In the past few years, the world has seemed to change faster than ever. Smartphones, AI, social media and the constant flow of information have transformed daily life. Yet one thing has barely changed: the history curriculum in K–12 schools. The world may be moving fast, but history textbooks are not.

The war in Iran shows how badly educators need to change the way we teach the past. We can’t begin with distant history — the 13 colonies, ancient Egypt or classical Greece — and expect students to figure out why any of it matters. We need to begin with the world students are living in now, with the headlines they already see every day. They need to understand what’s happening in Iran before they learn it was once the Persian empire. Once they understand the present, they can begin to understand why the story of how we got here matters.

History explains our nation’s politics, our institutions, our ideas and our wars. But why should students care about how we got to the modern world if they do not understand the modern world in the first place? It is hard to make sense of the past, or even care about it, if you do not understand the present.

And yet, America still teaches history from the colonial period or classical antiquity forward. Our curricula, though not our teachers, assume students will make the connection from past to present on their own. But the worldview of a 14-year-old, fresh out of middle school and getting most of their news from TikTok, will be incomplete at best.

Schools cannot begin with history without first asking what they know about the present: Do they know where Iran is? (.) What kind of government it has? How its economy works? Why the region matters geopolitically? If we asked, we would find that many students know very little about the wider world as it exists right now. That helps explain why they so often struggle to care about its history.

Because classrooms so often teach Ivan the Terrible and Alexander the Great in a vacuum, they get lackluster results. Scores in U.S. history have declined sharply, with just 13% of middle school students performing at grade level. Yet more than 75% of high school students following current events is important to them, and 93% say more opportunities to discuss current events in the classroom.

At our school, in the Bronx, we focus on computer science, technology and internships. But our mission is larger than that: to prepare students to navigate the economy and the world. A year ago, when we looked at our graduating seniors, we found that many knew little about the world they actually live in. That is why we revamped our 9th-grade history curriculum.

Before teaching U.S. and world history, we teach students about the world as it exists today. In 9th grade, they study geography, economic systems, governments and culture in the present. That way, they can understand history as an attempt to explain the world around them, not as a random collection of facts.

We examine major powers and regions — Iran, China, the U.K., Mexico, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria and the U.S. — and ask basic questions. How does each country’s economy work? What is its political system? How well does it serve the people who live there? What languages do people speak and what religions do they practice? How do states compete for power?

The result is that students have a framework for everything they learn later in high school.

So when federal food assistance was suspended a few months ago and students in my class were struggling to afford groceries, we turned that into a short study of federal systems and how different levels of government work. When the war in Iran began, our students already had baseline knowledge. I asked why they thought we were at war, and they talked about the strategic value of oil and the challenges of an authoritarian theocracy. They were able to think critically about what they saw on TikTok instead of simply absorbing it.

The crisis led to serious classroom conversations. Students were equipped with knowledge.

Rethinking how schools teach history takes on new urgency because social media now delivers global events to students instantly. They see what is happening in the world whether adults are ready for it or not. As educators, we have a responsibility to help them process that information with reason. We want them to think independently, not simply absorb what an algorithm feeds them.

That is especially important in an age of misinformation. It is also more engaging. When students do not see a connection between school and their own lives, absenteeism rises and disengagement follows. Starting from what is relevant to students’ lives and backgrounds is critical if we want to build students who are curious and eager to learn.

To my fellow educators, especially history teachers: I understand the hesitation. In a hyperpolarized political climate, teaching current events can be a scary and thankless task. But we have to be brave.

If our families and our students see that we are helping them make sense of what is happening in the world right now, they will remember why school matters and why our profession matters to our communities and our country. And if more people understand both the world we live in now and how it got this way, we may be able to educate a generation of leaders better prepared for the crises yet to come.

My first encounter was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Standing there, I realized how easily words like history and memory fail. The train tracks ran straight into the Nazi extermination camp and then simply stopped. Our guide said there was nowhere else to go. In New York City, trains mean movement: getting home, staying connected, continuing life. At Auschwitz, they carried people into death.

What stayed with me wasn’t just the scale of the violence but how deliberate it all was. About 80% of the people brought there were murdered within days, many immediately. The system was designed not only to kill, but to make killing efficient. That realization didn’t feel distant. It felt uncomfortably human.

As the trip continued, I began noticing how remembrance shows up — and how often it doesn’t. At the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, I learned about a synagogue that had been destroyed during the Holocaust, rebuilt years later and repurposed as a toy store. That decision didn’t sit right with me. Synagogues are not just buildings; they are spaces of identity and connection. It raised a question I couldn’t shake: When historical spaces are restored, who decides how they are remembered — and what responsibility comes with that decision?

Later, in Warsaw, we visited what remains of the Jewish Ghetto and saw a mural honoring six members of the Jewish resistance who died after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Their bravery gave hope to people who had almost none. Yet the mural honoring them wasn’t created until 2022 — nearly eighty years after their deaths. That delay troubled me. Remembrance shouldn’t have to wait decades to feel necessary.

As a Hispanic student who is not Jewish, this trip reshaped how I understand the Holocaust and its relevance today. I learned that antisemitism didn’t suddenly appear in the 1940s — it had deep roots, and difference was used as an excuse to exclude and dehumanize long before genocide followed. That pattern is not just “history.” It’s a warning.

People look different, worship differently, live differently. That diversity should never justify violence. And yet history shows how easily hatred grows when difference is normalized as a threat and memory is treated as optional.

This trip forced me to confront uncomfortable questions: Why did recognition take so long? Why are some stories remembered immediately while others fade? And what happens when remembrance becomes symbolic instead of intentional?

Poland has made important efforts to memorialize the Holocaust, and those efforts matter. But remembrance cannot stop at monuments. It must protect meaning, preserve truth and demand honesty. Otherwise, memory risks becoming something we admire instead of something that changes us.

This experience made me realize that remembrance is not passive. It requires participation — especially from those of us who did not inherit this history personally. If remembering becomes optional, history becomes fragile. But if remembrance is active, it becomes a responsibility.

I carry that responsibility with me now. And if I have the opportunity to share even a small part of what I learned, I will. Because remembrance isn’t just about never forgetting. It’s about never looking away.

For nearly two decades, Scott Kern has worked to make history feel more alive for Newark students. He does so through close readings of Fredrick Douglass’ Fourth of July speech or, most recently, by weaving artificial intelligence tools into his classroom.

Kern, the AI innovation lead and history department chair at North Star Academy’s Washington Park High School, teaches AP U.S. history to ninth and 11th graders. He joined North Star in 2007 and has spent the last decade at the charter network’s Washington Park campus.

Kern didn’t always envision himself in the classroom. In high school, he enrolled in a world history course instead of orchestra after realizing he had reached his full potential on the violin. That switch set the tone for his career. A standout teacher sparked his fascination for the past and “started a love affair with history that hasn’t abated since,” Kern said.

Now, in his 19th year of teaching, Kern reflected on the lessons that shaped him, why his favorite lesson still surprises him every year, and how AI is influencing what happens inside his Newark classroom.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

How and when did you decide to become a teacher?

I was certain I would do something with history as a ninth grader. In middle school, I played the violin and was in the orchestra, but it was pretty clear that I had peaked. So I had to meet with my guidance counselor to reconfigure my schedule and replace orchestra. That replacement class happened to be world history. That class and that teacher – Mr. Bentivegna – changed my life and started a love affair with history that hasn’t abated since. I majored in history in college and earned a bachelor of arts, then headed to graduate school to pursue a doctorate in history. One day, when I was at the library working on an esoteric paper for a graduate medieval history class, I started to wonder if this was really what I wanted to do with my life (the answer was “no”). I thought about the people who really changed my life and why, and it was my teachers. After that reflection, I finished my master’s degree, went for yet another master’s degree, and have been teaching history ever since.

What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why?

My favorite is our close reading of a portion of Frederick Douglass’ Fourth of July speech from 1852. I just love everything about it. You have one of the greatest speakers in American history, invited by a group of abolitionist women in New York to give a speech honoring American independence. I try to transport students there. We picture all of these women sitting in their seats and imagining that he is going to thank them and deliver this soaring speech about the Fourth of July and instead, it’s an excoriation. Abolitionists in 1852 are losing – America has just passed a fugitive slave law that endangers all African Americans, including Douglass himself, and slavery is becoming increasingly entrenched in American society.

We zoom out to consider Douglass’s purpose, audience, and word choice. Why would Douglass have come out so intensely in this way? Was this the right message for this audience at this moment in history? What can this tell us about how leaders of social movements try to effect change?

Students are absolutely enthralled every year. We only read a few paragraphs, but they always find something new that surprises. It’s a reminder that history is complicated and beautiful and that we need to bring it to life for students.

What’s something happening in the community that affects what goes on inside your classroom?

Artificial Intelligence is affecting Newark and pretty much every other community in America. I’ve been using AI tools with students for the last two years, such as custom chatbots that I’ve built to help students revise their writing and or debate ideas before class discussions.

The results so far have been really encouraging. Last year, I had my highest AP scores and pass rate ever. I’m also co-teaching an AI literacy class for seniors starting in January and hope to expand it next fall. The goal is not just to teach them how to use these tools, but how to think about them and the world in a humanistic way.

How do you approach news events in your classroom?

We often look at how history echoes the present. Sometimes it’s in the hook and close of class to engage students in the content and then connect it to broader events that will help them see the trends in history.

When we studied the Douglass speech example from earlier, we started off class with pictures of the American flag – one at an ICE protest in L.A. and another from a Fourth of July parade. Students reflected on how the symbol of the flag can evoke different meanings depending on the context. That helped students see how Douglass and his audience could experience the same holiday in very different ways.

Tell us about your own experience with school and how it affects your work today.

I was an underachiever and a procrastinator for a long time. Some great teachers tried to pull me along, but it never clicked for me. That experience makes me hyper-aware of students who are capable but aren’t intrinsically motivated. If my teachers had let me just float in that state, my life would be very different. I’d like to think I’m doing the same thing – trying to nudge students along to reach their potential.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received, and how have you put it into practice?

The best advice I ever got was from my father, who encouraged me to be committed to whatever I chose to do. That has framed much of my life since. I knew I wasn’t going to be the smartest or the fastest at anything, but I could control my effort. Over time, I was determined to commit to things and try to out-hustle everyone else. Teaching isn’t a competition, but it has required extraordinary levels of commitment over the years. I credit my father for instilling that drive in me.

What’s one thing you’ve read that has made you a better educator?

Reading Zaretta Hammond’s “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain” felt like a strong pedagogical approach to teaching that I believed in and had seen in class. Her explanation of how the brain’s amygdala shuts down when threatened makes higher-order learning nearly impossible. When students feel threatened, their brains shut off the ability to do meaningful learning. It spoke to me deeply and reinforced my belief that a physically and intellectually safe environment is important for meaningful learning.

How do you take care of yourself when you’re not at work?

Friends and family are my priority outside of work. We have family rituals that keep me grounded. Family dinner at the table with no devices is obligatory except on Friday, which is movie night. We spread a blanket on the floor for our kids, and we have dinner and a movie together. I also try to get together with a group of friends at least once a week, usually to play board games. I love that board games bring people together in an analog way that promotes dialogue and human connection.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Cinco de Mayo commemorates a Mexican victory over French invaders, but May 5, 1862, is also an important day for the United States.

On this day, our country was in the throes of the Civil War. Battles raged in Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky. If Napoleon III’s French army had been successful in Mexico, it might have spelled doom for the Union and their efforts to abolish slavery. The Confederates were actively seeking a European ally on their southern border, and some historians believe that Napoleon III would have advanced to the United States after taking Mexico. So when the Mexicans defeated the French at the Battle of Puebla (what we now call Cinco de Mayo), the Union celebrated.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

This related history is rarely taught in schools, but as a children’s author and historian, I knew I had to bring this moment alive for today’s students. Through a trio of time-traveling children and their intrepid quest to find a magic sword, my latest book tells the story of Cinco de Mayo as it needs to be told: as a triumph for freedom in all the Americas.

What students learn from Cinco de Mayo is that our democracy depends on other countries. When they know that history, they know that isolating our nation doesn’t put America first – it leaves us behind. We are all connected, and history teaches that the U.S. does best when we work with, and not against, our neighbors.

By designating English as the official language and renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the current administration makes Latin America seem distant and unfamiliar. But Cinco de Mayo reminds us that we shared a common vision of freedom with this region.

My young protagonists have a time-traveling aunt, who after the Battle of Puebla tells them about the victory’s layered meaning: “America can be a land of republics,” she says. “It means Latinos can govern themselves. It means the underdog can win.”

As my characters witness the strife unfolding in the United States and Mexico, one of them muses on her admiration for those who fought for a world “where kings and queens live in fairy tales, not in government houses.”

When we take a hemispheric approach to history — meaning when we study what was happening throughout the Americas and not just in one country — it makes sense why Cinco de Mayo is perennially popular. Early Cinco de Mayo parties in the United States displayed the flags of Mexico, the United States, Chile, and Peru, which were the leading republics at that time.

It is clear that we owe our freedom today to the soldiers and leaders who stood up to the threats of wealthy planters and a self-declared emperor from overseas. The Union army included many immigrants and children of immigrants as well as Black and Native American soldiers. And the Mexican army had soldiers of mixed heritage — mestizos — as well as Indigenous peoples. Those who fought for liberty were not a monolith, but they shared a democratic ideal.

The upper elementary and middle school years are the perfect time to learn about democracy. Kids this age generally feel restricted by grown-ups, so they intuitively understand the worth of independence. They get that monarchies are bad, and given how eager the students are to make their small voices heard, they understand that living in a democracy is precious.

In my recent trips to schools to read the book, I try to build on children’s instinctive sense of justice. When teaching them about France trying to recolonize Mexico, I remind them that the country had already become independent at the time of the incursion.

“That’s not fair!” at least one or two students in every school group shout. “Exactly,” I say, reinforcing the importance of the rule of law.

We cannot expect children to care about democracy if we never teach them about it in more than just an abstract way. But through fiction, we can take young readers to the most critical moments in history and show them the turning points that shaped the United States and nations around us. They will learn that wherever we are in the Americas, we depend on one another for our freedom.

In my own history classes in high school and college, I learned about many remarkable individuals whose actions, for better or worse, plotted our course forward. Although there are no state or federal requirements to teach history to very young children, it is integral to my preschool classroom.

I teach history because I want my students to understand how change really happens, a lesson that is becoming more critical with each passing day. I don’t teach history so that some 4-year-olds can rattle off important names and dates before they head to kindergarten. They would likely forget those names in a few months anyway. 

Nothing is as compelling to a child as another child’s story, so we explore history by learning about young people who helped create change. We focus on wonderful picture books about ,��,��, and , all children facing a society that did not recognize their value. Young children inherently understand this experience because not only do they identify with someone having less power than the adults around them, they are also keenly tuned in to issues of fairness.  

As we thumb through the book , the children always want to examine the illustration of 6-year-old Ruby  past a crowd of screaming white grown-ups holding pro-segregation signs. They ask about why the adults are so angry. They want to know how Ruby felt being the only kid there at that moment. And I ask them, “What would you do if you were there with her?”  

