The Myth of the Anti-American Teacher

Most teachers think schools should teach that America is a good country. That shouldn’t surprise us.

It’s an article of faith on the political right that America’s public schools are hostile to the country that built and funds them. In this view, classrooms are the front lines of a culture war, where impressionable children are being catechized into grievance and self-loathing by teachers hostile to American ideals and estranged from the civic mission of the schools they staff. That story has become familiar—and politically useful.

It’s a concern I’ve raised and written about myself, borne out by repeated instances of teachers using their positions as platforms—the kinds of things that are a staple of Libs of TikTok and go viral on social media. But it’s important not to overstate or universalize the critique.

A new Education Next survey offers an important corrective. It finds that 55 percent of Americans—and 62 percent of teachers—believe schools should teach that America is “a fundamentally good country.” A solid majority (57 percent) of teachers think schools should teach students “to be patriotic and loyal toward the U.S.”

The Ed Next analysis, by Brian Kisida, Colyn Ritter, James V. Shuls and Gary Ritter, puts the matter plainly: “The evidence does not indicate that an anti-American teacher workforce is responsible for the general malaise among youth toward America.” They also cite research from the conservative Heritage Foundation showing that teachers “are largely moderate and generally hold less extreme partisan views than the public or politicians.” In other words, the political center still mostly holds in America’s classrooms—even if it often seems absent everywhere else.

That teachers’ attitudes and views generally mirror those of the country they serve shouldn’t surprise us. Public schools are an unlikely platform from which to foment anti-American sentiment. Moreover, it would be difficult to amass a workforce of four million teachers predominantly from one side of the political spectrum, let alone the extreme wing of that side. Indeed, about a month before the 2024 presidential election, a survey of 1,200 educators conducted by Education Week’s Research Center found that half planned to vote for Kamala Harris, 39 percent for Donald Trump, and the rest for a third-party candidate. This suggests that teachers are more Democratic-leaning than the country, but not overwhelmingly so.

Of course, there will always be outliers. It’s a serious problem when teachers make a show of defying parents or district policy—refusing to teach required content or posting performatively on social media. Such actions and displays fuel the perception of classrooms as ideological battlegrounds and raise concerns about indoctrination. But as I’ve argued elsewhere, these incidents are not proof of widespread radicalism. They’re more accurately seen as symptomatic of the culture of teaching, which often encourages teachers to see themselves and act as free agents rather than members of a shared civic institution. Said differently, teaching has a problem with its permission structures: the profession doesn’t seem to be as concerned about politicization as parents and other external stakeholders. Still, the mistake is assuming that the loudest, least restrained voices represent teachers as whole.

Those outliers notwithstanding, there’s also evidence to suggest teachers are becoming less likely, not more, to indulge in overt political talk in their classrooms. At least 18 states have banned critical race theory and other restrictions on how racism, sexism, and other hot-button topics are taught in K–12 classrooms. A 2023 RAND survey found that even in states without such restrictions, two-thirds of U.S. teachers have decided on their own to limit classroom instruction about political and social issues. That’s not the behavior of an activist vanguard. It’s the behavior of a profession trying to keep its head down. Critics may see this self-censorship as a dangerous chilling effect reflecting an authoritarian turn in our politics and culture, but a more optimistic view is that teachers are increasingly conducting themselves in a professional manner.

Where Teachers and the Public Agree
The Education Next survey shows strong consensus among parents, teachers, and Americans at large on a few key points. Majorities across the board agree that it’s good to question the policies and actions of the U.S. government. That’s one of the healthiest findings in the poll. Questioning authority is not un-American—it’s a vital expression of democratic citizenship.

There’s also broad agreement that schools should teach about the U.S. Constitution and its core values. Nearly everyone—parents, teachers, and the public alike—sees that as essential. The youngest teachers are particularly interesting here: while only 40 percent of young Americans aged 18–34 think it’s “very” or “extremely” important that schools teach America is fundamentally good, 57 percent of the youngest teachers surveyed say it is important. That 17-point gap is among the widest in the EdNext survey. It’s troubling that young Americans hold a measurably dim view of their country, but bracing that teachers of the same age still appear to believe in civic formation.

The most troubling finding, somewhat at odds with their generally favorable view of the U.S., is that roughly a third of respondents—teachers, parents, and Americans alike—think schools should teach the idea that the U.S. “was and still is a fundamentally racist country.” But even here, the question is ambiguous. To say schools should “teach the idea” may simply mean that students should encounter that view, not that it should be endorsed as truth. That’s a meaningful distinction, and one too easily flattened in our political shorthand.

Show, Don’t Tell
Choice advocates and conservative media often advance their cause by painting public education as irredeemably politicized. My AEI colleague Greg Fournier, a former middle school teacher, suggests those concerns were valid but might be growing outdated. He wonders if teachers have become less radical in their views after a brief period of heightened progressivism during the pandemic and in response to the death of George Floyd—a period that saw heightened progressivism in nearly all American institutions. But as the obvious excesses of those days and views drew criticism and were reconsidered, more temperate attitudes returned.

Despite the noise, the civic consensus remains surprisingly intact. For all the heat surrounding public education, teachers remain close to the American mainstream. They may lean slightly left, but they are not radicals. They are far more representative of the country than the people who claim to speak for them—professors in education schools, union leaders, and political activists.

In the final analysis, you don’t teach that America is good; you show it. You do so by maintaining institutions that work—schools among them—that give young people a sense of agency, competence, and belonging. When schools function well—when they are orderly, demanding, and fair—they model the virtues of a free society better than any civics lesson ever could.

The real challenge, then, isn’t rooting out anti-American sentiment from schools that, by and large, don’t harbor it. It’s insisting that schools be institutions worthy of the country’s faith.