At a time when vitriolic partisan rhetoric dominates our headlines and headspace, the AHA’s Nicholas Kryczka, Whitney E. Barringer, and Scot McFarlane, thankfully, seek to find out what teachers of history and social studies are really trying to accomplish in their classrooms. They argue that “culture warriors had imposed an analytical framework that obscured the real dynamics of curricular governance in the United States.” Relying on polls and interviews, they conclude that most teachers are not culture warriors but instead are trying to teach history “impartially” to prepare apathetic students for “critical thinking and informed citizenship.” Indeed, “97 percent of surveyed teachers cited critical thinking as among their top learning goals.”Footnote ¹

American Lesson Plan, the full AHA report on which Kryczka, Barringer, and McFarlane’s conclusions are based, argues that the majority of history teachers purposefully avoid biased and partisan sources as unreliable and controversial.Footnote ² The AHA’s findings echo those of a 2021 Heritage Foundation poll that found that although teachers are to the left of the average conservative, they are more moderate than the average liberal, including on issues of race. The Heritage poll’s authors concluded that “the results of this survey do not support the idea that K-12 teachers are radical activists.”Footnote ³

Taken together, the AHA and Heritage reports suggest that teachers—like so many Americans—are more often running interference than embracing the culture wars. Why, then, do the culture wars loom so large? With the loss of earlier forms of cultural solidarity, Americans today struggle to find common ground and are therefore more likely to divide into camps that see the other side as enemies.Footnote ⁴ Many elite actors in the culture wars—professors, activists, politicians, investors—have agendas that benefit from mobilizing public opinion against public schools and teachers.Footnote ⁵ As a result, debates over education have gone national and become more partisan.Footnote ⁶ Elected leaders have reacted to this context according to their political affiliation: in blue states teachers feel pressure to respond to legislative or district mandates about anti-racism and social justice, whereas teachers in red states feel pressure from the opposite direction.Footnote ⁷

When it comes to US history, most Americans disagree with both sides in the culture wars.Footnote ⁸ According to the AHA report, most of the nation’s history teachers feel the same way. The vast majority of teachers want to offer a history that brings us together as a nation, respects diversity, and has room for pride and shame.Footnote ⁹ Of course, there are some teachers—as there are some Americans—who take sides. This may be a good thing: in a democracy, we do not want all teachers to think the same. The danger is when Americans think that public schools themselves have become partisans in the culture wars. The report finds that 26 percent of teachers considered it important or very important to teach US history as “a consistent fulfillment of the promises of the nation’s founding,” and the same percentage considered it important or very important to present US history as “a story of violence, oppression, and/or injustice.”Footnote ¹⁰ The report also hints at variations between states as well as a notable divide between urban and rural districts. The influence and intensity of the culture wars in schools may depend on where one lives.Footnote ¹¹

Even if many history teachers feel caught in the crossfire, there is evidence that progressive ideas are having an impact in public schools. Researchers have documented the influence of progressive ideas in the education schools and humanities departments where teachers and administrators are prepared. The AHA report surveys district-sponsored curricular efforts and professional trainings that embrace progressive ideas about race and social justice. It is difficult to document the impact these influences have on classrooms, although a poll by the right-leaning Manhattan Institute posits a relationship between the prevalence of progressive ideas in schools and how students were taught American history.Footnote ¹² Media stories of progressive educators going too far, even if they do not represent the majority of teachers, fuel conservative responses, whether they be parent activism or Republican-sponsored legislation.Footnote ¹³

Whatever teachers’ politics, it is unsurprising that most teachers claim to be impartial and committed to teaching critical thinking. The AHA report relies on these proclamations as evidence of the culture wars’ absence in classrooms, but doing so raises as many questions as it answers. Michael Roth has recently articulated three models of critical thinking that he respectively attributes to three teachers: Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus. When teachers say that they teach critical thinking, do they mean that they are teaching students to question society’s myths or overcoming ignorance to see the hidden truths about our society (Socrates)? Do they mean learning deeply about our society’s ways and traditions (Confucius) or becoming disciples of great teachers (Jesus)? All of these approaches demand critical thinking but rely on different sources of authority and have divergent political valences.Footnote ¹⁴

If the AHA report’s findings are true, we must protect teachers from becoming further caught up in the culture wars. That will be difficult. When defenders of public schools focus on local questions, they can mobilize bipartisan support—voters are not fans of culture warriors taking over their schools—but the news is filled with stories of teachers resisting Republican overreach. Regardless of whether these stories portray teachers as heroes or villains, they reinforce a culture wars narrative, which in turn undermines trust in public schools. To challenge that framing, Americans need to learn about teachers resisting the excesses of progressivism too. Americans need to know that most teachers have not taken sides in the culture wars but share with them the goal of an honest and complex American history.