from opinion and to assess the credibility of sources they encounter online.
At this point, some teachers might object, “OK, we get it. It’s our responsibility. But what can we actually do?” That’s a great question and not just a legitimate rhetorical expression of frustration. Social ills as big as polarization aren’t solvable by schools alone. To act as if they are guarantees failure and disappointment. Therefore, instead of asking what schools can do to overcome polarization, I propose that we ask instead what schools can do to promote informed, civil debate under conditions of polarization. Achieving this more modest aim will not be easy, but at least it is possible in principle.
To address this challenge effectively will require a twofold approach: top-down and bottom-up.
Let’s start from top-down: leadership training for school boards, superintendents, and principals. Not something generic about stakeholder management and the responsibilities of bosses to provide employees with the conditions to succeed but rather, taking a deep dive with leaders into the specifics of what professional courage looks like in the face of politically motivated attacks; education in the legal boundaries of professional authority and discretion; workshops in clear, timely communication under duress; and best practices of teacher empowerment and protection under conditions of political sensitivity.
The goal of such leadership training would be to help those who set policy and manage educational institutions understand, anticipate, and manage political pressures, formulate courageous educational goals, and hold the territory of partisan disagreement rather than cede it to extremists.
As a former head of educational institutions and a consultant to CEOs of education systems worldwide, I have found that this kind of targeted training often has a multiplier effect. Not only does it strengthen the resolve of leaders to be proactive in addressing complex political challenges, it also equips them with the management skills needed to create institutional cultures in which educators feel inspired and supported to teach with courage and creativity.
By bottom-up, I mean development and implementation of curricula and pedagogies designed to teach students explicitly how to engage in collaborative inquiry and civil dialogue about controversial topics. Here, too, the need is not for generic add-ons to existing curricula about inquiry learning and critical thinking. Rather, it is for new curricula and pedagogies that address how radically the ways today’s students learn and argue about hot political topics diverge from how previous generations did so. Most obviously, this requires a major focus on online literacy and, in particular, students’ capacity to distinguish fact from opinion and assess the credibility of claims they encounter online.
Moreover, the working examples included in such curricula should not be generic. Subject to their fit with curricular goals, these examples should be the most current and most divisive hot political potatoes possible. Only thus will students stand a decent chance of transferring the online literacy and argumentation skills they have been taught in school to contentious issues they encounter IRL (in real life).
To some, this approach might sound overly ambitious. I disagree. None of the work required to do this well is excessively expensive or time-consuming.
First, some good initial models of the kinds of intervention described above have been developed already. Meira Levinson and colleagues at Harvard University have developed case studies of educational dilemmas and decisionmaking that could be adapted to leadership training of the kind I outlined. Sam Wineburg and colleagues at Stanford University and the Digital Inquiry Group have developed innovative curricula in online literacy, many of which are available free, online. My own research with Michael Baker and Françoise Détienne at the Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation in Paris has produced a model of joint online deliberation about controversial topics that could be used to teach students skills of online inquiry and respectful dialogue.
Second, “expensive and time-consuming” compared to what? In my work as a leadership coach, I am continually surprised by just how much time heads of school spend fighting political fires they could have prevented in advance or snuffed out before they spread out of control. Timely, effective leadership training can save weeks or months of wasted work hours (and expensive, senior ones, at that!), not to mention prevent the considerable collateral damage to school culture and teacher morale.
I propose that when it comes to schools tackling polarization, we should take our cue from the 1st-century sage, Rabbi Tarfon: You are not obliged to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it. When truth and civility are on the line, you can’t hang back or succumb to despair. Educators, do your job!
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