Culture Wars, Curriculum Battles & Public Schools: Pursuing a Bottom-Up Education Policy Research Agenda for the Field

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

Abstract

Progress toward educational justice and social, political, and economic equality has long faced backlash (DuBois, 1935/2017; Klarman, 1994; McRae, 2018). Today, these challenges take a renewed form as politicians harness racialized fear, resentment, and economic decline to advance a right-wing extremist education agenda (Alexander et al., 2024; Anderson, 2023; [blinded], 2022; LoBue & Douglass, 2023). Organizations and individuals are responding, engaging in creative resistance in communities, classrooms, board rooms, courts, and state capitols. What can and should be the role of academics/researchers in supporting these efforts?

In this presentation we share a Coordinated Research Agenda co-designed by a collective of 35 educational researchers, litigators, legislative advocates, educational leaders, educators, teacher union leaders, and parent and youth organizers combating right-wing extremism across the country, concentrating in the South and Midwest. This group, funded through a Spencer Foundation Vision grant, met in-person and remotely over 4 months to collectively envision and prioritize research needs for litigation, advocacy, and resistance. This group also discussed institutional supports that educational researchers and schools of education should consider building to support their K-12 colleagues and advocates.

We will share the Collective’s research priorities:

1. Documenting Harms Across Many Dimensions
2. Learning Alongside Resistance
3. Deep Listening for Building Solidarities
4. Understanding the Right

We will then share what the Collective identified as key institutional supports that schools of education should build, including:

1. Political and legal education for educators and the public to understand the source and implications of the culture wars.
2. Rapid response research infrastructure (i.e., resources, time and incentives) to support research needs of advocates.
3. Organizational chapters across schools of education networked to combat rising censorship and right-wing extremism in education.
4. Space for popular democratic discussion about education (i.e., engaging in deep analysis of the current political context, discussing narrative strategies, and designing alternative bold visions for the future of public education).
5. More opportunities to engage in participatory cycles of research alongside policy advocates and activists.

After sharing these priorities, we will provide an update of the research and infrastructure developments towards this agenda and existing gaps. We hope to provide some guidance as to the kinds of questions and ways of conducting research that our colleagues in schools, school districts, communities, courts, and legislatures are asking for - and for us to find new ways among ourselves to create strategic collaborations and infrastructure that can amplify our impact and avoid duplicative efforts. In this process we suggest and attempt to model a bottom-up, participatory approach to education research agenda setting that not only brings research, practice, and policy together in defense of democracy and public education but also practices what research looks like when democratically and collaboratively pursued.

The final presentation reacts to prior panel presentations and shares on-the-ground efforts to protect education opportunity today.

Authors

• Danfeng Soto-Vigil Koon, University of San Francisco

• Huriya Jabbar, University of Southern California

• Joseph J. Ferrare, University of Washington Bothell