The pitched battle that erupted in Douglas County’s school district over the teaching of race and history encapsulates the sense of polarization that engulfed America over the last years.

Or least that’s the prevailing narrative. 

But a new study by a group that seeks to understand the forces driving polarization challenges the notion of a country highly divided in its views of teaching race and history.

What the group found is that Americans, divided along ideological lines, regard the other as holding views wholly divergent from their own when they, in fact, share a lot more common ground.

More in Common, which released the results of its year-long study called “Defusing the History Wars: Finding Common Ground in Teaching America’s National Story,” said a clear majority of Americans prefer the teaching of American history in ways that include “both the inspiring and the shameful.”

This approach, the group said, highlights both the histories of minority groups and history that “elevates a shared American identity and that allows students to learn from the past without feeling guilty or disempowered by the actions of prior generations.”

“The news here is very positive,” lead author Stephen Hawkins told The Denver Gazette. 

And just as importantly, people can take concrete steps to bridge what the study referred to as the “perception gap,” said Hawkins, who is based in Denver. 

Polarization in American politics manifests in different forms, most stridently in the divisions that haunt school boards and legislative bodies over how to deal with critical race theory and proposals to limit books or subjects that can be taught in the classroom. 

That debate is heated and incessant, leaving communities upset and frustrated, and magnified by national media coverage.  

The way the More in Common study puts it, the “perception gap” – the gap “between what we imagine an opposing group believes and what that group actually believes” – leads to a lot of misunderstanding.  

The study shows that Republicans underestimate Democrats’ commitment to celebrating American achievements and its story of progress, while Democrats underestimate Republicans’ willingness to recognize failures and the roles that minority groups played in making America better.

For example, 95% of Democrats and 93% of Republicans actually agree that “Americans have a responsibility to learn from our past and fix our mistakes,” but the study says Democrats believe only 35% of Republicans feel this way and Republicans think only 56% hold this view.

In another example, an overwhelmingly majority of Republicans – 93% – say that Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks should be taught as examples of Americans who fought for equality, but Democrats think only 38% of Republicans do.

In addition, 87% of Democrats believe that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln should be admired for their roles in American history, but Republicans think only 42% of Democrats.

The study indicates that independents’ perception of where Republicans and Democrats stand on these subjects largely track how members of the two parties regard each other.      

The study calls it “false divergence” – a “dangerous level of overstatement.”

What the study suggests, Hawkins said, is that the American public is operating from a largely similar set of information.  

Part of the problem, Hawkins said, is that immensely difficult to hold a conversation about pointed subjects, notably about American identity or the history of racism in the country, and so it’s easy to misunderstand what people believe.   

And the incessant focus by national media and social media on conflict isn’t helping, he said. 

“The incentives toward finding controversy and conflict both on social media and cable news are very likely a driving factor here in what people perceive,” he said.

The national media, for example, could highlight a controversial issue arising out of a school, which becomes a part of the national narrative but which fails to paint the full picture and add the nuances of where, how and who crafts curricula.    

“A cable news show can say here’s something that somebody had in their homework yesterday and putting it on national news and saying this what they’re teaching our children,” Hawkins said. “It’s very hard to definitely address whether that’s representative of what the average 8th grader is reading or whether that’s an anomaly.”     

That’s not to say actual points of divergence don’t exist, the study says. 

Researchers found that the greatest disagreements revolved around two questions – how to draw connections between the past, notably “past injustices,” and today’s America, and over the degree of emphasis given to the histories of minority groups.

“There is meaningful variation in responses to these questions by race, but our data shows greater polarization by political ideology,” the study says. 

Notably, the study found that the views of Americans on the opposite of the political spectrum – the progressive activists at 8% of the U.S. adult population and the devoted conservatives at 6% – directly conflict with one another.

“These findings suggest that even where large groups of Americans genuinely disagree about how to teach history, the history wars reflect an amplified version of that disagreement by emphasizing the views and voices of the wing segments. The resulting misunderstanding makes it much more difficult for communities to engage on substance,” the study concludes.

Hawkins told The Denver Gazette the study paints an optimistic picture of Americans’ attitudes toward these polarized subjects.

He added that school districts and others can take concrete steps to foster more understanding of people’s positions, with the goal of reducing partisan animosity and strengthening common grounds.

He pointed to a study by researchers from MIT, Stanford, and other universities, who tested roughly two dozen interventions meant to reduce partisan animosity and who concluded that nearly all of them work. Among the most effective interventions included correcting misperceptions about what members of the other party believe.  

These interventions, Hawkins noted, aren’t trivial.

“There is something that can be done,” he said. “Addressing perception gaps is both viable and proven at this point.”

Groups, for example, can host spaces where they can have “sensible conversations” about these controversial subjects  via an explicit invitation to join with sincerity. 

“People are operating with these caricatured visions of these ideologies or these racists in their minds, and very often what’s happening is that people are imposing an image from cable news or from social media,” he said.  

Hawkins said schools should reject a “binary framing” of the subject – that it’s either glorification of nationalism or exceptionalism, or one of guilt, shame, and oppression.

“That framing is one which almost every American we spoke rejects as being overly simplistic,” he said.