Caricature and Crush: A Conflict Campaign and Limitation Effect Reducing Opportunity in the Nation’s Schools

• In Event: Refusing Limitation, Protecting Public Education: Researchers and Practitioners Responding Together to K12 DEI Attacks

Abstract

Objectives

Since 2020, in a partisanized conflict campaign (blinded) caricaturing K12 education as “woke left,” right-wing critics and policymakers have attempted to convince Americans to “ban” “Critical Race Theory” from K12 instruction; limit SOGI-related support caricatured as “sexualizing”; and prohibit demonized/undefined “diversity, equity, and inclusion” effort (“DEI”) altogether. In 2025, such attacks have challenged baseline education autonomy and funding. I overview five recent coauthored studies on this attack movement and K12 consequences since 2020, noting some key actors now targeting education opportunity federally. Findings demonstrate how attacks risk removing and preventing learning opportunities across K12 systems in what we call a limitation effect (blinded). I and other presenters ask how educational researchers might help turn attention back to supporting educators to enrich learning opportunity in public schools so all students can thrive – a possible bipartisan priority (Berkshire, 2025).

Framework

Scholarship on framing explores how people purposefully pack language with connotations (Lakoff 2004; Snow et al, 2019; Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007). In such framing processes, caricature –overstating a phenomenon to smear the whole -- is a key aspect of shaping attitudes. In a framing process, the right wing has distorted education activities and infused them with race- and SOGI-related caricature and anxiety, actively framing schools as places parents and observers need to distrust, monitor, censor, restrict, punish, and abandon.

The current federal restriction juggernaut is one endpoint of the past five years of caricaturing.

Methods

I digest findings from five coauthored studies since 2020, in which we 1) reviewed websites, social media, and “toolkits” from campaigners attacking K12 “CRT,” conducted an open-ended survey of 275 educators across the country, tapped interviews of 21 district equity officers nationally, and analyzed over 10,000 media stories on “CRT” between September 2020 and August 2021. We also 2) tapped 16 in-depth followup interviews with educators across the country surveyed a year earlier, 3) conducted youth interviews from five states with new, explicitly restrictive state policy, 4) analyzed interviews with eight school board trustees leading eight California districts, and 5) conducted an open-ended-answer survey and follow-up interviews totaling 86 respondents from Florida, largely school-level educators and parents (plus supplemental review of media/public documents) to explore Florida’s particularly active restriction policy environment and its consequences for the opportunities and supports offered young people in public schools. Narratives from these studies demonstrate how networked attacks on race or SOGI-related work in schools and key policy mechanisms have led to actors removing and preventing basic opportunities to support students in K12 systems.

Results/significance

Targeted attacks on caricatured forms of K12 work now threaten public education opportunity. I ask whether researchers might collect/amplify more stories of localized opportunity removal, and openly support educators to sustain learning opportunity in public schools. Framing research urges naming what you are “for,” not just what you are “against” (Lakoff, 2004). As a pragmatic and bipartisan antidote to a five-year right-wing focus on “banning,” can researchers support a new vision of increasing public education opportunities for all?

Next presentations engage related work.

Author

• Mica Pollock, University of California - San Diego