Separation of Church and State Curricula? Public Standards, Private Values, and Textbook Conten

Separation of Church and State Curricula? Public Standards, Private Values, and Textbook Content

Emileigh Harrison (LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin)

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ABSTRACT:

Curricula are a critical site of cultural transmission, yet we know little about the values conveyed in textbooks across educational settings or the forces that shape them. We examine textbooks from Texas and California public schools and religious-private and home schools spanning 1980-2022, using computational and AI tools to measure presence and portrayal of people, topics, and values over time. Despite narratives of political polarization, Texas and California textbooks show substantial similarity. In contrast, religious private-school textbooks place greater emphasis on religious and character values and depict characters with lighter skin colors; we show these differences align with preferences and demographics of target markets. To explain public-school convergence, we develop a framework in which publishers serve a national market con-strained by state standards and provide evidence consistent with cross-state spillovers in textbook content following standards revisions. Conversely, private-school publishers serve a more segmented, less regulated market, leading to greater differentiation.

BIO:

Emileigh Harrison is an Assistant Professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her PhD in Public Policy from the University of Chicago. She studies the economics of education, with a focus on how educational materials, policies, and institutions shape human capital and cultural transmission. In addition to applying traditional causal inference tools to study the effects of policies such as merit-based free community college, she applies and develops tools from computer vision and natural language processing (including gen AI) to convert text and images into data. This approach allows her to examine questions such as how regulatory and market forces shape textbook content in public and religious private schools.