US Parents direct more threats toward school administrators than teachers

Study finds verbal aggression against school staff is prevalent but largely unreported

Ohio State University

WeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

COLUMBUS, Ohio — In K-12 schools across the country, administrators are tasked with keeping everyone safe. New research shows they may be the most in need of protection.

In a study published this week in Psychology of Violence, researchers surveyed school personnel prior to the onset of COVID-19, during the height of COVID restrictions and after most restrictions had been lifted, and their findings surprised them: Administrators were more likely than teachers or school mental health professionals to experience verbal and threatening aggression from parents. After restrictions lifted, 77% of administrators reported such experiences, nearly 3.5 times the rate reported by teachers.

The research was led by Eric Anderman, a professor of educational psychology and vice provost for regional campuses at The Ohio State University. He and colleagues have conducted a number of related studies as members of the American Psychological Association (APA)’s Task Force on Violence Against Teachers and School Personnel.

“We didn't fully expect such a pattern to emerge,” Anderman said. “A lot of us went in with an assumption, including me, that it would be mostly the teachers — they’re the ones who have the most direct contact with students every day.”

The data show that parental aggression against school personnel never went away, even during the height of COVID restrictions. When most schools switched to remote learning, 42% of administrators still reported experiencing verbal or threatening aggression from parents, and rates climbed even higher after schools reopened.

For Anderman, the issue is personal. As a high school teacher early in his career, he experienced a verbal threat from a student and didn’t feel supported by his school’s administration. “That always stuck with me,” he said. “Whenever I write about it, it resurfaces.”

Anderman’s research focuses primarily on academic motivation, which is how he became involved with the APA Task Force nearly two decades ago. Past research from the group found that 49% of teachers nationwide considered quitting or transferring jobs as the result of violence and threats made against them, and that violence against teachers is higher in schools that focus on grades and test scores than in schools that emphasize student learning. 

Although school personnel experience physical assaults, the new study focused on verbal aggression and threats, which a 2022 meta-analysis found to be more commonplace in schools. The researchers measured eight specific types, including obscene remarks or gestures, intimidation, identity-based slurs, verbal threats, bullying, public humiliation, cyberbullying and sexual harassment.

After pandemic restrictions were lifted, more than 1 in 4 teachers said a parent had publicly humiliated them, and more than 1 in 4 reported being cyberbullied. For administrators, more than 4 in 10 were verbally threatened, and around 1 in 5 reported being publicly humiliated or cyberbullied.

The scope of the problem becomes clearer when educators are given the opportunity to describe their experiences anonymously. In earlier research, the task force collected around 3,000 written accounts from teachers describing the worst incidents they had experienced.

“The stuff they told us — you can’t make this stuff up,” Anderman said. “People said things like, ‘Thank you for asking. Nobody ever asked.’ It was therapeutic for some of them.”

Despite how common these experiences are, Anderman describes them as a “silent epidemic” because there is currently no national system for tracking or reporting aggression against school personnel, and it receives little media attention. In addition, many educators don’t report incidents for fear of looking weak or incapable of managing their classrooms. This silence has consequences for the quality of education students receive and for the ongoing national teacher shortage.

There’s good news, though. The study found that maintaining positive relationships between parents and school personnel and providing support for teachers, administrators and mental health professionals at the school and community levels all help reduce parental aggression. School level factors, such as strong administrative support and effective disciplinary policies, were associated with less aggression at all three time points, and community-level factors, such as perceived district investment in education, also made a difference.

The researchers recommend implementing tiered systems of support for all school personnel — including classroom, school and community training — to foster a healthier, safer climate for everyone. The study also noted the importance of proactive and positive communication from school employees to parents. This resonated with Anderman, who still remembers the time his ninth-grade Spanish teacher called his mother — not to report a problem, but to say he was doing well in class. “It made my day,” he said. “But it’s the only time I ever remember it happening.”

Co-authors include Andrew Perry, Hyun Ji Lee and Adriana Martinez-Calvit from Ohio State; Susan D. McMahon from DePaul University; Frank C. Worrell from the University of California, Berkeley; Linda A. Reddy from Rutgers University; Andrew Martinez from Hunter College; Dorothy L. Espelage from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and Ron A. Astor from the University of California, Los Angeles. The research was supported by the American Psychological Association.

#

Contact: Eric Anderman, anderman.1@osu.edu

Written by Elizabeth Weinstein, weinstein.137@osu.edu   

---

Journal

Psychology of Violence

DOI

10.1037/vio0000697 

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Parental verbal and threatening aggression against administrators, teachers, and school mental health personnel.

