John Rogers spends a lot of time studying the ways in which partisan politics has shaped education. He’s researched the challenges public schools face amid rising political conflict in blue, red and purple states. So he’s accustomed to troubling information. Still, he is haunted by a recent finding.
“A large number of young people are missing school or going to school every day with fear of whether or not they’ll see their family members again when they come home,” he said. “The vast majority of America’s public schools have felt the impact of immigration enforcement.”
Rogers, a UCLA professor of education and associate dean for research and public scholarship, and Joseph Kahne, a distinguished professor of education at UC Riverside, conducted a survey of 606 high school principals nationwide on the impact of immigration enforcement policies launched during the first months of the second Trump administration.
Among the findings:
- More than half, or 63.8%, reported that students from immigrant families missed school because of politics or political rhetoric directed at immigrants.
- More than one-third, or 35.6%, of students from immigrant families reported they had been bullied or harassed at school.
- More than three-quarters, or 77.6%, of the principals said they have established plans to respond to visits from federal immigration agents, and nearly half, or 44.8%, created professional development for staff on how to support students from immigrant families.
Those are big numbers and across a varied landscape. It is not just immigrant-rich communities in the Southwest or urban areas that are feeling the impact. It stretches across the country and affects neighborhoods of every type. “The breadth of the impact,” said Rogers, “is breathtaking.”
Immigration enforcement’s effects on schools is only a small slice of Rogers’ broader research, which focuses on the social, financial and psychological challenges school officials face as partisan politics seep into the education system.
The costs of division
Political conflict is costly, and children pay those costs. A separate survey in 2024 found that, on average, a school district serving 10,000 students and experiencing high levels of culturally divisive conflict spends about $812,000 annually for increased security, legal fees, communications efforts to correct misinformation and other expenses — funds that could otherwise be spent on student enrichment. In total, researchers found, the cost of conflict for public schools nationwide in 2023-2024 was about $3.2 billion.
“We need a certain level of safety to build on and to promote learning because real learning entails taking risks and working with other people, and you need a certain level of comfort for that,” said Rogers, who is in the process of analyzing newly collected data on immigration enforcement and public schools. “When we’re teaching and promoting students’ development amidst a climate of fear, everybody loses.”
Brandon Wilson has spent 22 years in classrooms around Los Angeles, most recently teaching media literacy and film at a charter school in Watts where the student body is about 75% Latino and 20% Black.
“Twenty years ago, there was a lot more tension in the air, especially between Latino and/or Latina students and African American students,” Wilson said. “Now there’s pretty universal outrage about Trump. The students are just trying to understand what’s going on because so many things that they’ve been assured of during their lives — what couldn’t happen, wouldn’t happen — are happening. And they want to understand how is this possible.”
Wilson saw firsthand the impact of partisan conflict on the students during the 2025 raids in Los Angeles.
“That was an enormous source of anxiety that led to people being absent a lot, disengaged, depressed,” said Wilson, whose school went on lockdown at one point because ICE agents were believed to be in the neighborhood. “Nobody wants to feel like armed goons are going to be on your campus or could be outside.”
Still, Wilson said, in some ways, the shared tension brought students together.
“My sense is that African American students understand that immigration enforcement may not directly affect them, but there’s no sense of, ‘Well, that’s you guys’ problem,’” he said. “I think that’s very positive.”
In Ohio, partisan politics has played out in other ways. Fifth-grade language arts teacher Amy Kutschbach said her school is feeling the pinch of the state’s Republican-backed voucher program, which has lured students away from public schools and with them crucial tax dollars.
The school district is about 90% to 95% White, she said, so they don’t face some of the challenges that other schools may face. Kutschbach, who has been teaching for 25 years, recalls an instance when the school was considering a new reading series and a book under consideration was flagged by colleagues as something that might offend some members of the community, which she described as “conservative.”
“We didn’t go with the book I wanted — we got something different,” she said. “I didn’t want to rock the boat.”
With more schools nationwide dealing with declining enrollment and funding cuts, the strain of a contentious political climate adds to the pressure educators already face as they work to ensure they provide a safe and nurturing environment for students.
“Hellish time to be a teacher”
“It’s a really hellish time to be a teacher in some ways, but this is also kind of a great time because this is a real test of our profession and of us individually to rise to this challenge,” Wilson said. “I think more than ever teachers need to be very good listeners. We really have to listen and be very patient with the students because they are going through a lot.”
Schools, Rogers said, should be places where young people learn how to foster a “diverse democracy,” one that brings together people from different communities and with different leanings, experiences, identities, beliefs and interests to solve common problems. The goal is not to force students into any particular ideology or belief system but rather to encourage them to appreciate difference — and to learn from it.
The idea of schools as fertile ground for nurturing democracy is not new. Rogers regularly draws upon the work of John Dewey, whose 1916 “Democracy and Education” argued that students learn to become creative members of society through experiential learning rather than through lectures and rote lessons, and W.E.B. Du Bois, who saw education as a means to a multiracial democracy in the United States.