Their answers are thoughtful, powerful, and sometimes a little wild. Among my favorites is the child who said, “I’d give all the kids hammers, even the babies, and we’d hammer down that school and build a new one for everybody.” I love that even the babies are empowered in this re-imagining.  And this young child perfectly demonstrated the real key takeaway from all of my history lessons: there are no lone heroes.  It takes an organized community and some powerful leaders to make change.

The need to organize real people to work together and support one another through a difficult struggle is one that often gets lost in children’s media. Put a 4-year-old in a Batman t-shirt and they feel like they can do anything by themselves. And many history lessons inadvertently recreate those superhero narratives. 

There are extraordinary historical figures like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but when we lionize one person too much we turn them into superheroes, and superheroes aren’t real. Nobody has that much power all by themselves.  If history is just a series of superheroes, how can any of us regular folks hope to make any kind of difference?  

So we focus on the ways people help one another. We notice, together, that  in order to support the Montgomery bus boycott sparked in part by Claudette Colvin’s unwillingness to give up her seat months before Rosa Parks, and that MLK helped organize many other people to make that boycott happen. We notice that Judy Heumann organized many disabled people to protest effectively for equal rights, and that 9-year-old Sylvia Mendez was the central figure in the first court case to desegregate California schools, a ruling that paved the way for Ruby Bridges to bravely walk into an integrated school. 

We notice, our little classroom of very young people, that we all need help sometimes and that helping one another is one of the most powerful things we can do together. It takes the collective effort of many people, even the babies, to create change. As pressure increases in schools across the nation to erase these stories, I am more committed than ever to teaching the kind of history that ensures that these kids will make history of their own.

Can you tell fact from fiction online? In a digital world, few questions are more important or more challenging.

Can you tell fact from fiction online? In a digital world, few questions are more important or more challenging.

But a new book argues that the current approach remains deeply flawed. Though phonics instruction has emerged as a key component of reading lessons, stagnant NAEP scores, among other measures, suggest that something is missing — a focus on substantive knowledge, including detail-rich lessons in science and history. 

Author Natalie Wexler, whose 2019 book advocated a greater emphasis on these topics paired with explicit instruction, has said these principles are supported by cognitive science. A content-rich curriculum, she maintains, allows students to go deeper, helping information stick and building an academic foundation that allows them to write more easily, creating a kind of virtuous circle of reinforcement: The more they know, the better they can write; the better they can write, the more they can learn.

Six years later, Wexler is back with a new warning. In her book, , out Feb. 3. (pre-orders open today, Jan. 21), she says the benefits of improved reading instruction will go to waste if we don’t offer students a more vibrant, content-rich set of lessons to go along with it. 

She spoke recently with The 74’s Greg Toppo. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: Your book The Knowledge Gap came out in 2019. A lot has happened since then, including a pandemic and an explosion of interest in the science of reading, thanks in part, to the work of folks like . Would you say we’re in a better place in the knowledge discussion than we were in 2019?

Natalie Wexler: Yes, definitely. For one thing, there are now a number of knowledge-building curricula available that were not around when I was researching the book. There are more choices than there used to be. And although we don’t have really reliable data on what curricula are really being used, all indications are that more and more districts and schools are using those knowledge-building curricula. That’s been a very promising development. It’s still a minority, but certainly more than in 2019. Emily Hanford and other science of reading advocates have done a great service to the public and to the nation’s children by shining this spotlight on things that are problematic about typical phonics instruction. The risk is that it can lead, and has led in some places, to the assumption that if we just fix the phonics part of reading instruction, everything else is going to be fine. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. 

A lot of people see the science of reading as just “more phonics.” How do you describe this more comprehensive approach?

People outside the education world assume that schools are teaching social studies and science and all of those things. I have to do a lot of explaining when I talk about how we’re not building knowledge in school effectively. With The Knowledge Gap, the publishers expected that the audience would be primarily the general public and parents. But where it’s really taken off is among educators. And it’s because it’s a lot easier, certainly for elementary level and maybe some middle school level educators, to understand the argument, because they’re living what I’m describing: There isn’t much content in the elementary curriculum, and there is a lot of emphasis on teaching reading comprehension skills, making inferences as though they were abstract skills you can teach directly and apply generally. Many of them have seen that that doesn’t really work very well. 

As I was reading your book, it reminded me of some of the conversations I’ve had with Joy Hakim, who wrote the great series, A History of US and . Her books are favorites among people who are enlightened about this topic. One of the things she says is that we’re underestimating how much our kids can understand if they’re exposed to difficult material. Is that the right word, underestimating? 

“Underestimating” is the right word, and I use that a lot myself. But you have to be careful about what we’re underestimating. It is often assumed among educators that young children won’t be interested in history or can’t handle history because it’s just too abstract, too remote from their own experience. There’s no evidence to support that. And in fact, there’s anecdotal evidence that kids can get very interested in history.

I’ve seen this myself: second graders getting fascinated by the War of 1812. But at the same time, we’ve overestimated kids’ abilities sometimes to handle certain abstractions. I open The Knowledge Gap with a teacher who’s trying to teach kids the difference between a subtitle and a caption, which is abstract but not particularly interesting to them. They don’t get it. They want to know what’s going on in the picture. What is that shark eating? But the teacher feels that it’s more important. This is what her training in the curriculum has led her to do, to focus on the abstract difference between a caption and a subtitle.

You and I have both interviewed teacher in Baltimore, and I love what he tells you: He was initially skeptical that his students would like a Dust Bowl novel, , but as the drama unfolds, they’re hooked. I wonder what that tells you, not only about the topic, but about how he was able to approach it and make it come alive.

said that you can teach almost anything to a child of any age if you do it in a way that makes sense. Those weren’t his exact words, but if you engage kids, they will get interested in all sorts of things that have nothing to do with their own experience. If you basically tell them a good story, that’s the way you can teach history, science. This is what Joy Hakim does so beautifully in her work, both in history and science: telling stories that really hook kids, and then they learn a lot, almost effortlessly, along the way. 

There’s a lot of emphasis on having kids “see themselves” in what they’re reading, which is important. But it is at least as important to expand their horizons to other realms of experience. Fiction, novels especially, are a great way to do that. As Kyair said, when they learn that the main character’s little brothers died, they care. They care about this story and these characters. There’s also some evidence to show that this is the way empathy develops, through reading fiction about lives that are very different from our own.

In Chapter 3 of the new book, you talk about teachers colleges, and note that today’s teacher educators — that is, the people working in the colleges — have been shaped by “a system that devalues knowledge and prioritizes engagement.” In a way, you can’t blame teachers for this crisis.

Absolutely. It is no individual’s fault that we are where we are. It’s a systemic problem, so it’s not going to change overnight. It’s difficult, not just for teacher educators to step out of this system, but also the teachers themselves. If you’ve been teaching in a certain way for years in the sincere belief that you are doing a great job, and someone casts doubt on that, it’s a very difficult message to take in.

What really amazes me is how many teachers, despite the painfulness of the message, are nevertheless embracing it because they really care about the success of their kids. With teacher training, it’s going to be hard to change that overnight. We’re really trying to fix a broken system with the products of that system, which is very difficult. I don’t think we can rely on teacher training to change the system. Once teachers are on the job, we also need to continue communicating this message, doing training to undo some of the training they’ve gotten pre-service. 

Historically, teachers also haven’t learned much about cognitive science. Do you get a sense that’s improving?

As I say in the book, there are efforts. is an organization that is doing great work with some institutions of teacher training, but it’s going to be very slow. There are hundreds of programs that train teachers, and just a handful are signing up to bring their curricula in line with principles of cognitive science. Even within those programs, not every teacher is on the bandwagon. You can’t really, at the university level, control what goes on in the classroom. Professors are used to having a lot of autonomy. 

Let’s talk about writing. You’re the co-author of as well. Reading your new book, it seems that writing brings together a lot of your ideas. Can you talk a bit about the importance of writing?

Since I finished writing both of those books years ago, I have continued to think more about the relationship between reading and writing and learning in general. I’ve become more and more convinced that the combination of a content-rich curriculum and explicit, manageable writing instruction embedded in that curriculum can provide all the benefits of cognitive science-informed instruction, and possibly more. Without going into a lot of detail, we have evidence that when you write about what you’re reading or what you’re learning about, it enhances your learning. It enables you to retain the information better, it enables you to understand it better, and it enables you to think about it analytically.

The problem is that writing is really difficult. We have studies, like write-to-learn studies, where they have kids write about the content that they’re learning. Overall there’s a positive effect from that. But in one meta analysis, in 18% of these studies there was . In other words, kids writing about what they were learning actually retained less of it. It’s impossible to know why. But the reason is we sometimes ask kids to just write without giving them enough support, and that is cognitively overwhelming, so they don’t get the potential learning benefits. 

So what’s the key?

The key is to make writing manageable, not cognitively overwhelming, but still requiring some effort. The best way to do that is to start at the sentence level — because if writing is hard, then writing at length is only making it harder — and explicitly teach students how to construct sentences and eventually clear linear outlines for paragraphs and essays that are embedded in the content they’re learning about. If you do that, you’re having them engage in , which we know is a very powerful boost to retention of information. You’re also having them engage in elaboration, explaining what they’re learning about, giving examples, all of that. That has been shown to really help with comprehension. You’re familiarizing them in a powerful way with the complex syntax of written language, which can be a real barrier to reading comprehension.  

You say that content-rich curricula are under fire from both sides, the left and right. I love the anecdote where you visit a small town in Ohio where this group of parents objected to the use of the words “God” and “Goddess” in a second-grade unit on Greek mythology. You note, “It’s hard to imagine how children could truly understand Greek myths or ancient Greek culture without hearing those words.” I have two questions. Number one, how do we get out from underneath this? And number two, is there a way in which this is kind of a red herring? 

This is coming not just from the right and not just from the left. The same curriculum has been attacked, sometimes, from both sides for different reasons. What we need to fundamentally do is realize that compromise is essential, and it’s got to be compromise that doesn’t interfere with kids’ ability to learn. There’s been a lot of opposition from the right to teaching about Greek myths in a curriculum called . Sometimes it’s perceived as trying to proselytize about Greek myths or other religions, Buddhism, Hinduism. When school leaders have explained to the community, “No, this isn’t an attempt to convert kids to these other religions. It’s a part of teaching them about history and other cultures,” sometimes those controversies have been defused — not in every instance.

Another thing to bear in mind, though, is that sometimes the people who are protesting are not representative. They’re maybe a small but very vocal group of parents. You have to ask: Does it really make sense to deprive all students of exposure to some valuable information because a small group is protesting? Maybe there’s another way to handle it, some alternative texts or something for those kids. But fundamentally, everybody needs to realize that the curriculum is not going to align with your individual preferences about what you would like your kids to learn. And we have to find consensus. There’s more consensus than there appears to be, which kind of gets to your second question: The media have kind of elevated these conflicts. In many instances, there isn’t that much conflict.

Is there anything you see in the landscape that gives you hope that we are moving in the right direction?

For one thing, I have gotten many invitations to speak recently. The interest in this, at least from my limited personal perspective, is not dying down. It’s only growing. And that’s encouraging. There are other people taking up this message. I’m seeing the beginnings of a recognition that phonics instruction is important, but we may be overdoing it with all of the focus on it in some places — the one generalization you can make about American education is you can’t generalize, because who knows what’s really going on?

But in some places, schools are spending an hour a day on phonics and giving short shrift to some of these other important components of reading, like building knowledge. That really relates to reading comprehension. Even some of the people who have been in the forefront of the science of reading movement, like , have been saying this: Let’s not overdo it, because there’s an opportunity cost, and one of those opportunities that’s being lost is the chance to build a kind of knowledge that kids will need to read and understand the texts they’ll be expected to read in years to come.

, Michigan Democrats are pushing legislation they say would make history curriculums in K-12 public schools more culturally inclusive.

The most significant bill would require all public school districts in the state to include at least one unit of instruction a year on the histories of African, Latino, Arab, and Native Americans, among other racial and cultural groups, in their curricula. The lessons would be included in existing history classes by the 2027-28 school year and cover the discrimination the groups have faced and their fights for civil rights.

Another bill would require all teachers in the state complete cultural competency training that covers issues like implicit bias and the importance of inclusion in education.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

“Amidst the recent national wave restricting what can be taught in classrooms, we have the opportunity now in Michigan to support and stand with teachers who want to do right by their students and teach comprehensive and accurate history,” Henry Duong, who leads , a campaign that has advocated for inclusive history instruction since 2022, said in a prepared statement.

Rep. Ranjeev Puri, a Democrat from Canton who co-sponsored the legislation, said the new curriculum goes beyond teaching history.

“We are fostering empathy, cultural awareness, and the critical thinking skills our students need to thrive in an interconnected world,” he said.

but failed to move forward.

Despite that, the proposed curriculum was piloted in some schools this year. The Michigan Department of Education, or MDE, also began developing guidelines for the curriculum this year.

Here is what the package of bills would do:

• Require school districts ensure existing history classes include at least one unit of instruction on the histories of African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latino Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Caribbean Americans, Native Americans, Arab Americans, Chaldean Americans, North African Americans, and Jewish Americans. The requirement would begin in the 2027-28 school year and would apply to all public K-12 schools in the state.
• Require the lessons include contributions made by those communities, the discrimination they have faced, and advancements in their civil rights. The lessons would be crafted to be age appropriate.
• Call on the MDE to create instructional material that would be available to schools to use as guidelines for lessons.
• Require educators to receive cultural competency training, which would cover issues such as implicit bias, the importance of inclusion, and the struggles experienced by communities of color. The MDE would be required to create the professional development material and make it available to schools by June 2026.
• Require all educators who have contact with students to complete the training by the 2027-28 school year.
• Create a cultural history advisory board within the MDE to provide recommendations on the K-12 curriculum and professional development material. The members of the board would be appointed by the superintendent of public instruction and would include people from all of the communities represented in the proposed curriculum as well as educators, experts, and stakeholders.

Three of the bills in the package were introduced at the end of November in the Senate and the other three were introduced in the House this week. They have all been referred to education committees in the legislature.

The bills would need to clear several hurdles before becoming law by the end of the session.

Democrats are working to move their legislative priorities forward before the end of the year, .

The party’s other remaining legislative education goals include , , and .

This story was originally by Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Opponents of a that requires displays of the Ten Commandments in Louisiana classrooms point out that its language includes a quote attributed to one of the nation’s founding fathers that he didn’t actually say.

But that may not matter if a federal judge finds testimony one expert gave Monday in court irrelevant.

Those comments came Monday during arguments for a lawsuit that seeks to block the law from taking effect Jan. 1. U.S. District Judge John deGravelles, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, heard from a professor who called into question whether the Ten Commandments is a historical document that influenced America’s founding, as supporters of the law claim.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

While many see the legislation only for its provisions requiring classrooms to display a Ten Commandments poster, its other and perhaps more significant purpose, as evidenced in itself, is to try to establish an official record that ties the origins of U.S. law to a Protestant Christian doctrine. If its advocates succeed, the Louisiana law could revise a national historical record that has long supported the separation of church and state.

The problem is that some of what lawmakers placed into the legislation is flat out fake and based on myth, according to Steven Green, professor of law, history and religious studies from Willamette University, who testified on behalf of a group of parents challenging the constitutionality of the Louisiana mandate. The parents filed the lawsuit with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups.

