Separation of Church and State Curricula? Examining Public and Religious Private School Textbooks

• In Event: How Policy Shapes the Development of LGBTQ Youth and Young Adults

Abstract

Curricula impart knowledge, instill values, and shape collective memory. Given the importance of what children are taught for their worldviews and later life outcomes, little is known about how the values conveyed in educational materials differ across schooling environments in the United States. We examine a panel of textbooks from 1980-2022 used in Texas and California public-schools and in religious private-schools (including home schools), using AI tools to measure the presence and portrayal of people, topics, and values over time. Despite narratives of political polarization, we find few meaningful differences between public-school textbooks from Texas and California. In contrast, religious private-school textbooks place substantially more emphasis on religious values and character values; contain less female representation; depict lighter-skinned pictured characters; and discuss topics such as religion and evolution differently. Important similarities also emerge: all collections rarely discuss LGBTQIA+ topics, and females are portrayed in less active and less powerful contexts than males in both text and images. Using survey data, we show that differences between religious and public-school textbooks align with differences in the beliefs and demographics of the populations these books serve. To explain the strong overlap between Texas and California textbooks, we develop a conceptual framework in which publishers serve a common public-school textbook market but are restricted from differentiating by state standards. We empirically test for spillovers in content predicted by this framework and find that revisions to one state's content standards spill over into textbook content across states. Taken together, the findings suggest that textbook markets shape cultural transmission differently across sectors: public-school markets dampen curricular divergence, while more segmented religious-school markets are not subject to the same state-standard constraints, allowing textbook content to more closely reflect the preferences and demographic composition of the communities they serve. This distinction has an important policy implication: expanding public support for private schooling could increase curricular divergence, and thus a potential divergence of long-run beliefs across student populations, unless public funding comes with standards and common expectations about what private schools teach.

Authors

• Emileigh Harrison, The University of Texas at Austin
  Presenting Author

• Anjali Adukia, The University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Co-Author