Article Publication Date

6-Jul-2026

‘God commands us not to kill’: Faith leaders protest 50 years of executions

WASHINGTON (RNS) — On the anniversary of a Supreme Court ruling reinstating the US death penalty, faith leaders, those affected by murder and activists organize to call for an end to the death penalty. But religion has also been present in support for capital punishment.

Activists participate in an annual “Starvin’ for Justice” demonstration against the death penalty outside the Supreme Court, in Washington, Wednesday, July 1, 2026. (RNS photo/Aleja Hertzler-McCain)

Aleja Hertzler-McCain and Chloe Landen
July 2, 2026 

RNS

WASHINGTON (RNS) — In her first years attending a fast marking the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that resumed the modern-day death penalty in the United States, SueZann Bosler was still on medication to treat the effects of being stabbed in the head by the same man who murdered her father, the Rev. Bill Bosler, in 1986.

To honor the wishes of her father — a Church of the Brethren minister in Florida who was against the death penalty — Bosler worked for a decade to commute the death sentence of the man who killed her father and injured her, despite initially struggling to forgive him. “ It saved my life, forgiveness,” she said.

On Thursday (July 2), the 50th anniversary of the 1976 Gregg v. Georgia decision that reignited the modern era of the death penalty in the country, Bosler is on her fourth day of fasting. She has been taking shifts as part of the “Starvin’ for Justice” anti-capital punishment protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court to try to convince passersby to join her in opposition as temperatures climb above 100 degrees.



But the solidarity of about 85 protesters involved makes the time joyful, Bosler told RNS, because she’s often the sole person protesting outside the Florida Supreme Court.

In the 50 years since the Gregg decision, faith-based opposition to the death penalty has been a cornerstone of successful abolition and commutation campaigns — even as religious Americans as a whole tend to support the death penalty, data suggests.

“Faith leaders have been instrumental” in death penalty abolition in New Jersey, New Mexico, Connecticut, Virginia and several other states, according to Abraham Bonowitz, the executive director of Death Penalty Action and co-founder of L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty.

Abraham Bonowitz, of the group Death Penalty Action, leads a demonstration outside the Capitol in Montgomery, Ala., on Monday, June 8, 2026, to oppose an upcoming execution in Alabama. (AP Photo/Kim Chandler)

Bonowitz also credited faith leaders like the Rev. Sharon Risher, whose family members were murdered at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, with successfully pressuring President Joe Biden to commute the sentences of 37 people on death row in the last days of his presidency. Emanuel’s shooter was not among those commutations.

“God commands us not to kill,” said Art Laffin, an organizer of the Starvin’ for Justice protest and member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker community. “It’s not an option, it’s a command.”



Laffin, who has publicly prayed for the man who murdered his brother, Paul, said that on the cross Jesus was “given the death penalty of his day” but put “into practice the command to love your enemies” by asking God to forgive his killers. “The best way to honor my brother is to work for the prevention of violence,” he said.
RELATED: Faith groups join other death penalty opponents in new campaign

Executions in the U.S. surged last year, largely driven by an increase in Florida, and religious death penalty abolitionists are feeling renewed energy and searching for any openings they can find to prevent executions.

The death sentence remains a legal punishment in 27 states. Of those, four states — California, Pennsylvania, Oregon and Ohio — have instated execution moratoriums in the last few years. In the 23 states where the death penalty remains, it continues to emerge as a topic of vociferous debate, especially amid criticism over botched executions.

Protesters against the death penalty gather in Terre Haute, Ind., July 15, 2020. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

Currently, the federal death penalty applies to all 50 states but is rarely used. Since 1988, there have been 16 fed­er­al exe­cu­tions, 13 of which occur­red in a six-month peri­od between July 2020 and January 2021.

In Sacramento on Tuesday, faith leaders and activists delivered petitions from more than 25,000 people urging California Gov. Gavin Newsom to commute the sentences of all those on death row in the state, alongside 565 LED candles representing their lives.



Faith-based activists are also ramping up pressure on Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to commute sentences as his term ends this year. Bonowitz said DeWine sometimes attends Mass at the same Columbus parish as his wife, Bonowitz said. The church, St. Catherine, prays for the abolition of the death penalty at every Mass. A spokesperson for the Diocese of Columbus did not confirm or deny those prayers when reached by email.

