Multicultural Teaching Competency Scale (MTCS)
Category: Teacher and Leader Development
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.
Keywords
Curricula, education policy, religious education, public school education, diversity and inclusion in education, artificial intelligence tools, computational social science, content analysis
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/ec74-wh61
