100 years after the Scopes trial, Americans are still divided over what kids should learn

USA Today

12-07-2025

A century ago, a Tennessee science teacher's fight to teach evolution ignited national controversy. But battles over school curricula still rage.
In 1925, an American teacher's fight to educate his high school students about evolution thrust a small-town controversy into the national spotlight.
The case, now commonly known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, began when John Thomas Scopes taught Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in his classroom in Dayton, Tennessee. Scopes was charged under a state law that made it illegal to teach any doctrine that denied the creation of man as told in the Bible.
The case ultimately reached the Tennessee Supreme Court, which upheld the law but acquitted Scopes on a technicality.
In the century since, debates over what kids should learn in taxpayer-supported schools – and the role parents should play in shaping those decisions – have only intensified. This summer, those fights reached another crescendo when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that religious parents can opt their public-school children out of reading books with LGBTQ+ themes.
But the curriculum wars have been intensifying for decades. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement forced schools to start to reckon with decades of racist teachings and practices. The 1990s brought passionate fights over classroom standards. With the 2000s, came major tech innovations, from iPhones to YouTube, that raised new questions about whether those technologies had a place in the classroom.
Then came the coronavirus pandemic. Many parents tried, and failed, to keep their kids from falling behind as schools closed. Meanwhile, anger toward the educational establishment among conservative parents grew into a full-fledged movement to exert more parental control in classrooms.
"The longer classrooms remained closed, the more disenfranchised parents felt," said Sarah Parshall Perry, the vice president of the conservative group Defending Education and a former Education Department attorney in the first Trump administration.
"The parental right does not end at the schoolhouse door," she said.
One hundred years after the Scopes trial, the concept of parental rights continues to fuel curriculum battles – from book bans to LGBTQ+ censorship – in school boards and state legislatures nationwide.
Teaching about race across America
The debate over how American history, and its history with race in particular, should be taught in public schools intensified in a new way with the Scopes trial, said Adam Laats, a professor at Binghamton University who studies historical battles over education culture.
The trial was the beginning of a "100-year war over controlling public schools," he said.
"It's not just a question of evolutionary teaching," he said. "It's much bigger than that."
Fast forward to 2020, when another national spotlight was cast on racial inequities following the high-profile killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. In Taylor's hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, the local school superintendent, Marty Pollio, recalled being asked by state politicians for details regarding his district's racial equity policy, which had been in place for years before her killing.
"We were being praised," Pollio said.
But a year later, a nearly identical group of politicians questioned him over the alleged teaching of critical race theory in his schools. Critical race theory, or CRT, is a framework of legal analysis based on the idea that systemic racism is deeply embedded within American society. It is typically taught in U.S. law schools and colleges, not K-12 schools.
On the national stage, those criticisms about CRT have widened in recent years into broader concerns among Republicans about the role of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs in schools. DEI, a term that isn't always clearly defined, broadly refers to policies or programs that schools implement to prevent discrimination and create welcoming environments.
In April, President Donald Trump's administration warned school districts that they could risk losing federal funding if they don't get rid of their DEI programs. Though that threat has been halted by a court battle, Pollio said it was an indication that much of the progress he felt was happening in 2020 is long gone.
"I was really proud of the momentum that was happening in education at that time," he said. "But I'm really disappointed in how it's been abandoned at this point."
Book bans on the rise
Backed by conservative organizations like Moms for Liberty, efforts to control what books are on the shelves of classrooms and school libraries have also accelerated since the pandemic.
Free speech advocacy group PEN America said over 10,000 books were banned in public schools in the 2023-24 school year, nearly tripling the previous year's number. The most common themes in the removed books include race, sexuality and gender identity, along with topics involving struggles with substance abuse, suicide, depression and other mental health issues, according to PEN America.
In Tennessee, a state law passed in 2023 heightened tensions over what books are appropriate for young children. In 2024, at least 1,155 unique titles were pulled from the shelves or heavily age-restricted in Tennessee's public schools, according to The Tennessean, part of the USA TODAY Network.
State funds for private and religious schools
Another frontier in the modern-day battle over public schooling has less to do with what should be taught in the classroom, and more to do with another controversial question: Which schools should get taxpayer money?
An increasing number of states are adopting programs that give families taxpayer-funded vouchers to offset private K-12 school tuition – including at religious schools. While vouchers may not be a direct part of deciding what's taught in public schools, they do reflect the larger conversation around how states handle public education.
A major development in the debate on state-funded education is playing out in Oklahoma. In April, justices on the U.S. Supreme Court seemed sympathetic to a bid from the state's charter school board to create the first religious charter school in the U.S. But the court ultimately deadlocked 4-4 in the case, meaning the religious charter school would remain blocked.
Greenlighting the school would have marked a major expansion of the use of taxpayer money for religious education.
LGBTQ+ inclusion
Legislatures in red states have pushed in recent years to censor teaching about LGBTQ+ history and culture in classrooms. It comes in the context of a broader movement in the U.S. to curb the rights of queer and transgender people.
That campaign largely started in 2022 in Florida, where the Parental Rights in Education Act, a controversial measure dubbed by critics as the "Don't Say Gay" bill, was passed by the GOP-controlled legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The law prohibited classroom instruction on topics relating to sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade. A year later, the Florida state education board expanded the ban through 12th grade.
The law's initial ambiguity created a "chilling effect" that inspired conservative politicians in states across the country to pursue similarly written measures, said Brian Dittmeier, the director of public policy at GLSEN, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.
"The vagueness of some of these policies is the point," he said.
Since 2022, 11 states have adopted laws restricting discussions about LGBTQ+ people or issues in school curricula, according to a 2024 tally from the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank.
A court settlement eventually watered down the impact of Florida's so-called "Don't Say Gay" law by allowing teachers and students to still discuss topics relating to the LGBTQ+ community.
For advocates like Quinn Diaz, a public policy associate at the LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Florida, the settlement was a big deal. It showed – much like the Scopes trial, Diaz said – how legal fights can ultimately help protect students and teachers.
"The settlement remains a symbol of hope," they said.
Three years, almost to the day, after the so-called "Don't Say Gay" law took effect, the pendulum swung in the other direction. The Supreme Court allowed parents nationwide to prevent their kids from reading LGBTQ+ books in school.