Judge deGravelles heard arguments Monday on whether Green should be allowed to testify as an expert witness in the case and whether the court should grant a preliminary injunction to stop schools from complying with the new law before a decision is made or dismiss the case altogether.

The judge said he plans to rule on the matter by Nov. 15. School system leaders in the five parishes where the plaintiffs reside – East Baton Rouge, Livingston, Orleans, St. Tammany and Vernon — have agreed to hold off on placing the Ten Commandments posters in classrooms until mid-November and aren’t legally required to do so until Jan. 1, 2025.

The bill lawmakers passed earlier this year contains what it purports to be a quote from James Madison, the fourth president and the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution: “(w)e have staked the whole future of our new nation … upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.”

Green, an expert on First Amendment issues involving school prayer, religious displays and the separation of church and state, told the court the quote cannot be traced back to any primary historical documents related to Madison or any peer-reviewed research papers from scholars who have studied him.

Several different versions of the quote exist online as people continue to tweak it for various reasons.

Green went on to discount many of the other passages in the bill, noting that none of America’s founding documents — such as the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights — make any mention of the Ten Commandments. The same holds true for the Magna Carta, Mayflower Compact and Northwest Ordinance, all referenced in House Bill 71.

Calvinist and Protestant church leaders published the early school materials, such as the New England Primers and McGuffey Readers, referenced in the legislation before a public education system was well-established. Those materials referenced the Ten Commandments only two or three times among hundreds of lessons and were eventually omitted as education became more secular over time, Green said.

There were many different religions and religious sects in the early American colonies, so Madison and the other founders were very aware that any establishment of religion or indication of religious favoritism would cause discord, Green said. Some of the nation’s early criminal laws are indirectly based on the principles of the Ten Commandments and other philosophical writings, but the historical record shows no direct connection between any religion and the founding of America, he said.

“The influence is indirect, at best,” Green said. “We have a lot of founding myths, and this is one of them.”

The state, led by Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill, did not attempt to defend the historical accuracy of the claims within the bill while also not conceding to the plaintiffs’ version. Rather than try to refute Green’s testimony, the state’s lawyers argued that history is irrelevant at this juncture in the case, and the court should not allow Green to testify as an expert witness.

The attorney general’s team of lawyers also argued Green is biased because he previously served as the legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

While questioning Green under cross examination, the state’s lawyers tried several times to argue that he was testifying as a legal expert rather than a historian, but the judge seemed annoyed with the state’s lawyers for continuing to suggest it.

“He’s not qualified as a legal expert,” deGravelles said emphatically. “That’s what I said about three times.”

Other arguments from Murrill’s team could prove more persuasive at getting Green’s testimony struck from the record and winning a dismissal of the case. Her attorneys argued that the court should at least see the posters before ruling on whether to block the law.

The state’s lawyers pointed out that no case law exists in which a court has ever adjudicated an “imaginary” religious display that no one has seen.

“We think it’s premature,” Murrill told reporters following the hearing.

The plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that their clients include Catholic and Jewish families who shouldn’t be forced to look at Protestant scripture. The law requires the display of the Ten Commandments found in the King James Version of the Bible, which differs from the Catholic and Jewish scriptures. The state did not refute the claim that the posters are Protestant religious displays.

At one point in the hearing, the state’s lawyers presented an example of a Ten Commandments poster that would meet the minimum requirements set in the law. When the judge saw it, he noted the font was so small that it was nearly impossible to read from where he was sitting.

The law calls for the displays to be at least 11 inches by 14 inches.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on and .

But last week, instead of the wealthy audience members who usually applaud the Tony, Grammy and Pulitzer-winning show, hundreds of middle and high school students that looked like him screamed back in awe.

Brought to Manhattan from all over the country by the Gilder Lehrman Institute and Hamilton Education Program, low-income students celebrated winning EduHam’s annual competition that encourages learning history through original performance, like song or poetry. Dozens more, whose schools brought EduHam’s free arts-based founding era curriculum to classrooms this school year, attended via lottery. 

“It’s more immersive because when you see it here – all the little quips and the quotes, like in particular about the Federalist papers and how John Jay and Hamilton wrote very differently – it’s a more memorable way … to get involved with the learning process,” said Chloe Flood, a junior at Cesar Chavez High School in Arizona and one of this year’s winners. “It’s also a lot better to listen to a soundtrack than a textbook.”

For many young people in attendance, including Flood whose done theater for years, the May performance marked their first professional show. It also reminded them of what social and cultural nuances they yearn for in history class. 

“I’ve heard a lot of statistics and I’ve learned a lot of numbers but I’ve never learned how things affect the people who lived … how they coped with it, how they dealt with it, how they did it,” Flood said, adding she wishes history classes took time to teach the small, personal impacts. 

For her winning EduHam rap, Flood dove deep into the War of 1812, including the burning and reconstruction of the White House. Like Hamilton, she said, it tapped into the idea of “building something for yourself and the people around you.”

Other winning creations featured a 3-part spoken word on , with student winners coming from Alaska, Connecticut, Kentucky, Arizona, Maryland, New York and California. The broader curriculum, accessible for 6-12 graders, hopes to foster “deeper understanding of our nation’s heritage,” according to James Basker, GLI’s president.

For Justus Gaines, an aspiring animator and Maryland 8th grader who was recognized for a performance about Thomas Jefferson and the Whiskey tax, the curriculum and show brought emotions and nuance to the forefront – something he’d been missing from textbooks.

“But when you’re here, you go through all of the things that the characters are going through, you see everything on their faces, their reactions, their vocal inflections,” Gaines said, adding that this approach to learning history, which is more engaging for students, could be applied to other eras. 

“I wish we could talk more in depth about the civil rights era more than just Black History Month,” Gaines said. “It’s something that should go throughout the year because it affected a lot of the things back then and even today.”

Responding to a student question during an aftershow panel, stage actor Stanley reminded students how unearthing history’s personal stories can make moments resonate and empower people in new ways. 

He’d auditioned for Hamilton his senior year of college for months, without hearing much back in between. He experienced homelessness during that period. 

“Every time I’m able to do [“My Shot”], it’s just the persistence and the perseverance that you have to go through and remembering, hey, if you just keep going, if you remember why you’re here, you can just keep doing it – just don’t throw away your shot.”

As a small illustration of her long, idiosyncratic writing career, Joy Hakim likes to tell the story of a chance encounter in an Oakland elevator.

On the way down after a speaking engagement, a woman handed her a slip of paper — it contained the phone number of her son’s private school. He and his classmates, she said, could really benefit from their school swapping out its traditional history textbooks for a set of Hakim’s.

Asked who she was, the woman admitted that she was a representative of one of the big publishing houses.

“I was appalled,” Hakim remembered. “But this is an industry where almost no one believes the books educate well — and scores prove that.” 

Hakim doesn’t know if the school ever switched over. But the episode underscores her uncomfortable place in an industry that has never quite embraced her. By turns raw, thrilling and eye-opening, her writing offers young people a look at history that they rarely get between the covers of mass-produced textbooks.

Her most well-known work, a 10-volume history of the United States that began appearing in the early 1990s, remains in print. And at age 93, she’s still in the fight: Her newest series on biology debuted in September, continuing her tradition of wrestling with complicated ideas and difficult historical and scientific questions. 

But even after three decades, she remains unsure that she’s made much of an impact as textbooks with bigger promotional budgets enjoy much wider readerships. 

That view is belied by her legions of admirers. Praised by leading historians like David McCullough and James McPherson, she also may be the only textbook author to reliably receive fan mail. At one of her kids’ houses sit cases of letters, testament to the gratitude of two generations of readers. 

, podcaster and author of , who has championed deep subject matter knowledge in all areas of study, called Hakim “a force of nature.”

“Most textbooks are either extremely dry or so encyclopedic in their attempts to cover the universe of topics that they’re highly superficial and therefore boring,” Wexler said. “Joy Hakim understands how to use the power of narrative to bring topics in history and science to life.”

Wexler predicted that if more schools adopted Hakim’s titles, reading scores would jump because her work offers both the knowledge and vocabulary kids need to succeed on tests. 

And as the nation grows increasingly polarized about history, Hakim’s work eschews easy categorization. It is championed by liberals for not glossing over our dark past — and by conservatives for offering rigorous, challenging texts and sophisticated arguments.

, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute and a former New York City teacher, said Hakim’s history series “had a place of honor in my fifth-grade classroom and deserves a place of privilege in every school. It’s beyond her power to reverse the long-running and in American education, but she’s done her part to make real history accessible and interesting to those who seek it out, or who are engaged by it.”

Hakim’s books, he said, offer an important antidote to those that aim to trick kids into learning a little history via historical fiction or lightweight, fantasy-driven fare. “Hakim is winningly anachronistic by comparison: She takes history — and more pertinently her young readers — seriously.”

But she has often had to fight simply to be heard by school districts under adoption systems she sees as backwards. Teachers and students are hungering for good books, Hakim said, yet the adopted titles often stem from publishers’ long-standing relationships with state education bureaucrats, whom they lobby furiously. 

“I don’t think that they sell whether they’re good or crappy,” she said. “They sell because of this massive promotional effort that goes into them.”

‘I sat down and I started writing’ 

Hakim’s career as a writer for young people began simply, on a long car drive.

A one-time teacher and journalist — she taught in Baltimore for a spell and was both a business and editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk’s daily newspaper — by the 1980s, she was freelancing in Virginia Beach and raising three kids with her husband, a grain importer. She happened upon a notice for a hearing in Richmond, the capital, by a board looking for ways to improve school textbooks. At that pre-Internet time, it was a topic that aroused national attention. Hakim (pronounced HAKE-im) decided to check it out.

She expected to hear testimony from writers and editors. Instead, the publishers sent salespeople, who in her view stonewalled the proceedings by rhapsodizing about how beautifully designed and illustrated the books were.

“The whole thing was just a hoax,” she recalled. “The publishing industry was not serious about doing anything.”

Steaming, Hakim climbed back into her car and began the two-hour drive home. At some point, she thought to herself: Why not write her own history book?

“I sat down and I started writing,” she said.

Hakim didn’t stop for seven years, telling vivid personal stories of America’s founders, pioneers and others.

As she conceived it, the book aimed for a fifth-grade audience. To get direct feedback, she tapped a small group of 10-year-olds in her neighborhood, offering five dollars apiece to critique her manuscript. Hakim instructed the readers — mostly boys — to scrawl one of three reactions in the margins: G for Good, B for Boring and NC for Not Clear. 

Next, she invited classroom teachers to use the manuscripts in exchange for feedback. 

That one book ultimately became a 10-volume manuscript called . 

The books covered much of what she’d decided was important in American history — as she told one interviewer, from “people coming over the Bering Strait” to Bill Clinton’s inauguration.

And they offered children a thrilling narrative. In a chapter on Columbus’ voyages, she wrote that after surviving the treacherous waters of the Sargasso Sea, the explorer’s men wanted to turn back: “The sea seems endless. On October 9 they say they will go no farther. Columbus pleads for three more days of sailing. Then, he says, if they don’t see land they may cut off his head and sail home in peace.”

But for all the books’ originality, Hakim lacked a publisher. Eventually she met a literary agent who successfully garnered the attention of Oxford University Press.

, in a review titled, “Showing Children the Dark Side,” said Hakim “frees children from the grasp of hoary American myth nurtured by novelists and historians; without sermonizing, she allows them to glimpse the horrific underside of the once magical word ‘frontier.'” 

Hakim, for instance, was among the first writers for young people to address the 1839 Amistad rebellion, devoting an entire chapter to the slave uprising four years before the incident rose to prominence with the .

Historian David McCullough called the series “a big breath of fresh air and the best possible news for the youngsters who get to read these books.” 

Princeton University historian James McPherson said he was “impressed by the accuracy and the depth of her research,” telling one reviewer that Hakim’s books represented women and minorities in ways others hadn’t.

‘I have done something that’s quite different’

Like many authors, Hakim felt Oxford did little to publicize the series, leaving her to do much of the promotion herself. But in 1993, a family friend opened a key door: The composer BJ Leiderman, a long-ago classmate of one of her children, was by then writing for National Public Radio. He suggested to colleagues that they feature her, and soon Hakim found herself in front of a microphone at the network’s Norfolk affiliate. The result was a lengthy “Morning Edition” segment that helped introduce her to the world.

In the interview, she told host Bob Edwards, “The history books that are out there, most of them are committee-written, and committees can’t write. Committees have to be bland. So, I am doing something … that’s quite different.”

Looking back on the reception she got in 1993, Leiderman said Hakim was “progressive in the best sense of the word, searching out all different areas” to study.

All the same, he recalled, selling the books — sometimes on her own — struck him as a long, tough slog reminiscent of veteran rock stars playing small clubs to keep their music alive.

Despite the struggle — or perhaps because of it — “A History of US” soon became one of Oxford’s rock-solid titles, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, said Damon Zucca, the publisher’s director of content development and reference. The series has also received “the most fan mail from kids, parents, and teachers, who have been sending ardent missives about these books to Joy and to us for nearly thirty years now.”

But keeping them in classrooms has been a battle. Hakim recalled visiting Oakland schools a year after the district adopted her books, curious how they were being used. She couldn’t find them anywhere. “They’d all been replaced,” she said. A few teachers told her they’d saved their copies and were literally hiding them in closets to keep administrators in the dark. 

At one point, Hakim even sued after textbook giant Houghton Mifflin purchased the books’ distributor, D.C. Heath. Fearing it was a bid to bury the titles, she pursued an antitrust violation. Civics-geek alert: The case eventually landed before the federal bench of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who 14 years later would rise to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Hakim eventually got the books out from under the big publisher’s purview. Now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

Eventually, “A History of US” gave rise to a companion with all-star voice talent including Morgan Freeman, Julia Roberts and Robert Redford. But by then Hakim was on to something new: a three-book series about the history of science, from Aristotle to Einstein.

Then as now, Hakim’s most fervent buyers are often private school teachers and homeschooling parents who are free to use materials that appeal to them. She also holds a kind of magnetic appeal to cultural conservatives like Lynne Cheney who have derided public school readings they view as mushy and politically correct.

Yet conservatives have also protested Hakim’s books. In one case, Texas parents organized a letter-writing campaign, telling state officials that the books were unpatriotic.

They’ve been banned at least twice, as far as Hakim knows — once quite recently after a parent complained that they were too liberal. She jokes that the honor puts her in good company. 

Asked how she’d categorize herself, Hakim doesn’t hesitate. “I’m just a teacher,“ she said. “My books talk. I’m in a conversation with these kids and I respect their intelligence — and they understand that.”

‘This is a tough chapter’

Ask about her workflow and Hakim will tell you that she is blessed with — or cursed by — a journalist’s penchant for accuracy, which often prolongs her creative process. In the case of the science books, she finished the last one — on Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and the origins of quantum mechanics — and her new publisher had submitted it for peer review, when she received an unsolicited email from an unfamiliar name with an mit.edu address.

It was from renowned physics professor , also editor of the American Journal of Physics. He’d read a piece in TIME magazine about her plan to write about Einstein and offered to read the manuscript.

Hakim sent him the first four chapters. A few days later, Taylor wrote back asking if someone had actually reviewed them.