Last month, DeWine, who had earlier in his career sponsored a bill to reinstate the death penalty in Ohio, called for state lawmakers to abolish the death penalty. Despite pressure, he has commuted only one of the state’s more than 100 death penalty sentences to life in prison without parole.

In Florida, Catholic bishops have written repeatedly to Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is Catholic, asking him to stay the executions of 22 people in the last year. They recently urged DeSantis to prevent the execution of Dusty Ray Spencer, 74, who last week became the oldest person executed in Florida’s modern history. Faith-based activists have also elevated the voice of Ron McAndrew, a former Florida prison warden who says he is haunted by men he executed.

SueZann Bosler, center left, and Art Laffin, right, pose at a “Starvin’ for Justice” demonstration against the death penalty outside the Supreme Court, in Washington, Wednesday, July 1, 2026. (RNS photo/Aleja Hertzler-McCain)

In the nation’s capital, the activists hope to mark the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision by appealing to passersby and the consciences of the justices inside, many of whom are Catholics and have issued decisions advancing the death penalty.

The Rev. Jack Sullivan, Jr., a Disciples of Christ pastor and the brother of a murder victim, Jennifer, told RNS the anniversary “confronts people of goodwill across the country, and particularly people of faith, who believe in the powers of hope and life and love and redemption.”

Like Bosler and Laffin, Sullivan is part of Journey of Hope, a national anti-death penalty organization led by family members of murder victims.

Among the advocates fasting are also those who minister to those on death row. Maureen Bibby, a Catholic from Tennessee, said she’s “become best friends” with the man she visits on death row.

“It’s the only place in the world where you are known only by the worst thing you’ve ever done,” Bibby said. “These are human beings.”
RELATED: Supreme Court stops execution of inmate who became a ministry leader on death row

On July 2, 1976, in a 7-to-2 decision, the Supreme Court ruled capital punishment did not violate the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The decision was a dramatic reversal of the court’s 1972 ruling in Furman v. Georgia, which had halted executions nationwide.

Since Gregg v. Georgia, “1670 people made in God’s image and likeness have been executed,” Krisanne Vaillancourt Murphy, executive director of Catholic Mobilizing Network, an anti-death penalty organization, said in a statement to RNS.

Vaillancourt Murphy added that more than 200 people on death row have been exonerated since 1973 — “a sobering reminder that our criminal legal system is fallible, and that the death penalty is irreversible.” Perjury, false accusations and official misconduct are the leading causes of wrongful convictions, the advocacy group Equal Justice Initiative has found.



In the history of capital punishment, Black Americans have been disproportionately sentenced to death, especially when the crime involves white victims. The majority of state executions since 1976 have occurred in the U.S. South. As a result, several scholars and activists have deemed capital punishment “a direct descendant of lynching” and racial oppression.

“The country has had and continues to have racism flowing in the groundwaters of our land,” Sullivan said, “and it certainly affects the criminal justice system and the handing down of sentences, including and especially death sentences.”

Religion has also been present in support for capital punishment. A 2021 Pew Research Center report found that a majority of religiously affiliated U.S. adults, especially Protestants, favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder — as do a majority of all Americans, per the survey.

NEW: Bring more puzzles and play to your week with RNS Games

In advocating for death sentences, some prosecutors have delivered closing remarks including scriptural quotes such as Leviticus 24:17, Genesis 9:6 and Exodus 21:12 that call for the death penalty as punishment for murder.

Yet Bonowitz, who is Jewish, said those who base their support for the death penalty on Hebrew Scripture must look at rabbinic interpretations, which argue “the death penalty exists” but humans “cannot be trusted with this power to execute.”

Shane Claiborne, the author of “Executing Grace: How the Death Penalty Killed Jesus and Why It’s Killing Us,” told RNS, “The death penalty wouldn’t stand a chance in America without the support of Christians.”



Claiborne, co-founder of Christian social justice group Red Letter Christians and a key figure in the religious left, said he saw opportunities to work with conservatives on the issue. “There’s something deeper that should connect us, which is this profound sense that no one’s beyond redemption and that our government is not infallible, so we shouldn’t entrust it with this power,” he said.

Sister Helen Prejean, part of the congregation of St. Joseph and an anti-death penalty advocate, said in a recent video reflecting on the 50th anniversary of the Gregg decision, “I think it is the most terrible decision the Supreme Court has made after Dred Scott,” which ruled enslaved people were not U.S. citizens.

