Only about one in 10 U.S. school districts had any media-documented conflict over COVID masking, critical race theory, book bans or transgender student issues between 2018 and 2024, but those districts enrolled roughly three in 10 of the nation’s public school students.
The finding comes from a Brookings Institution analysis of web-scraped news articles covering a nationally representative sample of 2,337 school districts. Researchers manually reviewed each article to confirm whether a genuine conflict between a community and its school board had occurred, rather than simply noting policy activity.