He and Hakim met a few times and, in Taylor’s words, “got to know — and respect — each other.” In all, they spent the next year-and-a-half revising the book, to the chagrin of Smithsonian Books. “They were not happy with me,” Hakim recalled. “But I’m so happy that I did it.”

In the book’s introduction, Hakim wrote of the “private tutorial with one of the greatest physics teachers this country has produced,” adding, “Sometimes my head hurt with all the stretching.”

The book won several best-of-the-year awards, which she credits largely to Taylor’s influence. For his part, Taylor told The 74 that Hakim “made great contributions to high school science teaching” and deserves wider recognition. 

As with the history series, the science books found a devoted audience as Hakim challenged young readers to grasp hard topics and complex ideas. In a chapter explaining Galileo’s writings on relativity, Hakim urged them to “catch your breath, relax and be prepared to stretch your mind.” 

In the chapter, she described how an observer on shore, watching a ball fall from the mast of a moving ship, sees it move in an arc, while an observer on deck sees it travel in a straight line. Acknowledging that the idea seemed outlandish, she warned: “This is a tough chapter; stick with it; the ideas here are important.”

Indeed, when journalist and scholar Alexander Stille set out to capture the essence of Hakim’s history books in 1998, he concluded, “Instead of talking down to children in simplified language, her books invite children to make an effort.” He that “a grandmother from Virginia” could produce books superior to those of most publishing houses.

‘The world has changed’

Now, nearly 20 years after the science texts first appeared, Hakim is out with a new series for teens about the history of biology.

gave the first volume a coveted starred review, calling it “thoroughly engrossing and highly recommended.” 

The second book is due out in April, part of a planned four-volume series. Published by MITeen Press, the last two books won’t appear until 2025 and 2026 respectively, but Hakim jokes that at her age she may not live to see it in readers’ hands.

She has asked her publisher to pick up the pace.

At the same time, she remains unsatisfied about her previous work: Three decades after “A History of US” began appearing on shelves, Hakim says the series could use a refresh. 

“I wrote it 30 years ago, so some of it is really dated,” she said with a self-conscious laugh. For one thing, she wants to recast the role of women, a topic she didn’t adequately address in the 1990s, mostly due to her own blind spot. An avowed feminist, she now sees she didn’t step back enough and appreciate the importance of the women’s movement. 

“Thirty years ago, we were different people than we are today,” she said. “The world has changed.” 

Yet, oddly, little has changed in Hakim’s career. Her husband is gone and the “grandmother from Virginia” is now a great-grandmother, but she still feels like a disruptor and an outsider, angry that we don’t have “better books” in schools. After millions of words on the page and cases of fan mail, she admits that she has barely struck a blow in the nation’s larger battle with historical illiteracy.

The textbook industry that she set out to disrupt in the 1980s is still dominated by a handful of publishers — actually, consolidation has , not more, choices. Together, they still produce what she considers bland, formulaic books that are making the nation’s reading crisis worse, not better.

“I’ve worked all these years and I’m not sure what I’ve achieved,” she concluded. “I’ve sold some books, but I haven’t changed the field.”

A record producer and music historian, Van Zandt has been a member of two well-known rock bands: Springsteen’s legendary E Street Band and the influential Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. A fierce promoter of American popular music, he’s in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Van Zandt found a new generation of fans in 1999 as TV mob consigliere Silvio Dante on “The Sopranos.” Twelve years later, he co-wrote, executive produced and starred in “Lilyhammer,” Netflix’s first original scripted series. 

Oh, and before that, he landed a blow against the apartheid-era government of South Africa by organizing the all-star 1985 recording session that produced the protest anthem “,” in which major artists vowed they’d boycott its eponymous segregated resort. 

But in 2006, Van Zandt launched , a free, comprehensive U.S. history course for K-12 students that uses pop culture to teach about the period between World War II and the near-present. 

The lessons now number in the hundreds, and encompass every grade level. One middle-school lesson uses poetry and music to explore ways in which the United Farm Workers movement and contributed to civil rights struggles and the feminist movement. Another, for younger students, uses documentary footage and folk music to help students understand the environmental legacy of by coal-mining companies in Appalachia. Students eventually create their own folk ballad about an environmental issue of their choice. 

This fall, the program will get a big boost as the at Monmouth University, a wide-ranging collection of materials related to Springsteen in particular and popular music more generally, partners with Van Zandt’s nonprofit. The partnership gives TeachRock access to a vast array of original material and allows it for the first time to bring teachers to the archives for workshops and events. 

“We’re really excited to work with them to build bridges between classrooms and the center,” said Executive Director Bill Carbone. He noted an upcoming symposium in October celebrating the 50th anniversary of the release of Springsteen’s sophomore effort, “The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle.” The event will feature original members of the E Street Band.

TeachRock is already in more than 30,000 schools in all 50 states, and a recent that interviewed participants found that, by far, students were most engaged when they were “learning something new that opened students’ eyes or caused them to think of something in a way they hadn’t before.” 

With the current Springsteen tour on hiatus — the band leader is being treated for a peptic ulcer — Van Zandt, 72, sat down this month with The 74 from his New York City home and talked about his program, his musical education and the legacy that baby boomers leave behind.

“I think it’s an obligation,” he said. “I really do feel it’s a responsibility for us to pass along something that was better than we had.”

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: One of the things I remembered from talking to you in 2020 is asking about this quote of yours, where you said, “I had a vacation once in 1978, and I didn’t like it.” And I wonder: It’s three years later. Have you had a vacation yet? And if so, did you like it?

Steven Van Zandt: No, but I’m starting to understand the concept (laughs). 

So you’re easing into it?

Yeah. I’m discovering these things called weekends. And all kinds of revelations are coming to me late in life.

Excellent. Obviously, we’re going to talk about the work you’re doing in education. But I wanted to ask you about your own musical education. I wanted to actually spool back a little bit and ask about your earliest musical memory.

My earliest musical memory? That’s a good one. I want to say what comes to mind is the Mickey Mouse thing. “,” was it?

Did you have a lot of music in your house when you were a kid?

Not really. My father was a part of a barbershop quartet. So I was exposed to that quite young. That may have planted my love of doo-wop. But around the house, not so much.

You talk about the Beatles a lot and their Ed Sullivan Show debut on Feb. 9, 1964, and the effect that had on you. That’s such an important part of your story.

What we call the British Invasion was a major turning point in my life. Pop music has always been around. We actually had good pop music in the fifties and early sixties. I started buying some singles a few years before the British Invasion happened. I was buying “Duke of Earl” and “Pretty Little Angel Eyes” and ’ records, The Four Seasons.

But I wasn’t really particularly interested in doing it until the British Invasion happened. There weren’t that many bands in America back then. If there was a band, it was mostly an instrumental group. You went to your high school dance, it was an instrumental group, usually, and a sax player would be the leader usually and then maybe put the saxophone down for like one song where he’d sing. 

Then suddenly, here comes the Beatles. And then The Dave Clark Five and Herman’s Hermits and then The Stones and The Who and the Kinks and the Yardbirds and all of the British Invasion bands — four or five guys all singing and playing their own instruments and eventually writing their own songs, which was a major, major change. Up until then, most of the artists, with a few exceptions like Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly — the major pioneers — were [not] writing their own songs.

Keep in mind that rock wasn’t mainstream, really, until the British Invasion. Mainstream pop artists were mostly not writing their songs. So you had songwriters and arrangers and producers. It took an army to make a record in those days. Publishers were involved in all kinds of different facets of the business.

Then it all came together when you had a self-contained band like The Beatles. They just changed everything. They changed the entire configuration of the business. Technically, publishers were no longer relevant, because publishers’ main job was to expose a writer’s music to the world in the form of sheet music. They literally would publish physical music and they would make those piano rolls, back in the 1880s or whenever. They were popular.

And with a band singing their own songs — in other words, marketing themselves — the whole publishing thing would soon transform itself into mostly administration, which was collecting the music and collecting the money for these self-publishing artists. 

For our generation — and we were the luckiest generation ever — there were all kinds of teenage band activities. It wasn’t just the bars. The bar culture had bands. But before you got to the bar culture, literally teenagers, 12, 13, 14 years old, you’d go to beach clubs, you’d go to V.F.W. halls, you’d go to your high school dances, you’d go to clubs that were built for teenagers, literally teenage discotheques, as they were called before disco happened. You would go out as a kid. Your parents would drop you off, and you’d go see a band.

But it was bigger than that. The entire culture was electrified. Suddenly, our generation had a soundtrack that was really quite significant. The fifties generation, the generation before us, also had a wonderful soundtrack going on, but it seemed to be a little bit more temporary in some ways.

Our artists grew, our artists evolved. This one aspect that the Beatles brought gets underreported — and Bob Dylan was right there with them — but the Beatles actually introduced the idea of evolution in popular art, which was not a thing. Popular art was: If by some miracle you had a success, your job was to match that success as often as possible and as closely as possible.

The great example is the record called “The Twist.” And then you follow it up with “Let’s Twist Again.” (Laughs.)

Right. No shame at all!

The perfect template for what was the pop music methodology.

And for the Beatles, I think, it was just boredom because they’d been doing it so long. They had one of the longest gestation periods between starting and arriving. Only the E Street Band was longer than the Beatles, I think. It took us like seven years, but them, like five years — four or five years of working in bars, working in the clubs, absorbing all the material. In those days, they knew every song that had been recorded because there weren’t that many recorded [by] 1959. They knew every rock record that had been released.

They were playing them all over and over again and absorbing and absorbing. That’s why, when they started writing, they not only had a very high standard to live up to — which is why their songs were so good right away — but also, when they started writing, they were like, “Let’s try some new chord changes.” You know what I mean? “We’ve been doing these same chord changes for years. Let’s try some new things.”

And so it started there. All of a sudden, an interesting bridge. With songs, they could go somewhere odd, pretty early on. Then was even a little different. And then was a little different. They kept evolving almost to the end, really. And so as they grew, our generation grew with them. And it was just a wonderful, wonderful energy exchange. It was really a part of the fabric of your life.

Yes, it was a soundtrack, but it was also more than that. It was inspiration and motivation. We really, really were a music culture growing up. We didn’t have all the distractions of today. You didn’t have cell phones or computers or video games or TikTok. You didn’t have anything except the radio and three channels on TV. 

You may be even one of the people who said it, that when we, for lack of a better term, met the Beatles in ’64, they were halfway through their career as a group. We were seeing a mature group.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s why, as I go into much more detail , of course, when we saw them, it was an absolute epiphany, a world-changing event. Literally. The term gets used a lot, but this was a game-changer for real. They were so sophisticated that even though they revealed this incredible opportunity, a new world that you had no idea existed, you didn’t exactly say, “Jeez, I think I could do that.” Even though they were just 20, 21, 22 years old, the clothes were different. The hair was different. The accent, of course, their wisdom and wit. Already at that age, they were very, very experienced and very sophisticated and just perfect. The harmony was perfect, the playing was perfect.

That’s why I always credit the Rolling Stones with just about equal importance, because the Rolling Stones come four months later and they’re wearing all different things, their hair is not exactly perfect, except for Brian Jones. And they don’t have any real harmony to speak of really, at that point. They were like the first punk band and they did the same thing that punk would do, years later, by making what they were doing accessible, making it look easier than it was.

A teenager [could] say, “Well, I really don’t know if I could do that Beatles thing, but maybe I could do the Stones thing. It doesn’t look that difficult.” Of course, they were making it look a lot easier than it was.

But making it look easier was important. It was the same thing for punk, really. You listen to the Sex Pistols, and at first glance you might say, “Maybe I can do that.” But is phenomenal. It’s a phenomenal record that actually was quite produced. So the Stones were that for us.

 Like I say, the Beatles revealed a new world to us and the Rolling Stones invited us in.

I want to give you a chance to talk about the work you’re doing in schools, beginning with something you said about the program. You said, “All I wanted was for every kid in kindergarten to be able to name the four Beatles, dance to ‘Satisfaction,’ sing along to ‘Long Tall Sally’ and recite every word of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues.’ The rest will take care of itself.” Which to me is profound. But I wonder … 

I’ll stick by that too (laughs).

How’s that working out? How has it developed from that conception?

Pretty good. Obviously, everything always goes slower than you hope. It took us a long time just to get it together to the point where I felt confident enough to go public with it, which only happened five or so years ago, after working on it for like 10 or 15 years.

It’s been a long time coming. But we have like 60,000 teachers and 200 partner schools and we’re in every state. I had the opportunity to visit one of our partner schools and, man, it was wonderful to see. I think it was the first five or six grades in this particular school. And the enthusiasm of the kids was amazing. The entire concept here was to do something that would get the kids interested and keep them interested and get them to come to school and stay in school. Judging by the enthusiasm that I saw, it really is working quite well because our whole concept begins with finding the common ground between the student and the teacher. 

This generation is only right now. It’s all very, very immediate because of technology.

You’ve got to give them a reason to not look up whatever you were telling them in 30 seconds on their device. “Why do I need you? I got this thing.” So it’s a combination of curation, of selected information that we feel is important and inspirational and motivational, and using what the kids already have, what they’ve already brought with them, which is curiosity and energy and instinct and opinions. They come to school with that, with elements of an identity. And most of our school methodology in the past has been, “Leave all that outside, O.K. Just come in as a blank slate and we’re going to fill in. We’re going to tell you what you need to learn.” And it was a classic, “Learn this now and someday you’ll use it.”

Completely irrelevant.

Over the past couple weeks, the Springsteen Archive agreed to work with you. Can you talk about what that will allow you to do that you couldn’t do before?

Well, it’s more exposure. Right now, our thing is exposure, just turning as many people on to this as we can because we know it works now.

It’s probably going to take another couple of years before we have irrefutable data. But we can just tell because we’re always improving it and correcting it. We get input all the time from our teachers. But we know it’s working. We have absolutely, across-the-board success. So now it’s just a matter of spreading this thing as widely and as quickly as we can because I believe this is going to transform the entire education system. I’m not exaggerating. That’s not hyperbole. I really feel that.

I feel our system is generally antiquated. The machine is so big and so bureaucratic, it can’t adjust fast enough to deal with this new generation. Now we’re into two or three generations of this modern technological world. Still, you can see the system is just struggling to keep up with all of its other problems. 

That’s why it was important to us to make sure we made this available for free. Because all the problems begin with, “We can’t afford it,” right? So we were like, “That’s not going to stop us and we don’t want to hear you can’t afford it — because it’s too important.” The future generation is here. We’re going to lose them. I don’t want to hear about money problems when we’re talking about future generations’ quality of life. So we made sure that it’s free for everybody. That way it can spread quite quickly.

We made sure it meets all the state standards. It’s not an after-school thing. We integrate art into the principal disciplines. We add the A of arts into the middle [of STEM], turning STEM into STEAM. We integrate the arts into each of those disciplines. 

So that’s a difference between our thing and what people think about art. We think of it in our country as a luxury item. Maybe it’s an afterschool thing or a special school you go to. I don’t think there is a word for art in the indigenous people’s language because art is integrated into everything they do. And that’s the approach we take. It plays on a different part of the brain, the more comfortable part of the brain, not the one that needs to be precise all the time. We like to dwell on the side where there’s no wrong answers. There’s no wrong answers in art, and we like to kind of hang around there, and then make people comfortable enough to deal with the more precise parts of the system. 

