“We're on the front line”: a mixed methods study on sex educators' work navigating controversy as street level bureaucrats

Comprehensive sex education (CSE) holds vital opportunity for students to learn how to make informed decisions for their sexual and relational health, but CSE policies also tend to attract heated debates and controversy. Even when CSE standards are instated, these policies are only as effective as their implementation, and policymakers rarely discuss teachers as the primary implementors of sex education legislation. This study aimed to better understand teachers’ experiences implementing sex education policies in communities where the policy may be seen as controversial. To do so, I used the street level bureaucracy theoretical framework to conduct a mixed methods study on the Washington Healthy Youth Act, a CSE policy that was voted on and approved by state voters. The analyses included county-level statistical analysis of voters and community characteristics as well as interviews with Washington public school sex education teachers. This study found that the higher proportion of conservative voters in a county, the more likely it was that county opposed the school-based comprehensive sex education policy. This suggests a highly politicized nature of sex education that created challenges for the public school sex education teachers in this study. I referred to those challenges as “perceived policy controversiality” and posit it as an addition to the street level bureaucracy framework. Despite the divisiveness of the CSE policy at the voter level, teachers largely managed their classrooms and school communities with relatively low backlash. Ultimately, this study finds hope that teachers can successfully implement CSE policy even in controversial spaces.