One morning in early June, I sipped coffee inside a hotel conference room with floor-to-ceiling windows that beg you to gaze into the depths of the Pacific Ocean. I was in sunny southern California for a meeting organized by policy makers turned professors Carl Cohn and Jennifer Cheatham. They brought scholars, philanthropists, and superintendents together for two days of discussion on the political challenges now confronting the superintendency.
That morning, superintendents serving districts of different sizes and types from various states and regions throughout the U.S. spoke about their struggles with the new “politics of education.” They painted vivid pictures of board meetings consumed by anger that seemed detached from the everyday needs of kids who were (and are) still clawing out of the pits of the most ravenous public health crisis of modern times. One superintendent, Vivian Ekchian, spoke with passion about how much she loved the kids in her district, but she was reaching a breaking point. By the end of June, she had announced her retirement from California’s Glendale Unified School District.
In the weeks and month before her resignation, Ekchian puzzled through what it looks like to affirm the rights of LGBTQ+ students, particularly transgender students, in the face of the rising political controversy. The emerging culture war has ideological conservatives trying to control how social identity fits into the practice of schooling. It’s the war on “woke,” and the main targets are Black Americans and LGBTQ+ Americans, especially those who are transgender. We know the culture wars are making the jobs of well-meaning school board members and superintendents harder and much more stressful. What can district leaders do?
Moving up and moving out
We must start by diagramming the full scope of the problem. The timeline for Ekchian is illustrative. Her career follows the ideal trajectory for a lead administrator of a school district. With humble beginnings as a teaching assistant, she became a classroom instructor before moving up the ranks to principal. From school leadership, she became a districtwide director of instruction before serving as a superintendent’s chief of staff and eventually catapulting herself to the superintendency.
Just over a year ago, she was at the peak of her career. In 2022, the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which oversees the 80 school districts within Los Angeles County, named her Superintendent of the Year, praising her for her strategic work in student achievement and COVID-19 mitigation. This was the education leadership success story we hope for.
It all came to a boil in May 2023 when unusually large numbers of Glendale community members showed up at consecutive board meetings to comment on the district’s gender-identity policy. Vitriol came from all directions. The board and superintendent faced allegations that a transgender student was forced to unclothe in front of a school staff member. They heard complaints that a sex education lesson included inappropriate topics. LGBTQ+ students lamented hearing slurs aimed at them by peers. This, however, was just the backdrop for the main event.
With the variation in state support, the way districts communicate to the public about their policies is increasingly important.
On June 6, a massive brawl broke out outside the board meeting. The board was set to review a resolution for including content about gay pride in the social studies curriculum. Opponents mobilized to protest, which motivated a countermobilization of LGBTQ+ advocates coming out in support. The result was a violent clash. Ironically, the resolution was simply an annual renewal of a curriculum implemented in 2019 and reauthorized two years later without any objection.
On June 20, Ekchian announced her resignation. She joined a growing list of superintendents stepping down from their jobs in Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, and other parts of California.
Policy and messaging
We are losing talented and capable leaders to these culture wars. Is there anything we can do to stop it? There are two issues: a policy problem and a messaging dilemma. The former is driven by the variation and ambiguity in state law. States such as Florida have policies that make LGBTQ+ students vulnerable to things like hate speech, poor representation in the curriculum, and a lack of medical and facilities-related accommodations. In states such as California, policies require districts to provide some of these supports. Ekchian, for instance, was adamant that district policy stemmed from state law. It is California law, for instance, that every individual on campus has a right to be referred to by their preferred pronouns. California law also protects LGBTQ+ students from discrimination in state-funded programs and activities. This legal infrastructure buttresses the inclusion of content affirming gay pride in the curriculum, though the specifics of implementation are largely left to the school district leaders.
With the variation in state support, the way districts communicate to the public about their policies is increasingly important. I’ve done research that is particularly useful here. As the culture wars developed, I fielded an original nationally representative survey (as a part of a larger series of annually disseminated original surveys) assessing the public’s views about school board politics, the COVID-19 recovery, and other controversial issues. I found that simply using the term critical race theory (CRT) leads to about a 20% decrease in support for curriculum that teaches students about the history of race in the U.S. Partisan differences, aside from the literal CRT language, explain the remainder of the gaping divide in public preferences.
What the public wants
This brings us to LGBTQ+ student policies. In March 2022, I constructed an experiment that tests for support for three specific kinds of transgender student rights policies: 1) a bathroom policy, 2) a policy for sports teams, and 3) a policy for violence reduction. The policies are presented as ideologically neutral. The goal was to identify aspects of transgender student rights that garner the most political support.
Figure 1 shows the results. The antibullying policy received, by far, the most support. Almost eight out of 10 respondents supported policies to reduce violence against transgender students. Contrast this with slightly less than three in 10 respondents supporting the sports policy, and around two in 10 who supported the district bathroom policy. In sum, Americans support transgender student rights when it’s clear that the policy protects them from overt harm. There is less support when policies prevent more subtle, less obvious kinds of harm.
Some of the most vehement protests of transgender student rights have come from organizations with ties to national conservative political organizations. Likewise, some of the most pronounced support of transgender student rights have come from organizations with links to national liberal politics. So, what does support for transgender student rights look like when broken down by partisan affiliation?
Even when factoring in partisanship, the overall trends remain the same. A majority of survey participants of all parties support the violence reduction policy idea. There is less support across all parties for the other policies.
A bare minimum
These results bring both concern and optimism. The first area of concern is that an estimated 20% of the population (and 40%-plus of Republican voters) reject a policy protecting transgender students from physical violence. The optimism, though, comes from the evidence of a bipartisan majority that sees protecting transgender kids from violence as a value worth building district policy around. According to the UCLA Williams Institute, transgender people are four times more likely to be victims of violent crime than cisgender people. A study from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention found that one in four transgender students are victims of sexual assault in any given year. So these policies are important.
However, there is much more to supporting transgender students than antiviolence. Safety is a bare minimum, but the promise of safety is too often broken for transgender students. And a majority of adults did not express support for policies that go beyond this bare minimum. Transgender bathroom and sports policies remain controversial in many places. Think about what it must be like to navigate a day of school afraid to make a friend, ride the school bus, play a sport, or use the bathroom.
We will no doubt continue to lose superintendents to the pressures of the current culture war. One key to keeping them in our districts is by raising public awareness of how life-threatening the challenges are for transgender students and why school and district leaders are implementing policies to protect them from more than overt physical violence.
Having students feel safe and loved should not be controversial.
This article appears in the November 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 3, p. 60-61.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan E. Collins
Jonathan E. Collins is an assistant professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, the associate director of the Teachers College, Columbia University Center for Educational Equity, and the founder and director of the School Board and Youth Engagement (S-BYE) Lab.