The last question I want to ask you: What do you see as the legacy of this program 10, 20 years from now?

Well, we keep spreading it. The legacy is the transformation of the education system. It’s the public education that we focus on. Everyone is welcome. We are interested in where most of the kids are and most of the parents are. Most of the really hard-working, underpaid teachers that can’t find enough time to do what they do and end up going out and buying pencils and paper for their classrooms.

So we see this fulfilling our three goals eventually, which is making sure that art in general stays in the DNA of the public education system. Number two, creating a methodology that works for this generation and future generations that have no patience and are a lot smarter and faster than we ever were. It needs a new methodology, and we have that. And the third thing is keeping kids in school and increasing the graduation level and reducing the dropout level, which is just intolerable and scandalous.

We really intend to change that. Because if a kid likes one classroom or one teacher, they’ll come to school. The statistics show that. We want to be that class. 

The last thing I’ll offer as an observation is: It’s interesting that somebody like you, not only an outsider, but somebody who even talks of themselves as being sort of like an outcast and ….

You can say, “Moron.” It’s OK.

Oh no! (Laughs.)

You can say even half a moron like me. I should have been a dropout myself. I get it. I know, it’s ironic, isn’t it? It is ironic, but like I say, I feel like I’m the luckiest guy in the luckiest generation.

I think it’s an obligation. I really do feel it’s a responsibility for us to pass along something that was better than we had because we’ve taken all the good stuff. We’ve taken an awful lot of the good stuff, and we’re leaving them a hole in the sky and a poisoned environment and a permanent recession really — all kinds of ridiculous problems in terms of the failures of our society.

So you look around, you say, “Oh, well, what can we do? What do we have control of that we can pass along that’s an apology to the next generation?” So I’m hoping that this is one of the things, along with a couple of my radio formats [that] I hope will long outlast me and improve the quality of life for the next guy.

I mean, what else can you do? What else are we here for?

Students at Florida public schools will now learn that Black people benefitted from slavery because it taught them skills. This change is part of the African American history standards the State Board of Education approved at a Wednesday meeting.

The description of slavery as beneficial is not the only grievance parents, teachers, education advocates and politicians had with the new . People speaking at the Wednesday meeting generally called out the diluting and omissions of history. For example, instruction at the elementary school level is largely limited to identifying famous Black people, and high school teachers will talk about the “acts of violence perpetrated by African Americans” at the , in which a white mob killed at least 30 Black people.

“Please table this rule and revise it to make sure that my history our history is being told factually and completely, and please do not, for the love of God, tell kids that slavery was beneficial because I guarantee you it most certainly was not,” said Kevin Parker, a community member.

Though the public testimony period lasted over an hour, most of the people objected to the adoption of the standard, with supporters of it waving from their seats. Paul Burns, the chancellor of K-12 public schools, defended the standards, denying that they referred to slavery as beneficial.

“Our standards are factual, objective standards that really teach the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said.

Board member Kelly Garcia upheld the standards and said that none of the backlash she read about them before the meeting pointed to specific concerns. A coalition of Black leaders and community groups — Florida Education Association, FL’s NAACP and The Black History Project, Inc. and Equal Ground — sent a letter to the board on Monday in opposition to the standards.

Whitewashing history

State Sen. Geraldine Thompson, representing part of Orange County, and state House Democrat Anna Eskamani of Orlando showed up to speak out against the standards.

“When I see the standards, I’m very concerned,” Thompson said. “If I were still a professor, I would do what I did very infrequently; I’d have to give this a grade of ‘I’ for incomplete. It recognizes that we have made an effort, we’ve taken a step. However, this history needs to be comprehensive. It needs to be authentic, and it needs additional work.”

A 1994 Florida statute requires schools to teach African American history, but Gov. DeSantis has been chipping away at the legacy of the law. Last year, the Legislature passed HB 7, which restricted certain and gender in schools and workplaces. Regarding race-related discussions in schools, the law says that students must not feel guilt over past actions of people of the same race.

At the beginning of the year, the governor’s rejection of the New York-based College Board’s pilot course amassed nationwide backlash for trying to whitewash history.

“To be discussing African American history in this moment, with no one present who has felt the pain of the infliction of harm on African Americans. It’s overtly problematic,” said former state politician Dwight Bullard, pointing at the non-Black members of the board.

“Part of the reason the ’94 statute exists is because the state tried to cover up the Rosewood massacre. So, by the very admission of the state, the reason that we need a stronger statute that covers African American history, a broader statute is because of the necessity or the failures of your predecessors. So, I simply ask that you table this amendment until those closest to the pain have access to the power.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Diane Rado for questions: info@floridaphoenix.com. Follow Florida Phoenix on and .

To counter this unproductive narrowing of the curriculum, states should embed civic content into statewide reading assessments. This simple change would incentivize more attention to civic learning while making reading tests more engaging, equitable and accurate.

of American middle schoolers can read an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech and identify two ideas from the Constitution or Declaration of Independence that King might have been referring to. This is a symptom of the atrophy in the civic mission of schools that represents a grave danger to American democracy. Only , compared with 70% of Americans born before World War II. Most Millennials say that if Russia invaded the United States, they . These data are a wake-up call that the nation needs to recommit public schools to their foundational purpose: preparing young Americans for citizenship.

Including civic content on every grade’s reading test is low-hanging fruit because it encourages engagement with meaningful issues while signaling to teachers the importance of covering social studies content — all of which improves literacy instruction. While phonics (knowing letter sounds) and decoding (putting together sounds to make words) are essential foundational skills, they are not sufficient for proficient reading. Students also need background knowledge to make sense of what they are seeing on the page. that when students are given a text about a topic they are familiar with, they perform better on reading tests. Conversely, students perform more poorly when confronted with texts on topics they’ve never learned about, even if they have strong reading skills.  

Louisiana is piloting assessments that , with promising results. Some texts in the state’s innovative reading test draw directly from books students have read, with additional passages extending into related topics. Designing tests around what students are expected to be taught makes sense and dovetails state expectations for learning, classroom curricula and reading comprehension assessments.

When students are familiar with the topics being tested, they stay more engaged and do better. reveals that achievement gaps are somewhat smaller on Louisiana’s pilot tests, partly because the opportunity gap is being narrowed by creating more equitable opportunities for students to demonstrate their reading skills. Tests that use random texts privilege students who have more world knowledge from outside of school. Louisiana’s innovative test design encourages teachers to focus on the topics the state wants students to learn and more accurately assesses their reading skills.

Embedding civic content in reading tests would make teachers’ jobs easier and support better student learning outcomes. Every state already has adopted civics standards, and almost all state English language arts standards include expectations for reading and writing in science and social studies. But only Louisiana has prioritized content from its standards in innovative reading/language arts assessments. Every state could make similar progress by making small shifts in the direction it gives to its testing contractor. 

Including a focus on civic learning in reading tests is a simple solution that can be implemented by state education commissioners and testing directors without changing any laws or regulations. That said, this shift should be done with key stakeholders through an open and inclusive process. Leading with public engagement and input creates the opportunity to share the rationale and build trust with educators, parents and policy leaders, minimizing the risk that this becomes a polarizing idea. Parents are likely to support the change because much more than generic standardized tests. 

In 2012, Supreme Court said, “the only reason we have public school education in America is because in the early days of the country, our leaders thought we had to teach our young generation about citizenship … that obligation never ends. If we don’t take every generation of young people and make sure they understand that they are an essential part of government, we won’t survive.” 

Democracy is being tested in real life. Reading tests can signal the importance of civic learning and lead to more time and attention to this vital content. State education commissioners should make this a first step to reinvigorate public education’s mission as a bulwark of democracy.

Ohio legislators on both sides of the aisle are hoping to change how students learn about things like government affairs and history.

On one side, Democrats and supporters presented their argument for changing the model curriculum for K-12 social studies in a Tuesday press conference, with members of education associations and minority advocacy groups pushing for ‘s passage.

That bill would direct the Ohio State Board of Education to “update” the social studies lessons in the state by July 1, 2024, to include “age and grade-appropriate instruction in the migration journeys, experiences and societal contributions of a range of communities in Ohio and the United States.”

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Those communities would include African American; Asian American and Pacific Islander; Arab, African and North African immigrant, refugee and asylee; Appalachian; Jewish; Latin American; and Native American communities, according to the bill.

“This bill not only positively benefits students, but also the state as a whole,” said Saanvi Gattu, a student at Olentangy High School.

As someone who emigrated from Mexico when she was an 8-year-old, Linna Jordan said she understands what inclusion means for students.

“It really is important for children to see themselves in their learning,” Jordan said.

Jordan is now the president of the Hilliard Education Association, and said including the stories of all communities who call America and Ohio home is “the most responsible thing we can do as a state.”

The bill, sponsored by state Rep. Mary Lightbody, D-Westerville, also has the support of the Council on American Islamic Relation’s Ohio Chapter, the Ohio Education Association and its Hispanic Caucus, Ohio Progressive Asian Woman’s Leadership and the Black Led Organizing Collaborative (BLOC).

A Republican-led bill that’s already seen committee activity since being introduced in March is , which seeks to create a “social studies task force” to develop academic standards for K-12 social studies.

Those studies have a specific model in HB 103, however, with the bill specifically targeting standards presented in “American Birthright: The Civics Alliance’s Model K-12 Social Studies Standards.”

The Civics Alliance is a New York-based group which states in its mission statement preceding “American Birthright” that it is “dedicated to preserving and improving America’s civics education and preventing the subornation of civics education to political recruitment tools.”

HB 103’s co-sponsor, state Rep. Don Jones, R-Freeport, is listed as a state policymaker for the American Birthright Coalition.

The standards pushed by the Civics Alliance encourage student instruction that teaches “America’s common language of liberty, patriotism and national memory,” and not a social studies “filled with animus against their ancestors and their fellow Americans, and estranged from their country,” according to the

“The warping of American social studies instruction has created a corps of activists dedicated to the overthrow of America and its freedoms, larger numbers of Americans indifferent to the steady whittling away of American liberty and many more who are so ignorant of the past they cannot use our heritage of freedom to judge contemporary debates,” the alliance states in “American Birthright.”

The Ohio bill is supported by conservative groups like the America First Policy Institute, as well as the Common Sense Society and the Freedom Education Foundation, Inc.

In a recent hearing for HB 103 with the House Primary and Secondary Education Committee, the American Historical Association expressed “grave concern” about using the product as part of state curriculum, calling the idea of a “politically appointed task force” unnecessary.

“Few Ohioans will agree with the premise that the state needs more bureaucracy,” the AHA told the committee. “Fewer still are likely to support the idea that yet another board with an unambiguously political mandate would streamline the already complicated process of crafting education policy.”

The AHA said singling out the American Birthright model would “hobble students” with a “pleasant fantasy” of history such as colonization by European empires “without ever meaningfully engaging with any evidence to the contrary.”

“These standards are not the product of an evidence-based study; they are merely a risky, untested document that, if they were adopted, would impose wrenching opportunity costs on Ohio students, parents, teachers and schools,” the group stated in committee testimony.

The bill is also opposed by the Ohio Federation of Teachers, the Ohio Education Association, Public Education Partners, the Children’s Defense Fund of Ohio, and the Ohio Council for the Social Studies.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on and .

Yes, better curricula and instructional supports for teachers are crucial. But real improvement will also require gathering evidence to inform decisionmaking. To this end, researchers and local, state and federal policymakers can take several actions to implement a broader strategy for systematic data collection, reporting and evaluation.

Adopt a more systematic approach to monitoring student progress and learning opportunities in civics and history. Ongoing are a step in the right direction, as are changes such as tentative for state-level NAEP civics testing, as well as civics and U.S. history assessments in grades 4, 8 and 12 starting in 2030. However, NAEP doesn’t provide results for individual students or schools, so a comprehensive approach to monitoring learning in civics and history will be necessary. It is critical that these efforts include measures of students’  achievement along with their learning opportunities, such as the amount of class time, content covered and whether they had access to high-quality instruction.

District and school surveys of instruction and activities related to civics and history, for instance, could provide useful guidance to education leaders to evaluate and adjust their curricula. This type of data collection also provides an opportunity to highlight students’ perspectives and ideas. Engaging young people through surveys and focus groups can serve as a powerful civic-learning activity by enabling them to contribute to decisions that affect their lives.

Engage with educators to identify the most pressing data needs. Efforts to gather data from students and teachers should be informed by an understanding of what information is most needed to guide educators’ work. With topics as potentially contentious as civics and history, it is especially critical to collaborate with educators — who are familiar with their communities’ concerns and priorities — on what to measure and how to use the resulting data. Obtaining this input from the earliest stages of the development of data-collection tools can help ensure that resources focus on the most helpful kinds of information. Involving educators could also reduce the likelihood of pushback from the community.

Help educators, leaders and policymakers identify effective approaches for teaching civics and history. Federal education law encourages district and school leaders to choose and implement evidence-based programs and practices that have been rigorously studied and are shown to improve learning. But there is a major evidence gap. Because federal funding can be tied to of effectiveness, the field needs to move toward understanding and providing proof of whether (or not) the programs and practices that educators use are effective. Such an effort will require data collection and research designs that allow for making causal inferences regarding what works for whom, and under what conditions.

Provide guidance and resources for educators to monitor civics and history instruction in the classroom. Large-scale achievement tests and survey data are valuable tools for monitoring opportunities and outcomes, but they are not intended to inform teachers’ day-to-day work. Access to for civics and history can help educators tailor their instruction and gauge whether their efforts are working. Advances in technology-based tests offer promising new approaches to classroom assessment of civics and history achievement, but investments in research and development are needed to ensure their quality and usefulness for improving instruction. 

Educators are on the front lines of preserving democracy, but they can’t do this alone. Teachers have faced particular challenges in recent years as a result of legislation that aims to limit what they can say or do in the classroom. Enacting the recommendations above will require significant resources and strong collaboration among government agencies, research and development organizations, and educators. But the need for such investment is clear.

Policymakers and practitioners cannot rely solely on NAEP results every four years to inform decisions about policy and practice in civics and history. Nor can they wait until the next release of NAEP scores in 2027 to make much-needed changes. 

As students enter classrooms in the days after a widely publicized , experts say educators have a responsibility to acknowledge their anger, grief and sadness — particularly as more than ever before experience symptoms of depression and anxiety. 

Nichols, who grew up in Sacramento enmeshed in and with a love for , was father to a 4-year-old son. On Jan. 7, he was pulled over in a traffic stop and severely beaten for three minutes by five police officers on since-released body camera footage. The officers were part of a since-disbanded special unit that policed his Memphis neighborhood. Nichols was unarmed and minutes from home. Three days later, he died in the hospital at age 29. The officers will appear for an arraignment on Feb. 17, charged with second-degree murder.

But Dimitry Anselme, executive program director with the global nonprofit , said it is now critical to explore Nichols’s life and humanity with young people.

“We don’t want to stay only in death. We’ve lost Tyre. What you want to begin to help [young people] think is, what’s our response? What are the ways by which we want to engage with one another to move to justice?” said Anselme, who oversees workshops and training with educators and staff internationally, guiding constructive and psychologically safe ways to discuss violence and injustice with young learners. 

