Arguably the biggest thing happening in American K–12 education over the past several years has been culture war: Battles over whose values, views of history, and more will be reflected in public school curricula, library holdings, athletics and bathroom policies, and more. It is something Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom has cataloged for many years. While the original intent was not to precisely track trends from year to year, our ongoing collection for the Public Schooling Battle Map enables us to at least roughly observe trends.

The good news for the calendar year that just ended—as seen in the first chart below—is that we saw a dip in cataloged battles versus the previous year, which had seen a big drop from the peak year of 2023. The bad news is that conflict remains heightened since 2021. Also, as depicted in Figure 2, we have seen an uptick in conflicts being fought at the state level versus the previous year, meaning all people in a state, as opposed to individual districts, are on the battlefield.







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~Education