A policy proposed by the Laboratory Schools’ top administrator about how teachers present contentious issues in classrooms has prompted concerns from teachers. The policy on viewpoint neutrality aims to eliminate bias in how teachers present difficult topics, encouraging students to come to their own conclusions.
Dr. Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, interim director of schools, based the policy on a document published last school year by Lab’s freedom of expression steering committee that encourages teachers to teach students “how to think, not what to think.”
“With respect to contested issues, the place of the school is not to tell our students implicitly or explicitly what they should think,” Dr. Bueno de Mesquita said. “It is to help them and empower them to figure out how to think about those issues for themselves.”
But this is not how all faculty view the policy. Some teachers view it as demeaning and say it is undefined and reflects misunderstandings.
“My impression, initially, was that it felt like a very punitive document,” Ana Romero, fine arts department chair, said. “Kind of like a gut punch to everyone, and specifically teachers. There was a lot of language that I felt was problematic in the document.”
Some faculty raised concerns about gray areas determining what counts as a contentious issue and how to navigate the nuances.
“Reading through the guidelines, it seems extremely challenging to me to figure out where to draw the line,” Matt Martino, science department chair, said. “It’s easy to put things into the contentious category, but then, on personal expression and like where we can share opinions, it’s harder to tell.”
Ms. Romero argues that the administrators who wrote the guidelines do not fully understand what is going on inside of the classroom, adding that other teachers agree with her. She said that to assume students’ personal thoughts would sway so easily is to underestimate the students.
“It has come up from students, and I’m talking specifically about high school students saying that ‘We do think for ourselves!’” Ms. Romero said. “I think there is a little bit of the idea that students do listen to their teachers, but at the end of the day they make up their own minds.”
Dr. Martino agrees with Ms. Romero that Lab faculty have expertise teaching students of all ages about contentious issues.
“We have actual people who have decades of experience educating this age range, and maybe we need to have conversations by division about how to talk about it,” Dr. Martino said. “That seems much more sensible than trying to build a policy that is coming from the University of Chicago’s viewpoint that is then going to apply to everyone.”
The policy stemmed from the UChicago review of Lab conducted during the 2024-25 school year. Dr. Bueno de Mesquita chaired the review committee prior to being named interim director in November.
He said, “As a part of the process of the review, we learned some things about the ways in which various sorts of contested social issues were being talked about inside Lab and in Lab education. I wouldn’t say that as a result of the review, something about the policy or the standards changed. I would say that that got us thinking about the extent to which Lab’s approach to those things and the university’s sort of broader philosophical approach to how we talk about and think about contested issues were lined up or not.”
History teacher Christy Gerst, the current chair of the freedom of expression steering committee, has spent time contrasting the steering committee’s policy that was published in 2025 with Dr. Bueno de Mesquita’s policy.
“My attention when the document came out was trying to unpack the distance between our committee report and the university report, trying to see where it was different, where it was more expansive and also where it was more restricted,” Ms. Gerst said, later citing that the new policy has broad guarantees.
Dr. Bueno de Mesquita wants to use the viewpoint neutrality policy to promote open discourse among students in the classroom. By getting rid of the teacher’s opinion on contested issues, he hopes students will feel more comfortable expressing their own opinions.
“The idea of a school where students are not arguing about politics or arguing about public policy or arguing about values, is totally anathema to me,” Dr. Bueno de Mesquita said. “So, if anything, my goal is that those conversations in the classroom will be more wide ranging, more expansive, and happen more often, precisely because students feel more empowered to speak their own minds.”
Despite Dr. Bueno de Mesquita’s hope, teachers may decide the policy will make it more difficult for educators to bring up contentious issues in the first place for fear of going outside the policy boundaries.
“Once it actually becomes a policy there is no way that it will not reduce discourse,” Dr. Martino said, “because we will be thinking about, ‘Gosh, is this thing too contentious? Do I have to all of a sudden be very careful about how I speak around this topic that I’d like to talk about?’”
The complex policy may deter teachers from trying to talk about contentious issues in the classroom.
“For some teachers, it might just be too hard to think about navigating one’s way with a controversial issue and you need to navigate through the policy,” Ms. Gerst said, “and maybe they will just throw up their hands and not do it.”