Paramount in this immediate aftermath, according to Anselme, is to offer ways for students to reflect on their emotions like journaling, and emphasize the message: It’s OK not to watch. 

While graphic images, including photos of Emmett Till’s open casket and Nichols’s hospital bed shared by family, have forced Americans to contend with extreme anti-Black violence, exposure to such imagery can trigger psychological and physical reactions, such as disrupted eating, sleeping and bed-wetting in children. This is particularly for Black children who may identify with Tyre, experts . 

In conversation with The 74, Anselme explains how Nichols’s life can be explored alongside critical moments in American history, why inviting young people to reflect is critical in this political moment and best practices gleaned from teaching violent history and genocide.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The 74: What have you been hearing from educators and students in the wake of Tyre Nichols’s death and the recent release of body camera footage? 

Anselme: Emotions. A lot of students and teachers are sad. They are frustrated. For many of them, this will not be the first time that they have to have a conversation in the classroom around an episode of police violence or police brutality, particularly targeted toward the loss of a life of a young Black man. So there is a sense of déjà vu and people are really exhausted. Episodes like this contribute to the sense of sadness and powerlessness, like, ‘Oh my God, how many more lessons can I possibly do on gun violence, or the loss of life of a young black man, or another police brutality incident?’ It feels like it is nonstop. 

The other thing we’re hearing is, ‘I don’t want to keep my young people mired in grief, anger.’ It’s not that they’re looking for ‘give me something positive’, but it’s what can I give to young people that does not keep them in a sense of powerlessness, especially in the moment? The kind of national dialogue that’s going on in the country, the incessant fights around racial justice, give young people a sense of change does not happen. 

Teachers are looking for ways — I call it teaching for democracy. That is to say, democracies are not perfect. They require that we remain vigilant, that we don’t tire out, that we don’t lose hope, optimism and a sense of engagement. So a lot of our resources are around how do you bring students back to core democratic values? We always select a moment of fracture, usually brought on by violence, with examples of how to repair, rebuild, and what we call choosing to participate. So you don’t just stay in that moment of history that is sad, but you are looking at ways that ordinary people repair. That’s how we teach the civil rights movement, the Reconstruction period, the Holocaust, Armenian Genocide. Here’s the moment of fracture, here are the range of responses that human beings have taken on, look at all the ways by which accountability happens, attempts to have national conversation about memory and legacies, and how to rebuild.

I think a lot of teachers at Facing History know that the work is really around inspiring young people. To say, channel your grief, your sadness, into participation. It’s not to minimize the loss of Tyre. But, increasingly, our sense is we need to provide resources so young people can think about themselves, their rights and responsibilities when they live in a democracy and how they can sustain civic agency.

How might educators foster discussion in a way that it doesn’t feel, as you said, like another moment of hopelessness?

First, you move to history. So let’s use a moment that is not in the here and now, because it’s going to give us emotional distance. You don’t necessarily need to use a police brutality moment — I might say, let’s talk about the murder of Emmett Till. It’s an act of injustice, and it raises all the conversations that we want to have about the value of Black life, around the way that violence is being used to circumvent or to prevent coexistence, our ability to live. It keeps them focused on the larger themes: democracy, civic engagement, civic participation. 

One of the things that we get from looking at Emmett Till is the way that his mother responds to his death, the way that she will inspire a civil rights movement that was already taking place. That’s the lesson you want kids to take. We don’t want to stay only in death. We’ve lost Tyre. What you want to begin to help them think is, what’s our response? What are the ways by which we want to engage with one another to move to justice? 

On Wednesday, we witnessed Tyre being laid to rest in Memphis. How can educators today, tomorrow next week, acknowledge that grief?

We train a lot around the use of journals so that young people can capture, ‘what do I think before I speak?’ These are moments where I would call educators to look at our or a because I would be inviting kids to be writing, journaling, reflecting on the emotions they are feeling. What’s in their mind? Reflect on the multiple identities of Tyre Nichols that we’ve learned about him: a young Black man who was also a skater, a young father. I would be inviting young people to think about him and reflect on his humanity. Rather than again, focusing on the pain, honor him. Recognize him as a human, and let’s celebrate the loss of the human life that we’ve lost.

What I’m telling you is also the way we’ve learned to teach around genocide. We use survivor testimonies to give you a sense of the individual. Who was this person? Where do they live? What kind of relationships do they have? I keep you centered on the human person that is lost. So it’s not just a number, 6 million. No, it’s about the story of Greta. It’s the story of Rena. It’s a story of this one person living in just one moment in time. I would honor Tyre in that way. Write about his identities, his multiple ones. Do you have friends who are skaters? 

Could we spend a moment reflecting on the technology aspect of this? The images of his killing can be somewhat unescapable. You might be at a restaurant with your family as CNN plays the footage on loop. How has your guidance adapted to that reality?

It’s really, really difficult. I went on a news blackout last Friday. I’m raising two young Black men and I said to all my colleagues and friends: news blackout. I definitely don’t want to see the video. I don’t want to overwhelm ourselves with images just because of the media environment we all live in. At Facing History, in all of our work for the last 47 years, when we teach about genocide, we always invite teachers not to overfocus on the images of death camps, of dead bodies. We don’t encourage that kind of teaching. Usually there’s a desire like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna show them these awful images and bang it on the head so they can understand what happened.’ We say it’s not going to be effective. And the reason why we don’t think that’s effective is because that really traumatizes kids and it leaves them in a space in the space of pain.

In this current social media environment, we would encourage teachers to encourage students not to be watching those videos, to avoid them or empower yourself. You can write a statement on your Instagram or your Facebook: tell your friends and colleagues that you’ve chosen not to watch the video, that you would love it if they could avoid sharing it with you or putting it up themselves. Give them tools where they themselves can be empowered to sort of communicate that. It’s OK not to watch the video to relive the images. It’s OK to change the channel, shut the TV off. It’s not like you’re minimizing or you’re running away from what happened. No, you’re fully aware of what happened. What you’re doing is self-care. Protect yourself. 

We cannot use the classroom and materials to cheapen, to use violence and death to get students’ engagement or attention. As an educator, I would say you should feel free never to utilize those videos and images. A lot of entertainment is centered on abuse and violence of Black bodies. We have it in sports, music, movies, law, literature or history. I like to think we have a responsibility as educators not to participate in this. 

Students and educators, particularly Black families, have felt this kind of vicarious trauma many times in recent history. Why does the conversation have to be continued, not a one-off lesson, particularly as we are amid a youth mental health crisis?

We are social beings, but we also have emotional lives that need to be recognized, realized and affirmed. I don’t think one does an educational service if you’re working with people of color, in particular Black students, to not acknowledge the emotional toll, the trauma that the content that we look at in classrooms will bring. It has to be something that’s perpetual, but you don’t want to do this in a way that is re-traumatizing or deepening the trauma. 

You want to end lessons by bringing attention to issues of identity, to collective identity, group membership, legacies and then the civic participation piece. You are trying to balance giving space for the emotion to be recognized, but also engage a larger conversation about human behavior. As young Black men, they are human beings, they have empathy for the struggle and emotion and injustice of other groups. So that moment when they are engaging with their own trauma and frustration, it is also a moment to help them see: you have experienced this, other groups have experienced this. So what kind of human societies do we want to create? What does coexistence mean? When you do that, you provide them with the vocabulary and mitigate the pain — I’m not alone, there’s something larger about the way human societies operate. There are larger dynamics. 

We have a lot of this conversation on staff at Facing History. I do not think it is fair for us as educators to teach young Black kids, you were victimized in 1619 and you are victimized today in 2023. If that is the only way we teach American history to Black kids, we’re doing them a disservice. Because if you teach it that way, you don’t teach them Fannie Lou Hamer. You don’t teach them Frederick Douglass. You don’t teach Harriet Tubman. 

Because in fact, throughout the history of violent oppression and marginalization, many Black folks chose to respond to the pain they were having by engaging. Harriet Tubman comes up with a way to help free other enslaved people; Frederick Douglass plays a key role in the key constitutional amendment that everyone in America today enjoys. That’s the amendment that gives you immigration laws that we have today that a variety of other people are using and enjoying. So I want African American kids to know the America that we have today comes directly out of the Black experience, pain and trauma. We’ve created this society of democracy and freedom, not only for ourselves, but for other groups. That’s where you help balance the pain and fracture. I don’t think it’s fair to just keep Black students in this idea of perpetual victimhood because in fact, the history tells something else. We do not do a good job in history education of helping kids see that.

We could think for a moment about the challenge and changes to the AP African American Studies curriculum, book bans removing Toni Morrison and other historic Black authors’ work. How does that context impact your recommendations and how you speak with educators? 

The reality is teachers are already finding ways to resist this on a daily basis. What I would say to educators is to continue to focus on the work that they’re doing, identifying resources and moments that are important for students. We have some shared democratic values, I think if we hold on to these, we will survive this particular political movement. There have been efforts at other moments where, for example, you couldn’t teach about LGBT experiences in the classroom. With the work of activism, we were able to create the space. We created the Black Studies movement, an ethnic studies movement, an Asian Studies movement in the country.

It’s very scary what’s happening. I used to be a teacher and a principal. I feel so much for folks who are in the classroom today, or for school principals who are just overwhelmed. I’m hearing things in Florida about doing a book review at every school. You can imagine the amount of human time and labor it’s going to take to do this. I was born in Haiti and I grew up in the Congo. My formative years were in two societies shaped by dictatorship. This is not democratic behavior. I’m very comfortable saying that; I have lived in non-democratic societies. 

This comes back to the civic agency piece. If we lose hope if we think somehow, oh, well, that’s it, this political movement doing all this book banning has won. No, they have not won and are in violation of the American spirit and democratic values. So what does that mean? We redouble our effort and our commitment to democratic values to believe that we have a freedom of conscience, that young people have freedom of conscience, they should have access to a wide range of ideas, that we are all as educators going to defend a marketplace of ideas. The idea of a marketplace of ideas is as American as apple pie. Use that as an inspiration to students. None of these bills prevent me from teaching about the Declaration of Independence; use those moments to highlight key American values. How do we preserve them today?

“We were just shocked and frankly a little bit alarmed at the low levels around teachers’ responses about the LGBTQ students in their classrooms and schools,” said Evan Stone, co-CEO of the organization, popularly known as E4E. “With the rates of bullying and mental health issues, this is a population where teachers are particularly concerned about engagement in school and, as a result, academic achievement.”

show a sharp decline in educators’ perceptions of how well schools are serving LGBTQ youth. In a , 41% of respondents said their schools often meet these students’ needs, a number that fell to 31% and 22% this year. 

Stone attributed the rising reluctance to address sexual orientation and gender identity to the surge in anti-LGBTQ legislation like Florida’s new “Don’t Say Gay” law. “There has been a chilling effect across the country on teachers’ comfort talking about issues of gender and sexuality,” he said. “Teachers are nervous about parents’ reactions, or nervous about what they can or should say.” 

Hundreds of bills targeting LGBTQ Americans have been introduced in state legislatures this year, many aimed at transgender youth. Past experiences in states and districts that try to limit what educators can say to students show that teachers often fear the policies prohibit them from intervening when students are bullied.

Research consistently finds that LGBTQ students subjected to in-school bullying and victimization have poorer educational outcomes, including lower attendance, grade-point averages and rates of college enrollment, than their heterosexual, cis-gendered peers. If LGBTQ students are specifically named in anti-harassment policies, they are more likely to be protected in school. 

Even teachers in states where gay rights have not been a political flashpoint have expressed fear, Stone added, pointing to responses to the survey’s findings among members of an E4E teacher leadership council.

“Because of the culture of fear that’s been created, teachers are afraid to have these conversations with their students,” Leona Fowler, a teacher in Queens, New York, is quoted as saying in a report on the findings. “They have to find subtle ways to bring it up, to challenge gender stereotypes and censorship. But we don’t have the support, resources or curriculum to know how to do that effectively.” 

was administered in January and February to a nationally representative sample of 1,000 teachers, 77% of whom were white, as well as an additional 300 teachers of color. In contrast to the one-third of teachers overall who said gender and sexual orientation should not be taught, 97% of Black, Latino and Indigenous teachers said LGBTQ issues should be discussed in class, and 69% said their schools were failing their queer students. 

Respondents in the national sample overall said their schools met the needs of students with disabilities and students of color half the time, homeless students and foster youth a third of the time and English learners 37% of the time. 

Support for teaching LGBTQ subjects ranked lowest among 14 topics polled, with 99% of teachers saying the Civil War should be taught and 78% saying systemic racism should be discussed in schools.  

Teachers of color were more likely to support introducing LGBTQ history in earlier grades, with 75% saying middle school was an appropriate time, versus 42% of the national sample. Just 18% of both groups approved of instruction in elementary grades, while 65% and 60%, respectively, favored high school. None of the educators of color in the supplemental sample believed their school didn’t enroll any LGBTQ students. 

The disparity between the views of teachers of color and the majority white sample did not surprise Stone, who said the numbers mirror past polls. “In general — and this is true across multiple years of the survey — that our [Black, Latino and Indigenous] teachers are more likely to say their schools are struggling and not supporting all groups of students. And I would say they have a more realistic lens on what achievement looks like in their buildings.”

The poll also revealed discrepancies in teacher views by age, with 32% of those 50 and older opposing instruction covering gender and sexual orientation, as opposed to 18% of educators younger than 30. 

The University of California Los Angeles’ Williams Institute estimates 10% of Americans ages 13 to 17 identify as something other than heterosexual or cis-gendered. In June, President Joe Biden issued an executive order bolstering LGBTQ rights that called for greater collection of data on queer students’ experiences in school.  

Among educators who want to teach LGBTQ history and culture, Stone said E4E leaders hear concerns that a pervasive lack of training and classroom materials leave teachers unsure they can address topics accurately and respectfully. “When we have follow-up conversations with educators, what they’re saying is the reason it’s not happening is [they] haven’t been supported,” he said. “We don’t have the curriculum, we don’t have the tools and teachers are worried they’re going to do it wrong.”

An of teachers and school and district leaders administered in November and December found even softer teacher support for teaching LGBTQ topics, with 57% saying instruction is appropriate. 

The E4E report directs educators who want guidance on inclusive teaching and resources for meeting LGBTQ students’ needs to GLSEN, a national school clearinghouse on addressing sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Joyce Foundation and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies provide financial support to Educators for Excellence and The 74.

A graduate of the Cleveland-area school where he’s taught for 25 years, Russell still works to pull together an annual basketball tournament and festival in Oberlin — the experience that convinced him it was a “joy” to work with high school students. 

“He just commands the best out of you when you’re tired and you feel like you can’t do anymore,” said senior Caleb Peterson, who has had “Russ” as a teacher every year since ninth grade and is taking three of his courses this year. He also played basketball freshman and sophomore year. “The lessons he’s taught me on the court or in the classroom will stick in my heart.”

On Tuesday, the Council of Chief State School Officers named Russell the 2022 National Teacher of the Year. Students and staff, wearing the school’s red, white and blue colors, gathered early at the school for a watch party. When the announcement came, just after 8 a.m Eastern on , “the whole auditorium lit up,” Peterson said.

