Neal McCluskey
Arguably the biggest thing happening in American K–12 education over the past several years has been culture war: Battles over whose values, views of history, and more will be reflected in public school curricula, library holdings, athletics and bathroom policies, and more. It is something Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom has cataloged for many years. While the original intent was not to precisely track trends from year to year, our ongoing collection for the Public Schooling Battle Map enables us to at least roughly observe trends.
The good news for the calendar year that just ended—as seen in the first chart below—is that we saw a dip in cataloged battles versus the previous year, which had seen a big drop from the peak year of 2023. The bad news is that conflict remains heightened since 2021. Also, as depicted in Figure 2, we have seen an uptick in conflicts being fought at the state level versus the previous year, meaning all people in a state, as opposed to individual districts, are on the battlefield.
Importantly, we do not track education culture war conflicts at the federal level, except if federal actions create conflicts within districts and states. Some of the 2025 entries are, in fact, people in districts and states debating how—or whether—to comply with Trump administration regulatory guidance requiring, for instance, that school districts only allow students born female to participate in girls’ sports. Of course, federal policy ultimately puts every single American on the battlefield—you cannot even move to a new state to peacefully access content and policies you agree with and avoid those you do not.
The big growth in disputes over the past few years, as seen in Figure 3, has been over reading material, gender equity, and curricula.
Reading material battles typically concern books in public school libraries and sometimes on recommended reading lists or assignments. This is what is often being discussed when the term “banning” is invoked. Gender equity conflicts used to primarily concern whether boys and girls are being treated equally—for example, does a dress code with more rules for girls than boys discriminate against girls or foster greater decorum? But more recently they have become dominated by disputes over bathroom access and athletics participation policies for transgender students. Finally, curricular battles concern what is taught, including hot-button topics such as the Israel–Palestine conflict and race in America.
With the Trump administration’s emphasis on culture war issues, the entire country is roped into public schooling battles, though the Biden and Obama administrations also thrust the entire country into them—federal overreach is not just a Trump phenomenon. That said, it is important to put these conflicts into perspective so as not to give the impression that people are at each other’s throats in all states and districts. In 2025, we cataloged state-level conflicts in 39 states, which means we found no such conflicts in 11 states. We found at least one conflict in 174 districts, but there are around 13,300 regular public school districts nationwide. So only 1.3 percent of all districts have a 2025 conflict on the Battle Map. The share by enrollment is likely higher because bigger districts tend to get greater news coverage, but it is probably still a small percentage of all students affected by district-level conflicts. To illustrate this using the entire data collection, the Battle Map has at least one battle in about 1,790 districts, or 13.5 percent of all districts. Those districts, however, account for slightly less than 50 percent of all students.
As always, a few caveats:
Year-to-year trends should be interpreted cautiously as our methods of finding media reports of battles have changed over the years and we did not start the map with the purpose of enabling precise annual comparisons. It is also possible that the media has not reported conflicts at the same rate from year to year, in which case our data might reflect changes in the attention of reporters rather than true fluctuations in battles. Finally, numbers for past years will likely increase a bit as we discover more battles that began in those years. This is especially applicable to the most recently completed year—2025—so it would not be surprising to see the 2025 total eventually surpass 2024, though likely not by very much. The trend is more of a leveling than a marked decrease or increase.
The ultimate point of the Battle Map collection is to illustrate that it is wrong to assume that public schooling unifies diverse people. At the very least, it also forces divisive political conflict to determine who gets what for their children when people disagree.