Schools Are Spending Billions To Fight Campus Culture Wars

As tensions rise on campus and in board chambers, districts dish out more for security, lawyers, and staff turnover.

The culture war is costing school districts billions, according to a report released in October 2024 by the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access. The report surveyed superintendents at 467 school districts nationwide about extra expenditures they undertook because of increased conflict over culture war issues such as critical race theory, book challenges, gender-related debates, and other politicized topics. The report estimates that such fights cost school districts around $3.2 billion during the 2023–2024 school year.

Superintendents reported increased security costs, legal fees, and expenditures related to high staff turnover, as well as other culture war spending. One superintendent interviewed for the report said these cultural conflicts, at a level he considered "high," required his district to spend an extra $100,000 to hire "armed plainclothes off-duty officers.…because people coming to the board meetings are unpredictable and sometimes violent."

That district also incurred more than $500,000 in legal fees. The district faced high turnover as well, incurring "additional costs in excess of $80,000 for recruitment and development of new staff members to replace teachers, counselors, and administrators who left their positions because they did not want to work in such a divisive setting," according to the report.

The report broke down extra expenditures into three main categories—direct budgetary costs, indirect costs (those "associated with districts redeploying staff time to address challenges created by culturally divisive conflict"), and staff turnover costs.

Around two-thirds of surveyed 
superintendents reported moderate or high conflict in their districts. For 
those in moderate-conflict districts, researchers calculated that a district with 10,000 students could expect to spend more than $485,000 in additional costs (a combination of direct, indirect, and turnover-related costs). A high-conflict district of the same size could expect to spend over $811,000 more. Low-conflict districts would, in contrast, spend around $250,000 extra.

The intense culture war battles that have dominated many school districts over the past several years have real costs to taxpayers and students. When the debate over school curriculum becomes a fierce, divisive fight, districts are forced to divert funding away from students and toward responding to security, legal, and public relations concerns.

"Again and again, we heard stories of sizable expenses related to all this tumult—the money schools and school systems needed to spend on these issues….meant less money was available for other educational priorities," the report reads. "Across rural, suburban, and urban areas and in communities of all political persuasions, we heard that these costs could be sizable, and that they were meaningfully impacting the quality of education students received."