Teaching American history with a focus on the Black experience — at a time of intense national scrutiny over how educators discuss race and discrimination — the veteran educator plans to focus his year as the nation’s top teacher on breaking down barriers in education.

 “I would like to focus on diversity and making sure students receive a well-rounded educational experience,” said Russell, adding that he’ll advocate for girls to pursue STEM fields and more men teaching in the early grades.

He was inspired to go into education when he had a Black male teacher, Larry Thomas, for eighth grade math. “Culturally I could relate to him,” Russell said. “ His family migrated from the South. My family migrated from the South. Some of the discussion I had in class was personal to me.”

Russell turned that connection to his cultural roots into a career, teaching U.S. History and electives on race, oppression and Black music that are among the school’s most popular courses. When he’s teaching, his booming voice carries down the hallways. 

“He puts his entire heart into his students and they are very engaged in his lesson,” said Denita Tolbert-Brown, a business teacher at the school who has worked with Russell for 24 years. 

Peterson, who is weighing offers from Temple University in Philadelphia and Clark Atlanta University, said even though reading doesn’t “grasp” him like it used to, Russell has sparked his interest in books about racial history.

“No matter what I end up doing, I want to have the same impact,” he said about his favorite teacher and former coach. “I want to try to be like him and excel and inspire people.”

Russell feels fortunate that he’s been able to work in a “progressive” district where he hasn’t faced backlash from the community over teaching about racial and gender discrimination. Parents, he said, have been “accepting.” That’s in contrast to Republican lawmakers in his state, who have introduced three bills to restrict lessons on so-called “divisive” topics. would also limit references to gender identity and sexual orientation.

Even so, broader opposition, combined with the impact of the pandemic, has left many colleagues feeling worn down.

“For me, it’s just the idea of respect,” he said. “If someone visits a doctor and the doctor prescribes the medication, we don’t think twice about that. In education, teachers are not trusted. Politicians are telling teachers what we can or can’t teach.”

CCSSO’s choice of Russell as the winner “does bring a perspective that could add to the conversation both in Ohio and across the country,” said Anton Schulzki, president of the National Council for the Social Studies. “But that will be up to him to decide how to use his voice.”

Bills like those proposed in Ohio are “scaring” people out of the profession, said Jeff Wensing, vice president of the Ohio Education Association.

“We are looking at a time where students are really not considering the education profession,” he said, adding that Russell’s most important contribution over the next year could be to spark interest in the education field among young Black men. “We need more teachers of color. Students need to see people like themselves standing in front of them as educators.” 

Down the road from his Central Cabarrus High School stood the abandoned campus of the Stonewall Jackson Manual Training and Industrial School. Old and rundown, but with an elegant brick facade and tall white columns, the school had a “mythology” about it, Palko said. His classmates would sneak onto the grounds, which operated from the early to mid-20th century as a reform school for boys, and would spook each other with stories claiming the buildings were haunted.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

His curiosity piqued, Palko turned to the internet for information on the Jackson school. He quickly learned that in 1948, six teenage boys at the facility — some as young as 14 — by order of the state’s eugenics board.

“That was really shocking,” Palko told The 74. “It’s scarier than anything anyone said was going on.”

Those six operations, which medically robbed their victims of the ability to have children, were some of the over 7,600 sterilizations carried out by the state of North Carolina between 1929 and 1974 in a campaign to “” disabled and so-called “feebleminded” individuals under the state’s eugenic sterilization law. , but North Carolina carried out the third-highest number of sterilizations in the nation, after California and Virginia, and in its later years, the program almost exclusively targeted poor Black women.

Palko, who is now a college junior at NC State University, is among the vast majority of North Carolinians who were never taught about their state’s eugenic past in school. Previous reporting from The 74 uncovered that, despite a 2003 state-level directive that information on the state’s eugenics program be included in K-12 curricula, none of the state’s 10 largest districts require that students learn about the tragic episode.

The 74 asked readers of that story to tell us if they knew about North Carolina’s history of forced sterilization and if they had learned about it in school. Responses from 175 individuals help quantify the impact of those untaught lessons:

• Out of 90 respondents who identified as North Carolinians, 87 said that they had never learned about the state’s eugenics past in school, though a few were introduced in college.
• A majority said they had never even heard of the history prior to reading The 74’s reporting.
• Several North Carolina respondents were familiar with the state’s forced sterilization program because their family members were victims of it.

In history class, Palko remembers the national eugenics movement surfacing briefly, but without any information specific to North Carolina. No one prodded further about where sterilizations had happened, and whether they might have taken place in the state they called home.

“I did feel that something was missing in that sense,” said Palko.

Spurred by his curiosity toward the Jackson school sterilizations, the high schooler searched for information on his own.

While most states pulled back from their programs after the atrocities of Nazi Germany laid bare the ethical flaws of eugenics theory, North Carolina accelerated its campaign, he learned, . More than , the youngest being a 10-year-old boy, and procedures often occurred against the will of victims and their parents.

In the latter years of the campaign, 60 percent of those sterilized were Black and 99 percent were female, leading a recent Duke University study to conclude that the state worked to through its eugenics program during the late 1950s and ’60s.

“Eugenics control is not exclusive to the Nazis,” Karin Zipf, history professor at East Carolina University, told The 74. Numerous U.S. states, including North Carolina, maintained a mutual exchange of information on eugenics theory and practice with Germany in the years leading up to World War II, said the historian, who authored a book about a reform school for poor, white girls in Eagle Springs, North Carolina: .

As an , Palko worries that the right-wing outcry against teaching race could further scare teachers away from covering eugenics.

“[It] creates an environment of fear, especially for teachers, of what they can talk about,” he said. In Palko’s own district, the school board passed an anti-CRT resolution that one observer said for educators covering supposedly controversial topics.

What’s at stake in failing to teach students about this history, said Zipf, is “that we make the mistakes of the past, that we are ignorant of those mistakes.”

For Jonathan Burtnett, who graduated from high school in 1979, learning about North Carolina’s eugenics program as a young person led to meaningful conversations. He grew up in Raleigh and was one of three survey respondents from the state who said they had learned about the sterilization campaign in school.

“The topic made a huge impact on me and it became the topic of multiple dinner conversations at our house with my parents and my siblings,” Burtnett wrote in his survey response.

The 10th of 13 siblings, Burtnett was the only child in his family to receive any instruction on eugenics in school. When his fifth-grade teacher broached the topic in the early 1970s, Burtnett was still learning in a segregated elementary school, nearly 20 years after the landmark Brown v. Board decision.

The eugenics program was still active at that time.

As discussions of eugenics made shockwaves in his nuclear family, Burtnett’s parents told him that his own second cousins who lived in Whiteville were the victims of sterilization against their will, even though they were white and the program affected a greater share of Black families.

Every weekend for more than a month, Burtnett’s parents took him and his siblings to a school for young people with mental disabilities, giving their children a chance to play with the students at the school.

“They wanted us to see that these were the type of children that eugenics was trying to prevent, but they still had value,” Burtnett told The 74. “I think it molded our family the best possible way it could.”

Numerous other survey respondents shared their personal connections to the eugenics program, but chose not to identify themselves:

• “​​My aunt was sterilized! She was not feebleminded but she was poor and Black and legally blind and so was her husband. My aunt gave birth to their only child and then the state of NC used her being legally blind as a reason to sterilize her so she could not have more kids. Their son was not blind or feebleminded but instead grew up to be a military language expert. He … even worked at the UN.”
• “I learned about this mostly from the news stories during Gov. Easley’s term. That was when I realized this is what happened to my childhood next-door neighbor. She was my father’s age, but had the cognitive abilities of a 12-year-old or younger. I had always been told that she ‘couldn’t’ have children because of ‘an operation.’”
• “My mother had me prematurely at 6 1/2 months in 1965 at age 18 then being 17 while I was conceived,” wrote a respondent from Virginia, where sterilization was also common. “Now I appreciate being here a little more … due to abortion and being my mother [was] sterilized.”
• “I learned about it when working at Wake County [Department of Social Services] in the late ‘70s. One of my supervisors was part of a group who determined who should be sterilized. She still believed it was a good program and shouldn’t be discontinued.”

To Palko, who from time to time when he’s home from college, the old buildings — still standing and now on the National Register of Historic Places — provide him an important reminder about his state’s eugenics past.

“It’s really not distant history,” he said.

Even as a young girl, the shadow of a dark history hung over Orlice Hodges. At seven years old, she remembers her grandmother offering an explanation — chilling in retrospect — of what happened to young women taken away by social workers: they went to Black Mountain to get “fixed.”

“I used to always wonder, what do they mean by ‘fixed?’” the North Carolina native told The 74.

Only as she got older did the awful meaning become clear. “Fixed meant sterilization,” she understood. “They were sterilized.”

Her own aunt, according to what Hodges was told by family members, was one of the 7,600 people sterilized, or medically robbed of the ability to have children, by North Carolina between 1929 and 1974 under the state’s eugenic sterilization law. As a young, Black woman growing up in Winston-Salem in the 1960s and ‘70s, she could not help but know about the program, which sought to “” disabled and so-called “feebleminded” individuals. By the time of her childhood, the effort had become distinctly racial, with more poor Black women forcibly sterilized than any other group.

Countless others, when Hodges was a girl and up until today, remain unaware.

“Why was that never mentioned?” wondered Skylar Sharkey, a rising senior at Middle Creek High School in Apex, North Carolina, upon learning about her state’s history of eugenics for the first time as a high school junior. Thanks to a scheduling glitch this past spring, she landed — by what she now sees as a fortunate accident — in an elective course that covered some of the grimmer moments in her state’s history. It included information she had never had the slightest inkling of.

, she learned, but North Carolina carried out the third-highest number of sterilizations in the nation, after California and Virginia. While most states pulled back from their programs after the atrocities of Nazi Germany laid bare the ethical flaws of eugenics theory, North Carolina accelerated its campaign, conducting . More than , the youngest being a 10-year-old boy, and procedures often occurred against the will of victims and their parents.

In the latter years of the campaign, 60 percent of those sterilized were Black and 99 percent were female, leading a recent Duke University study to conclude that the state worked to through its eugenics program during the late 1950s and ’60s.

That North Carolina’s K-12 schools have almost without exception ignored the state’s past practice of forced sterilization offers a compelling example of the suppression of racially motivated, government-inflicted harm long before the nation began debating critical race theory or states started .

“It really kind of upset me when I found out about it, because I was like, ‘This is something that is such a major part of not only North Carolina history, but U.S. history, and it’s just something that had never been mentioned to me,’” Sharkey told The 74. “Some of these things were so close to home.”

None of her friends had any idea of their state’s history of eugenics, either. She would tell peers about what she was learning, only to receive shocked and horrified reactions. Even her mother’s parents, who lived in North Carolina while the program was active, were unaware.

“[It] left me feeling a little bit like I was being rigged of some information,” said Sharkey. “Like it was being hidden.”

Intentionally or not, North Carolina has largely failed to deliver on efforts to use public education as a tool to reckon with its history of eugenics, despite a nearly two-decades old from a committee convened by former Gov. Michael Easley that called on the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction to “include information about the eugenics program in its curriculum on North Carolina history.”

Deanna Townsend-Smith, director of policy and operations for the state Board of Education, told The 74 that she was not aware of the board ever having heard or considered the task force’s recommendation. In an email to The 74, John B. Buxton, senior education advisor to former Gov. Easley, explained that because there was never a legislative requirement for the board to act, “that likely undercut the momentum for including content in the curriculum guidance documents.”

With the benefit of hindsight, June Atkinson, who served as state superintendent from 2005 to 2017, acknowledged that the Department of Public Instruction did not do enough to move the ball forward on teaching the state’s history of eugenics during her tenure.

“I believe we could have done some more about helping teachers incorporate eugenics as part of their curriculum by having more curriculum guides or more resources for them,” she told The 74.

While the current state history standards do mention the word “eugenics,” the reference is to the wider American eugenics movement rather than North Carolina’s program — and even that serves as an optional, non-mandatory example. The state’s U.S. history standards were recently given an conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

The 74 reached out to the state’s 10 largest school districts and none indicated that they include their state’s eugenics program in their social studies curricula. One district, Cabarrus County Public Schools, told The 74 that a single school has an elective course that covers the topic. Its unit on eugenics is called “.” Another district, Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Public Schools, said that they provide on the topic that teachers may use in class. No other districts said that their schools directly reference the state’s eugenics program in curricular materials.

Basically, “there’s nothing stopping a teacher [from covering the North Carolina eugenics program] … but there’s also nothing requiring it,” Wake County Public Schools Communications Director Lisa Luten explained to The 74.

That’s in contrast with states like Virginia, where specifics on the state’s eugenics program are considered “essential knowledge” in statewide standards, according to information provided by the Virginia Department of Education. Or Oregon, where the Department of Education told The 74 that will include the state’s history of eugenics as an example within a content area that examines structural disadvantages against people with disabilities.

It appears unlikely that North Carolina students will be learning anytime soon about the same disturbing history that, as Sharkey put it, was “going on in my own backyard.” That’s because conservatives across the country are taking aim are restricting “” topics in the classroom through state-level bans on critical race theory, a previously arcane academic topic, and North Carolina’s state Superintendent Catherine Truitt last month forced a sudden revision to a years-long update of the state’s social studies curriculum over concerns that the new version .

Having trouble filling out the survey, go here

‘An ugly, dark side of our history that needs to be shared’

By other measures, however, North Carolina was a nationwide leader in reckoning with its eugenics past. When a brought to light details of the state’s sterilization program that had previously been hidden in sealed records, the state took swift action. Then-Gov. Easley issued an apology and convened a committee tasked with leading the state’s reparations and healing process.

After more than a decade of persistent advocacy from late state Rep. Larry Womble, and with help from Republican ally Thom Tillis, who became the state’s speaker of the house in 2011, North Carolina in 2014 became the as financial compensation for the injustices they endured. That action paved the way for and to do the same in 2015 and July 2021, respectively.

In its response, the state also called for the creation of an exhibit “to ensure that no one will forget what the State of North Carolina once perpetrated upon its own citizens.” That task fell to Hodges, who heard stories as a child of her late aunt being among those victimized citizens and who was working at the state’s Office for Minority Health and Health Disparities at the time.

When the display was completed, visitors could inspect not only timelines and maps documenting the history, she said, but also copies of official records and the actual medical instruments that doctors used to perform sterilizations. One wall showed pictures of victims along with headsets. “You could pick up a headphone, and listen to the actual survivors in their voice,” recalled Hodges.

Yet after being created in 2007 and traveling to a handful of colleges and universities in the state, the exhibit was soon taken out of commission due to lack of funds in 2009, Hodges said. In 2011, it was put into storage in a vault operated by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, where the department’s public information officer Michele Walker confirmed it is kept to this day. Audio elements of the exhibit are out of date, and the information included is not updated with the state’s compensation of victims, according to State Archivist Sarah Koonts. Certain loaned artifacts were also returned, she said.

Hodges never understood why the exhibit — created to make sure North Carolinians never forgot and then itself forgotten — was stored away rather than updated.

“It’s just sitting in a basement,” she said. “It’s a waste. Because it’s such an ugly, dark side of our history that needs to be shared.”

