We launched the Public Schooling Battle Map to illustrate that requiring people with diverse views and backgrounds to fund single systems of government schools fosters conflict, not unity. We also hoped that the map would help reporters and members of the public dealing with values- and identity-based conflicts in their public schools discover other places that had faced similar conflicts and learn how they might have been resolved. Over time, especially as conflicts rose in number and intensity around 2021, it became clear that the map could, to some extent, be used to track trends in education culture war. It also started to be utilized in research. Given these developments, and that tracking trends and systematic analysis were not part of the original intent of the map, we provide the following timeline of the map’s evolution. It is important that those who might use the map to draw conclusions about trends know when data collection, rather than culture war intensity, might have changed, as well as understand some of the features of the map that have been added over time. That said, the timeline is not exhaustive; because the intent was not systematic analysis, we might simply have forgotten some changes made over the years.

• 2005-06 School Year – Conflicts collected for Cato Policy Analysis no. 587, “Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict.”
• January 2007 – “Why We Fight” is published.
• 2007–2014 – Continue to collect conflict stories, eventually with a possible database in mind.
• January 2014 – Public Schooling Battle Map is launched.
• 2017 – Specific dates, rather than just years, are added to the collection. This is to fill the “Latest Battles” box at the top of the Map, but it also enhances possible data analysis.
• 2022 – Choice​Me​dia​.tv, which included a news aggregator that was used for conflict collection, ceases operation. Additional Google alerts are combined with some longstanding ones in response. This likely increases the number of battles captured.
• January 2023 – Start including news article URLs for users of back-end data to more easily dive deeper into conflicts.
• January 2026 – Timeline added to Battle Map webpage.