By Mica Pollock and Hirokazu Yoshikawa
The Trump administration has furiously targeted and cut student support efforts it feels are related to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Trump’s Department of Education even threatened to withdraw baseline federal funding from children if K-12 educators support kids with “DEI programs” or “DEI practices” or instruction that the administration has suddenly and vaguely –and unlawfully, according to the courts — deemed “illegal.”
While various states resisted, some states agreed to review and reduce all K-12 DEI programming themselves to align with the Trump team’s anti-“DEI” demands. Judges blocked enforcement of some of these federal demands, finding they were making educators afraid to teach and support students.
So now the nation needs to ask: what else happens to education opportunity throughout K-12 systems when policymakers ramp up such threats and attacks?
The nation has an example to learn from. Our new study in Florida, The Limitation Effect, shows how policymakers pressuring restriction and “bans” on K-12 efforts to support students can end up hurting everyone.
Since 2021, Florida has been the test case for policy threatening and restricting K-12 education. Policymakers have amplified caricatures of what teachers are doing and created a suite of laws, regulations, and related state guidance to restrict education efforts. Florida policies have gone the furthest in the nation in targeting K-12 discussions of race and student supports around sexual orientation and gender identity. Policies threaten financial consequences for districts and individual educators’ employment; mandate and pressure employees into widespread vetting of materials; and actively invite individuals to try to restrict K-12 materials for everyone, including for containing any “sexual conduct.” Florida has the nation’s most book bans.
American parents should be worried. Policymakers now in and advising the Trump administration previously promoted policy elements present in Florida and are pressuring related and even broader restrictions nationwide.
Our 86 study participants, largely school-level educators and parents from 26 Florida districts, shared examples of how Florida’s restrictions harm education both for targeted subgroups and for all students as people throughout systems focus energy on limiting basic student supports.
As restriction and review pressures cascaded through systems, some teachers avoided books even mentioning “racism,” afraid they might be “unauthorized” – or said they felt afraid even to keep teaching “the African American experience in the U.S.” Librarians felt they couldn’t order books “speaking to” Black and Latino students, or books with LGBTQ characters. Educators and students became afraid to mention LGBTQ people, even their own families. Some educators stopped using youths’ preferred names. Some inclusive clubs were closed.
And study participants described more harms that spread even further across the education system as policies compounded. Despite state language about “parents’ rights,” parents were often unaware of the learning opportunities being taken from everybody’s children:
- Afraid for their jobs, some teachers boxed up or stopped using entire classroom libraries to avoid punishment.
- Some avoided discussing basic aspects of U.S. history in class.
- Some stopped using any literature other than textbooks, to be “safe.”
- Educators removed safe space signs and reduced efforts to build rapport with students.
- To root out “age inappropriate” material per the state, scared educators removed books for advanced readers.
- In state-pressured review processes, some educators threw out books that had inspired low-income readers learning English.
- Students were denied access to specific AP courses, including, statewide, the College Board’s AP African American Studies pilot.
- Some librarians and entire districts removed award-winning classics that included any mention of sexual conduct.
- Educators and some systems cut off student access to the public library, or stopped using national digital collections supporting struggling readers/students with disabilities, because K-12 employees could not re-review every text for content possibly prohibited by the state or disliked by an individual.
- State reviewers canceled some teacher professional development on supporting all students academically, for including discussions of “equity.”
- Professional development on diagnosing disabilities accurately—to avoid misplacing students generally as well as “black and brown children” particularly— was limited to avoid discussing “bias.”
- Lengthy state review of materials for compliance with new restrictions held up resources for blind students, and health curriculum for some entire districts.
- A district educator was spending paid time seeking lessons that did not mention “Black Lives Matter.”
- Some districts spent hundreds of thousands of public dollars re-reviewing and removing books.
- Some already-purchased books were thrown away.
The bottom line: the policies pressured K-12 systems to spend time, public funds, and energy on limiting student access to ideas, information, and supports, rather than expanding education opportunity. Such limitations cut into the bone of public school opportunities for everyone, to please the most extreme and restrictive voices.
In our study, many educators and parents described desires to leave Florida’s public education system due to these restrictions on top of existing stressors. As one Florida teacher put it: “I want to leave. I hate almost everything about ‘teaching’ because we are restricted on every level.”
The nation will endanger students’ futures and public schooling itself if we move further in the restriction direction.
Parents and students have a solution as the government threatens schools: more can speak up loudly for the inclusive and opportunity-rich public schools they want. Restriction policies threaten to halt the very areas of improvement that researchers call for and students need. Research shows all students benefit from multiple perspectives in books and classrooms, welcoming environments, and open discussions about society as they prepare for careers and college. The majority of U.S. parents want their children to learn to think critically and feel included in school as core aspects of gaining skills. We can debate best paths to these goals, but taking opportunities away from students and public schools is not “parents’ rights.” It’s time for more students, parents, and community members to say so.
In their schools and districts, to the media, at state legislatures and school board meetings, to their elected representatives, and to the feds– at every level where decisions are made— students and parents can blunt ideologically-driven calls to “ban” by focusing on supporting and discussing educators’ efforts to improve public schools for all students and expand opportunity so all children succeed. They can explain and demand more of the teaching, books, support, and programming that help all students develop skills and feel they belong. They can back up specific teachers, schools, districts, and students under attack; they can demand reinstatement of opportunities removed. Organizations to join exist nationwide.
By speaking up for schools’ best efforts to support all students, they can help stop efforts to crush America’s public schools.
That’s reclaiming education “rights.”
Mica Pollock is Professor of Education Studies at UC San Diego, and Hirokazu Yoshikawa is Courtney Sale Ross Professor of Globalization and Education and University Professor at NYU.
