Political and Psychological Predictors of Parents' School Censorship in the United States

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 3:45 pm - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Contested Classrooms: Censorship, Polarization, and Teacher Policy in U.S. Education

Abstract

In the United States, educators face parental pressure to censor educational materials by removing curricula or banning books (ALA, 2024; Goncalves, 2024). Despite immense social interest in educational censorship, current scholarship is limited in the degree to which it unpacks the values, traits, or motives which predict educational censorship. Experimental approaches to examining censorship could address this issue (Ashokkumar et al., 2020), and should be extended to the educational field. Drawing on a new dataset of over 600 United States-based parents of school-aged children, this study uses structural equation modelling (SEM) to examine how key political and psychological measures (i.e. identity fusion to party, affective polarization, political intolerance, White Christian nationalism) and sociodemographics predict parents’ willingness to participate in book censorship.

Authors

• Sarah Farnsworth Hatch, Harvard University

• Hannah Castner, Harvard University