Separation of Church and State Curricula? Examining Public and Religious Private School Textbooks
Abstract
Curricula impart knowledge, instill values, and shape collective memory. Despite growing public funding for religious schools through U.S. school choice programs, little is known about what they teach. We examine textbooks from public schools, religious private schools, and home schools, applying computational methods -- including the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools -- to measure the presence and portrayal of people, topics, and values over time. Despite narratives of political polarization, our findings reveal few meaningful differences between public school textbooks from Texas and California. However, religious school textbooks have less female representation, feature lighter-skinned individuals, and portray topics like evolution and religion differently. Over one-third of pages in each collection convey character values, with a higher proportion in religious school textbooks. Important similarities also emerge: all textbook collections rarely include LGBTQIA+ discussion, portray females in more positive but less active or powerful contexts than males, and depict the U.S. founding era and slavery in similar contexts.
About this workshop
The Public Governance workshop is an online seminar series focused on state of art research in political economy that uses non-traditional data and data-intensive methods.
The workshop gives a platform for the research on the role of governance in designing and developing better policies. Key features are the political environment, the role of the media, the engagement of stakeholders such as civil society and firms, the market structure and level of competition, and the independence of public regulators, among others. Particular emphasis is placed on research with NLP methods due to the proven usefulness of transforming text into data for further econometric analysis.
Periodicity: Mondays from 17h30 to 19h.