Prejean is known globally for her decades-long crusade against capital punishment. Her campaign has included making personal appeals to both Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis.

Francis ordered a change to the catechism of the Catholic Church in 2018, which positioned capital punishment as “inadmissible” and “an attack on the inviolability and dignity” of people.

Sullivan, the Disciples of Christ pastor, also acknowledged that central biblical figures such as Moses, David and Saul “committed murder” but “were transformed by the power of God” and became pillars of the Chrisitan faith. “How do we know that on death row, there isn’t another Moses or Esther or David, or Mary or Saul?” he asked.

The 50th anniversary of Gregg falls just days before America celebrates its 250th birthday. For Sullivan, the close proximity of the two milestones gives the nation the opportunity to reflect.



“I expect the state to rise above homicide,” Sullivan said. “I expect the state to adopt non-lethal methods of holding people accountable.”

What is Wrong with the American Left: the Abandonment of Class

David Schultz

 June 8, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Introduction: A Tradition That Forgot Itself

I write these essays not as an enemy of the left but as someone who believes it has lost the thread of its own best tradition. That tradition is the democratic socialism of Eduard Bernstein, who tied the classless society to the ballot rather than the barricade, and of Michael Harrington, whose The Other America forced a prosperous country to look at its own poor.

That tradition began with a sharp diagnosis. Karl Marx argued that capitalism rests on a class relationship in which those who own the means of production extract surplus value from those who own only their labor power. One did not have to accept the inevitability of revolution to accept the centrality of class, and Bernstein did not. He kept the analysis and changed the method, betting that universal suffrage could be turned into economic democracy.

That bet defined what the old left stood for. It was not merely taxing the rich and redistributing the proceeds, the liberal project of John Stuart Mill and later John Maynard Keynes, but democratizing economic decision making itself. The New Deal and the Great Society were humane achievements, yet they were state capitalism for the benefit of the many and left the boardroom intact. The democratic socialist asked a harder question: who decides what gets built, where capital flows, and whose work disappears?

Put most simply, the socialist project was about extending democracy into the economy. We accept that the people should govern the state, that no king or boss may rule a polity by private right. The socialist asked why the same principle stops at the factory gate, why the firm that shapes a person’s waking life should remain a little monarchy exempt from the democratic rule we demand everywhere else.

Robert Dahl made exactly this argument in his Preface to Economic Democracy, reasoning that if democracy is justified in governing the state it must be justified in governing economic enterprises. Charles Lindblom, in Politics and Markets, showed why this matters in practice. Business occupies a privileged position in any market democracy, holding a structural veto over public choice because it controls investment and employment, so that governments of every party must bend to its needs. The economy is not a neutral zone outside politics; it is where the decisive power lies, and to leave it undemocratic is to leave democracy itself half finished.

What now passes for left or progressive politics in the United States has quietly abandoned this question. The story runs through two ruptures. The first was the New Left of the 1960s, the world of Students for a Democratic Society, which rightly insisted that race, gender, war, and culture could not be reduced to economics, but which also grew suspicious of unions and of class as such.

The second rupture, theorized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, went further and rejected class as the privileged ground of politics altogether. What I will call the new new left inherited both ruptures and added a sociological twist. It migrated from the working class to the college educated professional, comfortable enough to treat economic security as settled and to make politics a matter of culture and symbol.

These five essays that will following over the next five weeks take up five faults. The first takes up the fault from which the others follow: the abandonment of class as the organizing principle of a serious left, and the unprecedented inequality that has come with it. The second takes up the capture of the movement by a professional and managerial stratum that no longer shares the condition of those it claims to speak for. The third takes up the drift from material politics into symbolic politics, where an agenda of identity and status alienates the very people a majority would need.

The fourth takes up the indifference to whether government actually works, which betrays Robert Dahl’s insight that democracy is judged by its institutions. The fifth takes up the first rule of politics, which is to build coalitions broad enough to win elections and take power, and the vulnerability to a culture war the left’s opponents are happy to wage. Throughout, I hold the present against the standard of Harrington and Bernstein, of Eugene Debs and Dorothy Day. They believed, as I do, that the point of the left is to assert that capitalism does not get to dictate how democracy operates, but the reverse.

The Abandonment of Class

The founding insight of the socialist tradition was that the central conflict of modern society is a relation, not a sentiment, between those who own the means of production and those who own only their labor. That relation, and not any catalog of identities, was the ground on which the left proposed to build a majority and to extend democracy into the economy. This frame, which even the revisionists who broke with Marx on tactics kept intact, the new new left has largely walked away from, and it did so with intellectual help.

