Classroom Wars: Bilingual Education, Sex Education, and the Making of Modern Political Culture

From Cultural Appreciation Days to Gay-Straight Alliances to cafeteria menus featuring “ethnic options,” 21st-century American public schools bear the unmistakable mark of the diversity that has come to define the nation. Yet it is also in public schools where citizens continue to organize most passionately to limit the influence of this heterogeneity.

How did we get here? Focusing on California’s schools during the 1960s and 1970s, I chart how a state and a citizenry deeply committed to public education as an engine of civic and moral education navigated social and political change, including the sexual revolution, school desegregation, and a dramatic increase in Latino immigration.

In California, where a volatile political culture nurtured both Orange County mega-churches and Berkeley coffeehouses, these changes reverberated especially powerfully. Analyzing two of the era’s most innovative and nationally impactful programs – Spanish-bilingual and sex education – I explain how during a time of extraordinary social change, grass-roots citizens politicized the schoolhouse and family. Many linked such progressive educational programs not only with threats to the family and nation but also with rising taxes, which they feared were being squandered on morally lax educators teaching ethically questionable curricula.

Using sources ranging from policy documents to personal letters to student newspapers to course evaluations to oral histories, I reveal how in California and the nation at large a growing number of Americans fused values about family, personal, and civic morality, blurring the distinction between public and private and inspiring some of the fiercest classroom wars in American history.