But in recent years, Rogers said, partisan polarization has had a “chilling” effect on public schools.
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, highly organized special-interest groups such as Moms for Liberty emerged. Some challenged masking policies; others objected to Critical Race Theory, access to certain books and policies on LGBTQ+ rights. Vocal parents and community members began showing up at school board meetings, at times spreading misinformation and occasionally threatening violence.
“Part of what’s challenging,” Rogers said, “is that it doesn’t take a majority of parents or community members to create an environment in which professional educators feel afraid.”
After the pandemic, the researchers surveyed a representative sample of 682 principals nationwide. More than two-thirds reported substantial conflict over hot-button issues. Principals in purple communities were far more likely than those in red and blue communities to report acute levels of community conflict.
Other findings included:
- Sixty percent of principals reported that students rejected information sources used by teachers, while nearly half, or 49%, reported multiple instances of students making unfounded claims in class based on unreliable media sources.
- More than two-thirds, or 69%, reported that students wrote derogatory or hateful emails to classmates for expressing political views, either liberal or conservative.
- Almost half, or 48%, reported that parents or community members sought to challenge or limit LGBTQ+ rights. The same percentage reported that parents or community members sought to limit or challenge teaching or learning about issues of race and racism.
They also found that teachers in schools most affected by increasing levels of conflict are the ones least likely to get professional support, including training to help students better judge the credibility of online content.
In the last 18 months, the most pitched rhetoric “has diminished somewhat,” Rogers said, “but I think that space has been filled by other troubling things, so it’s not all a positive. There is a line that we need to recognize between constructive participation and participation that ultimately is doing harm to the very work that our public schools are supposed to do.”
While financial costs, fear and anxiety levels have been significant, Rogers said, a less tangible result of the political strife is the “extraordinary distraction” for teachers and administrators.
“The biggest cost is time,” he said. “There is a feeling that the conflict both created greater stress and also took time away from that important work of school improvement and from the work of making schools places that were responsive to meeting the wellness needs of young people to make sure they felt safe and affirmed and psychologically supported.”
The disruptions forced educators to put extra time and effort into ensuring that schools are secure and healthy. At the same time, many superintendents reported threats to themselves and to their staffs.
“People should have strongly held beliefs about our public schools,” Rogers said. “But when that anger turns into violent rhetoric, when that anger seeks to ostracize or do harm to vulnerable minorities within the school setting, when that anger is tied up with the spread of misinformation, then you have a set of anti-democratic dynamics that are undermining the institution of public schooling.”
Researcher Young Whan Choi recently began noticing a worrisome trend: High school students were showing less interest in living under democracy and less of a responsibility to democracy as a system of governance.
“The lack of commitment that I was seeing in a lot of the data from this next generation, Gen Z generation, was just kind of alarming to me,” he said, “and I thought, well, how do we more directly address that in terms of thinking about curriculum and the experiences that our students are having in school?”
Choi, a curriculum director and lecturer at UC Berkeley in the Graduate School of Education, has been working with Rogers and Kahne to find ways to help teachers develop curricula that promote democratic values, principles and practices in students.
“We’re really trying to meet the need in the moment by saying, Let’s figure out how to engage students and educators with a curriculum that allows them to bring up the tensions in a way … that provides a container for how to talk about democracy at a time when even the word ‘democracy’ is weaponized,” he said.
That involves discussions about the principles in a way that is divorced from politics and instead grounded in compromise, laws, evidence and respect, or CLER. “Rather than talking directly about unlawful things that Trump’s doing or violations of our Constitution or things that can become highly political, they tackle tangible school-based experiences of injustice or conflict that will then surface the types of principles that matter to have a well-functioning society,” Choi said.
Different views, shared experiences
By studying laws and justice through the lens of hypothetical scenarios involving, say, a student who is suspended for smoking marijuana or a cellphone that is confiscated by a teacher, the students become more invested in the lessons.
The goal is to help students with diverse political views examine shared experiences within school, then come to an understanding of the basic tenets of how democracy and the rule of law function.
“Young people relate to the kinds of adolescent challenges and the challenges of being a student within the school system as a microcosm for how we function within the larger society,” he said. “So that’s why we really wanted to ground these lessons in the experience of students within school.”
The future of a diverse lives in the very classrooms that are under attack. Rogers’ research has found that educators who are more civically engaged are more likely to accept some responsibility for educating toward a diverse democracy.
“Those educators, despite the partisan context, are more likely to speak out for the importance of protecting LGBTQ youth, they’re more likely to talk about the value of addressing issues of race and racism in our society,” he said. “They’re more likely to talk about educating around issues of inequality and just giving young people the opportunity to debate and deliberate.
“People who are practiced in democratic life,” Rogers added, “are going to both be more committed and more skilled in that project.”
Despite the current political climate, he sees reason for optimism.
“Rather than backing away and feeling more chilled in this moment of heightened contention, we need to take this opportunity to reimagine what our schools do, and do that in a way that takes us forward to a better place,” Rogers said. “That’s what public schools do. They’re supposed to be about building toward a better place.”
