If you follow the headlines, it can seem like K-12 schools in the United States are a political battlefield.
Some conservative parents and advocacy groups are lobbying to remove certain books from classrooms and libraries, most often those that highlight LGBTQ+ issues or race and racism.
Some civil liberties groups, librarians and progressive parents, meanwhile, are pushing back against book bans, saying they are a form of unnecessary censorship.
Parents and school boards also are clashing over a range of other issues, ranging from how transgender and nonbinary students are treated and which bathrooms they can use, to whether teachers should use artificial intelligence in the classroom.
Beyond this evidence of political polarization, though, there’s another, less divisive reality. Ask people to name their best teacher, and regardless of their political affiliation, they will likely offer a similar answer. Most people will say that they learned a lot from a teacher who knew them, cared about them and made learning relevant to their lives.
Over five years, from 2020 through 2025, we asked more than 2,000 Americans, including Democrats, Republicans and independents, what makes a very good teacher. We expected deep partisan divides. Instead, we found something rare: genuine, cross-partisan agreement.
How we ran the study
We began in 2020 with a nationally representative survey of 334 adults, asking them to recall a teacher they learned a lot from. We then asked the survey participants to look at 10 statements that might describe a good teacher and rank them from most to least important.
Five of the statements we offered focused on relationships – like caring about students, making educational lessons relevant and giving students individualized support. The other five focused on whether teachers covered a lot of material, rewarded top performers with grades or prizes, and whether they applied rules consistently to all students.
Respondents generally focused on highlighting the same seven out of 10 statements, giving us a vision of how they perceived a very good teacher. People prioritized the same factors – how much the teachers cared about their students and whether they supported them – regardless of their age, race, gender or political affiliation. Republicans and Democrats were indistinguishable in their descriptions of effective teaching.
People did not prioritize whether teachers covered a lot of material, made students compete or ran a strict and disciplined classroom.
In 2022, we conducted a similar survey of 179 teachers in Arizona and California. The results echoed our 2020 survey participants’ view: Teachers also defined very good teachers as ones who emphasized relationships, made lessons relevant and knew the subject matter.
Given the prominence of politically charged education debates, we were a bit surprised by our results. We began to wonder: Do people privately agree on what it means to be a good teacher, but change their opinion if their image of good teaching is associated with an ideological orientation they disagree with?
Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
Adding a partisan label
To explore this question in late 2024 and early 2025, we ran a third experiment with a nationally representative sample of 1,562 adults from a range of political backgrounds.
We gave all participants the same description of a very good teacher, identified in our previous experiments. We then randomly noted if these descriptions of a good teacher were endorsed by Democrats, Republicans or people with no political affiliation.
When the participants read the teacher descriptions without any political labels attached, about 85% of Democrats, Republicans and independents agreed with the description of a very good teacher.
When we added a note saying that a political party the survey participant did not identify endorsed a particular description of a good teacher, they became less likely to support the statement.
The effect was sharpest among Republicans: Support fell from 85% to 64% when the description was tied to Democrats. Democrats’ agreement slipped less, from 86% to 76%, when the description was tied to Republicans.
Even with these caveats, nearly two-thirds of Republicans and Democrats still agreed on what it means to be a good teacher.
Political scientists call this affective polarization: How we react to an idea depends not just on the idea, but on who we think supports it.
At the national level, education is often framed as an intractable partisan conflict.
Yet at the individual level, many Americans continue to express confidence in their own local schools. Our findings suggest that part of this gap may be driven by how issues are framed rather than by fundamentally incompatible beliefs.
Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
This matters more than you might think
Federal and state education policy over the past four decades, including laws like No Child Left Behind, which mandated routine federal testing in reading and math, emphasize testing and competition. These priorities don’t always match what Americans across the political spectrum say they value most.
Americans continue to differ on many important education questions, including what children should learn in school, the role of school boards and other issues.
But these disagreements coexist with a shared beliefs about what good teaching looks like in practice.
Recognizing this gap could open new possibilities for education reform. When debates focus exclusively on disagreements, they can obscure areas of agreement that might otherwise serve as starting points for collaboration.
We encourage readers to go ahead and run a similar, small experiment: Ask people about their best teacher, then listen to what they say. The answer, it turns out, is likely more unifying than you expect.
