Any effective advocacy always has to start with education. We can’t solve any problems if we can’t define what they are and don’t possess the skills to deal with them. So really, there’s no better starting point to talk about how to make schools safer for LGBT kids than GLSEN’s biennial National School Climate Survey. At some point you’ve probably seen some of the data they’ve published; maybe you even participated in the survey when you were in school. There’s no more comprehensive resource out there to give us a picture of the experience of LGBT middle and high school students. I want to give you some quick takeaways from the latest 168-page report GLSEN released this month – there are some important lessons in that flood of data.
1) Most LGBT students do not have good experiences in school.
It seems pretty clear that as people come out at younger and younger ages, there is no experience more universal than going to school in a climate that is hostile to LGBT people. Almost 75% of LGBT students have been personally targeted for harassment at least once in the last year because of their sexual orientation, over 1/3 were physically harassed at least once in the month before they took the survey, 1/6 were subject to a serious physical assault, and most of these incidents go unreported because students do not believe any intervention would occur. Most disturbingly, over half of all students have heard some kind of anti-LGBT comments from teachers or school staff. Most kids say they attend schools that have some kind of anti-LGBT policy or practice codified in some way.
2) “It gets better” is more than just a video – we know what works to prevent bullying!
One of the benefits of a big nationwide survey, though, is that we also know that there are places where these things don’t happen. We know how to turn things around. We know that students who go to schools with GSAs are 30% more likely to feel safe in school. We know that students who see positive representations of LGBT people in the curriculum are almost twice as likely to say their classmates are accepting. We know that if students have many supportive teachers, they earn higher grades. And we know that when schools have comprehensive anti-bullying policies that specifically prohibit bullying on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, teachers are over three times more likely to intervene when anti-LGBT bullying incidents are reported.
3) Students and parents have to know what their rights are in order to advocate for themselves.
Buried in this report is something I find pretty astonishing: Only about 10% of students report that they go to a school that has an LGBT-inclusive anti-bullying policy, but we know from other research that about 48% of the US population lives in states that have laws prohibiting bullying on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in K-12 schools. If only a tiny number of students even know that the law where they live is meant to protect them, we clearly have a problem of education here.
Education is more than just arithmetic and history and diagramming sentences. The hidden curriculum we learn in school – the set of expectations we internalize regarding the way we treat each other, and the way we think we deserve to be treated – often has far more subtle and lasting effects on us than mastering French or memorizing who was President in what year. We have a long way to go to ensure that every child can benefit from the safe learning environment to which they’re entitled. The work GLSEN has done for the last 15 years in recording and quantifying the experiences of LGBT kids – both good and bad – will teach us how to get there.
by Matthew Patterson, Ph.D.
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