"A House Divided?" (PDF download) — which reports the results of a recent survey of the American public on the teaching of controversial topics in the public schools — addressed evolution in passing, in the context of what categories of books should and should not be included in the curriculum and the school library.
Asked whether it was appropriate for books focused on evolution to be assigned reading, 69% of respondents thought that it was appropriate at the high school level, but only 51% thought that it was appropriate at the elementary school level.
Asked whether it was appropriate for books focused on evolution to be available to students, 87% of respondents thought that it was appropriate at the high school level, but only 73% thought that it was appropriate at the elementary school level.
Of the eighteen topics considered, evolution was generally in the middle range of acceptability, with America's founding fathers and the Constitution at the top and profanity, sex between people of the opposite sex, and sex between people of the same sex at the bottom.
There was a substantial partisan divide, with Democrats more likely than Republicans to favor the assignment and the availability of books focused on evolution at both the elementary and the high school level.
The report was produced by researchers at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education. The survey was administered to 3751 adult US residents in a probability-based internet panel between August 15 to September 12, 2022. The margin of sampling error for the full sample is +/- 2 percentage points.