The decisive text is Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, in which Laclau and Mouffe argued that class is not the privileged subject of history and that political identities are constructed through discourse rather than handed up from the economic base. They rejected what they called the essentialism of the Marxist tradition, the assumption that workers form a coherent agent with shared interests. In its place they offered a radical and plural democracy stitched together from many separate struggles, each with its own logic, none foundational.

Here I want to draw a distinction the contemporary left routinely blurs, between class on one side and socioeconomic status and identity on the other. Status is a gradient, a matter of where one sits on a ladder of income, education, and prestige, and it sorts people into higher and lower without naming why the ladder exists. Identity is a category of recognition, a matter of who one is taken to be. Class is neither: it is a relationship to the means of production, a structural position that explains the ladder rather than merely measuring it. To speak of status is to describe inequality; to speak of class is to explain it, and only an explanation can be acted upon.

The deeper failure of status and identity is that they cannot achieve universalism. A politics of identity addresses people as members of particular groups, and however many groups it enumerates it never arrives at the whole. Class alone is universal, because nearly everyone who must work for a living stands in the same basic relationship to those who own.

And here is the point the identitarian left has lost. The great power imbalances it rightly cares about, racism and sexism above all, are not free floating cultural attitudes to be corrected by recognition; they are rooted in and sustained by economic power. Racism was built to justify the extraction of cheap and unfree labor, and the subordination of women was bound up with unpaid domestic work and exclusion from the wage. The discrimination is real and has its own cruel life, but its engine is economic, and a politics that treats it only as attitude and representation will tinker with the symptom while leaving the engine running. A class politics that named the economic root would strike at racism and sexism more deeply than any amount of symbolic recognition.

It is worth asking where the abandonment of class came from, and the honest answer implicates the very people who theorized it. Much of socialism’s twentieth century trouble was its capture by intellectuals, by the proverbial armchair socialist who theorized class away in favor of post-material concerns. It is easy to declare that class no longer organizes politics from the comfort of a tenured chair where one’s own economic security is assured and the daily reality of wage labor is something read about rather than lived.

The worker timed on the warehouse floor does not need a seminar to be told that class is real; he feels it in his body at the end of a shift. The professor who pronounces class obsolete is generalizing from a vantage almost no worker shares. This is not an argument against intellectuals, who built much of the tradition, but against a particular vice: mistaking the preoccupations of the comfortable for the condition of the many, and dressing that mistake in the language of sophistication. The post-material turn was a luxury belief, affordable only to those for whom the material question had already been answered.

Abandoning class also shrinks the kind of demand the left makes. When class is central, the demand is structural: democratize the firm, strengthen the union, put investment under democratic control. When class recedes, the demands shrink to the narrowly redistributive, which leaves ownership untouched, or the purely cultural. Both are easier to grant than the demand for power, which is precisely why the system tolerates them.

The consequences are not abstract; they are written in the distribution of income. Abandoning class is among the chief reasons the gap between rich and poor in the United States has reached levels without precedent in modern American history. The retreat from class politics tracks almost exactly the era in which inequality returned to and then surpassed levels last seen on the eve of the Great Depression, with the pay of the top one percent rising many times faster than the wages of most workers. When no major force in politics fights on class terms, the owners of capital face no organized resistance, and the result is exactly what one would predict: they take more, and the gap widens.

A left fighting on class terms would have made this the central scandal of the age. Instead the party that should have been the working class’s instrument made its peace with the order producing those numbers, embracing from the 1990s a Third Way accommodation with neoliberalism: deregulation, financialization, and trade deals such as NAFTA that treated the dislocation of workers as a price worth paying. Having abandoned the class frame, it had no alternative to offer, only a gentler administration of the same system, and the predictable result was the slow defection of the working class itself.

None of this requires romanticizing the old proletariat or pretending the factory floor of 1910 can be conjured back. The working class has changed; it is more female, more diverse, more likely to serve coffee than to forge steel. But that is an argument for redescribing class, not discarding it. The cleaner, the coder, and the contingent adjunct all stand in a recognizable relationship to those who own and direct, and a left that cannot name that relationship has given up the one thing that made it a left.

David Schultz is a professor of political science at Hamline University. He is the author of Presidential Swing States:  Why Only Ten Matter.