Report: U.S. Educators Lean Right
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Breaking from a chorus of concerns that American educators politically swing far to the left, a new report is arguing that they are quite conservative.
Compared to non-teachers with college degrees, primary and secondary schoolteachers are more likely to oppose homosexuality and legalized abortion and less likely to support values such as free speech and economic equality, a paper being released this week shows.
More than a handful of studies of universities have shown that a majority of American professors identify as liberal, but professor Robert Slater, who studies education at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said his data, drawn from the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, describe a clear conservative tendency.
The paper, which will be included in the winter 2008 issue of Education Next, a magazine published by the Hoover Institution think tank at Stanford University, highlights a question on freedom of speech. “If a person wanted to make a speech in your town against churches and religion, should he be allowed to speak, or not?” participants were asked. While 92% of non-teachers with 16 years or more of schooling said he should be allowed to speak, the number for teachers was 85%.
Attitudes on government aid to the poor also diverge. The portion of all Americans who support such aid has declined to about 28% from 40% in the 1970s, but it has dropped more sharply among teachers, specifically, to 24% in this decade from 48%.
On so-called family values questions, the study shows that teachers are more likely to oppose abortion and object to homosexuality than college-educated Americans who are not teachers. They are also much more likely to go to church.
A conservative author and activist who has condemned liberal leanings in a number of universities, David Horowitz, said primary and secondary schools propagate a pronounced left-leaning bias, citing curriculum that teach themes such as social justice.