A ‘complex subject’

Despite North Carolina’s trailblazing campaign to compensate some of the victims of its eugenics program, Charmaine Fuller Cooper, who led the N.C. Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation through 2012, worries that the lack of public education could jeopardize the state’s progress toward reckoning with its past.

“Education is critical to the effort,” she told The 74. “Unfortunately, it’s one of those things that still too many people are not familiar with.”

“To the victims and families of this regrettable episode in North Carolina’s past, I extend my sincere apologies and want to assure them that we will not forget what they have endured.”
—Former Gov. Michael Easley, April 2003

That squares with what Marion Quirici, a lecturing fellow at Duke University, sees in her disability studies classes, where she takes first-years to the library for primary source sessions on eugenics. While rarely discussed in current-day American classrooms, a belief in eugenics shaped U.S. education through much of the early 20th century, particularly in celebrating I.Q. tests as a way to weed out “feeblemindedness,” and .

“Students from North Carolina in particular always express shock at their own state’s especially egregious role in this history,” Quirici told The 74 in an email. “They’ll say, ‘I’m from here; I can’t believe I never learned this!’”

The stakes are high, says Barbara Pullen-Smith, former founding director of the Office for Minority Health and Health Disparities.

“If our young people don’t understand our history, we are certainly doomed to repeat it,” she told The 74.

In a twist of brutal irony, a figure who once propelled forward the effort to compensate North Carolina sterilization victims now stands in the way of students learning about eugenics and other dark moments of our nation’s history.

U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, who as speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives played a key role in passing the 2012 legislation to disburse funds to sterilization survivors, in June co-sponsored the ‘Saving American History Act’ to . The is a Pulitzer Prize-winning effort from the New York Times Magazine that traces how systemic racism and the legacy of slavery impact America today, including Its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, recently after the school originally denied her tenure amid a wealthy conservative donor’s that many supporters viewed as racist.

Regarding how eugenics should be taught in the classroom, Sen. Tillis expressed mixed feelings.

“This is a very important, dark chapter in our nation’s history,” he told The 74. “It’s a complex subject that needs to be taught, but it needs to be taught at an age-appropriate level.”

When asked whether the North Carolina eugenics program’s absence in history standards and curricula presented a problem, he turned down the chance to comment.

Acknowledging his own opposition to the 1619 Project, Sen Tillis recommended instead convening a team of “academics and historians [with] some sort of an ideological balance for the preparation of curriculum so that you give these young people facts upon which they can draw their own conclusions.”

Teaching the ‘fractures’ in American democracy

Educator Matthew Scialdone, who taught Sharkley’s ‘Hard History and Civic Engagement’ elective at Middle Creek High School this spring, worries that the momentum — both local and national — against teaching about race could dissuade some educators from tackling difficult topics like eugenic sterilization.

“Given all of the pushback,” said Scialdone, “[eugenics] would probably be one of those topics that a teacher might back away from and say, ‘You know what, is it really worth stirring up whatever community uproar may come from me talking about this topic?’”

That’s unfortunate, says Dimitry Anselme, executive program director of the nonprofit , which creates online resources to help teachers effectively address the darker points of America’s past. There’s much to learn from difficult moments in history, Anselme says.

“For healthy democracies, you have to see the fractures,” he told The 74. “The fractures can teach us … what to seek to avoid and not repeat.”

The fact that eugenics laws were eventually repealed “actually speaks to what’s beautiful about democracy,” said Anselme.

Scialdone emphasizes to fellow educators that there’s more than enough content available on the North Carolina eugenics program to engage students without worries over bias. The key in his classroom? Primary sources, says the 2015-16 Wake County Public Schools Teacher of the Year.

This spring, he presented students with testimony from survivors and medical records from the state archives that documented the paper trail of one young woman’s sterilization procedure.

“This isn’t somebody else’s interpretation that I’m putting in front of you. This is the real thing,” he told his class.

The impression on his students, many of whom were participating over Zoom, was immediate.

“The chat in that class just stayed scrolling,” remembers Scialdone. “There was a lot of OMGs. There was a lot of ‘wait what?’”

The content drew Sharkey and her classmates in. “I was so beyond engaged in this course,” she remembers.

But Scialdone knows that his class is the exception, not the rule. Teachers’ “default mode,” he knows, is to “teach what they were taught and how they were taught,” which means that North Carolina’s history of eugenics is “not really covered,” he said.

That’s a problem, he believes — for students and the state, alike.

“If I’m the only one doing it,” Scialdone said, “then the moment was lost.”

Educators interested in covering the history of North Carolina’s eugenics program may find curricular resources and

Lead Image: Proceedings of the Eugenics Board special meeting May 19, 1958 (Courtesy of Johanna Schoen / Video by The 74’s Meghan Gallagher)

Get essential education news and commentary delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up here for The 74’s daily newsletter.

Texas 8th-grader Ernest Toledo said he’s learned and relearned Texas history throughout elementary and middle school, yet has never been taught a word about Juneteenth, an event in the Lone Star State many consider the first independence day for Black Americans.

“We should talk about it,” Toledo said.

After the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd sparked massive racial justice protests last year, state and city governments — and many private companies — rushed to recognize June 19 as a holiday for the first time. While the , on the eve of Juneteenth a year later, many students, educators and parents are still .

Today, 48 states and D.C. recognize the date formally as a day of remembrance or a holiday, and this week, President Joe Biden signed legislation making Juneteenth after both  both the and approved the measure in a rare show of bipartisanship. Of the nation’s 10 largest public school districts, nine do not recognize Juneteenth in their calendars, although their school year ends for students in May or early June. New York City will formally close schools for Junteenth beginning in 2022, and Chicago Public Schools may follow suit  to recognize it as a state holiday.

Given its omission from most history lessons, Juneteenth celebrations in recent years mark the first time many Americans learned about that date in 1865, when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas were informed of their emancipation. Their liberation came more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation and two months after the end of the Civil War. 2021 will be the first year 156 years later, although it’s been a proud tradition of that city for generations.

Former U.S. education secretary John King, in Maryland, put the growing awareness of Juneteenth into the larger context — and increasingly fraught — of teaching in greater depth about America’s racist past.

“We have a responsibility to struggle for an America that is more true to the promise of equality of opportunity, and a critical part of that struggle is ensuring that we tell the full story of our history in our social studies curriculum,” King told The 74.

Juneteenth in the classroom

María Rocha grew up about 250 miles west of Galveston and now teaches sixth-graders at Mark Twain Dual Language Academy in her home district, San Antonio Independent School District. She excitedly shares details of this year’s Juneteenth musical celebration in town and excerpts from her own spoken word piece on the need to change history textbooks, though she can’t recall a time she or her colleagues included the day as a part of their social studies instruction.

When asked what elements of culturally significant history she incorporates in her classroom, she shares that she sticks to what’s outlined in Texas state social studies curricula.

“I want to be that teacher that has no limits to what she can say, but you know, unfortunately, our jobs are on the line with what we say and do,” she said.

Rocha’s concerns echo those of many educators facing legislation that can restrict their ability to touch on race-related content in the classroom. are in the midst of passing such legislation, aimed at curbing antiracism training and critical race theory in schools. Just signed by Gov. Greg Abbott, also prohibits students from receiving course credit for political activism, or work with policy advocacy organizations on any issue (even, for example, service learning). if teachers link historical events to institutional racism.

Without state or district-provided support, some educators have taken it upon themselves to make Juneteenth a part of their Civil War units. For years, artist and social studies teacher Diane Isaac has begun her Juneteenth lessons at Curtis High School on Staten Island with a gallery-walk of primary source documents, images, and first-person accounts from the 1860s. She leaves materials on the walls all week, and invites her 11th-graders to go back and respond to other students’ reactions. On the first day of their Juneteenth lesson, students come together for a conversation about Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech “.

“I think it frames the Juneteenth celebration, because he’s pointing out that for African Americans, this concept of freedom and this jubilation, this celebration of American independence, did not apply to them,” Isaac said.

For Isaac, incorporating Juneteenth in her Civil War unit was never a question of why. It was a question of how she could make it a part of a bigger conversation in her school and .

“I’ve had conversations with many of my colleagues who say, the Civil War, we’ll teach that in maybe one or two lessons; Reconstruction, one lesson; slavery, maybe two or three lessons,” she said. “In all of a week to a week and a half, the lived experience of African Americans is flown by. It’s narrowed down to a PowerPoint presentation, which may include some primary source documents, but there’s no real depth and I felt that I needed to provide that depth.”

Six years ago, Isaac shifted to teaching U.S. history to upper high school students. She decided then that she wanted to focus on “the histories of Black and brown people, the histories that were not highlighted”. Teaching Juneteenth, for her, is just one example of that practice in action.

A former social studies teacher himself, John King says Juneteenth is one chapter in a much greater story about the oppression and triumphs of Black Americans and other historically excluded racial groups. King, who is now running for governor in Maryland, said he regularly incorporated Juneteenth as a part of his Civil War and Reconstruction teachings.

“We should be advocating for inclusion of the study of the institution of slavery, resistance to Reconstruction, emergence of Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow, history of Japanese-American internment — we have to include all of those things, because that is the truth of the story. We also, at the same time, should be telling the story of the first Black elected officials during Reconstruction, and we should be telling the story about African Americans’ resistance throughout,” King said.

Even some smaller, predominantly white districts are in pursuit of a similar, intentional approach to acknowledging Juneteenth. Administrators from western Massachusetts to upstate New York now mark it as a school holiday and provide resources for educators looking to revamp their curricula.

Chicopee Public Schools will recognize Juneteenth as a district holiday beginning in 2022. District leaders have given out resources to , , and high school teachers to support their new lessons on Juneteenth this year.

“We’re trying to be a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive school district. This is not just a holiday for Black people. This is a part of American history,” said Alvin Morton, assistant superintendent for student support services in the roughly 6,800-student Massachusetts district.

In Rhinebeck, a town of about 7,500 nestled in New York’s Hudson Valley, schools will close on June 18 in honor of the holiday. All week, Bulkeley Middle School is recognizing the significance of Juneteenth, starting with classroom lessons on its history. Seventh-grade social studies teacher Henry Frischknecht coordinated grade-wide art projects, with goals in mind to educate (6th grade), commemorate (7th grade), and celebrate (8th grade) Juneteenth.

Bulkeley students will come together on June 18 to display art and a 4”x 8” Juneteenth flag — clad with imagery and symbols from the life of several formerly enslaved people in Rhinebeck —at Town Hall. Seventh-grader Amaia Hayes is painting a night scene of her town, with trails and houses depicting the Underground Railroad’s path. She first learned about Juneteenth’s specific history in her classroom. “I think it’s really important that we have it off, to think about our history,” she said. Slavery wasn’t just a part of other towns’ histories, “it was Rhinebeck too, it was part of our community.”

Following the public installation, student art will be displayed year-round at 16 partnering businesses.

From racial reckoning to ‘correcting harm’

While these teacher-driven efforts to honor Juneteenth suggest a budding and real commitment to imparting a history that includes Black Americans, others urge for sustained, structural change in schools and communities.

“One of the key questions about Juneteenth is if it’s just performative — just a moment, and not a serious district-wide effort to advance racial equity — then to me it’s grossly inadequate to the moment,” King said.

Educators and advocates say the historical implications of Juneteenth warrant us to . Krystal Hardy Allen, a former Louisiana elementary school teacher, doctoral student, and CEO of K. Allen Consulting, coaches educators and administrators in reframing their practices to be more inclusive. She notes that teachers may not have preparation time, historical context, or pedagogical frameworks readily available to teach about Juneteenth or the legacy of slavery. While districts grapple with how to teach about Juneteenth and move to recognize it as a holiday, she said, they also need to be mindful of treating their Black staff in equitable, inclusive, and respectful ways.

“It is a near slap in the face to give people a day off to commemorate a holiday — calling it Jubilee Day, Freedom Day, Juneteenth, etc. — but behind closed doors, foster an environment that is not psychologically, emotionally, and physically safe for them,” Allen said.

Outside of the classroom, Juneteenth has been an opportunity for community education, celebration, and broader political action. Organizers in , New Jersey, , Illinois, and , Minnesota are utilizingJuneteenth events to push for reparations and policy change to counteract centuries of systemic racism — and for the legacy of slavery, at the very least, to be examined more thoroughly.

The New Jersey Institute for Social Justice has co-hosted Juneteenth events for years. Organizers say 2021’s will be its first explicitly advocating for reparations, specifically, to create a state reparations task force “to look at New Jersey’s very particular history when it comes to these things, and come up with sweeping policy recommendations that address our particular brand of structural racism,” said Laurie Beacham, the Institute’s director of communications.

Newark residents and reparations supporters say there’s never been a better moment to act, given widespread dialogue on racial inequality. In 1989, federal legislation for a commission to study the history of slavery and reparations died in committee. Now three decades later, it’s been in the House with more than 180 Democratic co-sponsors.

Congressional Black Caucus members are pushing , in the wake of the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Even if moderates join the tide and it passes the House, there is slim chance of it winning approval in the Senate, where Republicans are concerned that a reparations commission could lead to unprecedented cash restitution.

This national momentum to examine the negative impact of government and institutional policies on Black families is also taking place at the same time that GOP-led states pass laws to restrict teachers from having the very conversations that link Jim Crow laws to systemic racism and the concept of reparations.

“It’s nice to have a day off, but it’s better to have a policy that reflects the importance of why we have the day off,” Natasha Capers, a New York City public school parent and director of NYC’s Coalition for Educational Justice, said. CEJ advocates for culturally responsive education, the policy aim of their annual Juneteenth event. “When we talk about reparations it’s about correcting harm. It’s not about individual wealth, it’s how do we pour this back into schools, how do we pour this back into infrastructure, how do we pour this back into land ownership?”

For supporters, correcting harm is at the heart of calls for reparations. Capers notes that Black, Indigenous, and Asian families did not see generational wealth because, for centuries, white families profited from their exploitation. Holding this fact in tandem with what happened on Juneteenth helps explain why the date finds itself perpetually a cause for celebration and political action — it marked the end of one form of exploitation (slavery), yet the start of another (Jim Crow).

Young people across the country are working to understand what comes after reckoning, celebrating Junteenth and positioning it in a larger political moment through or Samiyah Webster, a high school junior in Newark, seeks out opportunities on her own to learn, participate and share outside of the classroom, noting the opportunity to do so in-school is inconsistent. “I think it’s important to be aware of the history aside from the stuff that they teach you in school”, she said.

She’ll be attending the Institute for Social Justice’s Juneteenth rally for reparations, and hopes that people become more aware of what reparations mean and that Newark practices them. “It is basically making amends for things that someone did wrong.”

Leff, the board chair and a former history teacher, was standing on the Amtrak platform with Brooks in 2015, shortly after he became CEO, waiting for the train to take them to his very first meeting with donors. As she remembers, “He turned to me and said, ‘Everything I’ve done in my life has led me to this point.’”

Did the donors make a significant contribution? Yes, but to Leff that’s not the point. “He sees this as his calling,” she says.

Facing History equips high school and middle school teachers to bring history alive through engagement with primary sources (including firsthand accounts) and guided conversation. Under Brooks’s leadership, the organization has grown to the point where it now trains 100,000 U.S. teachers and reaches millions of students. More significantly, it has pioneered a new approach to history education, embracing current events and personal identity to achieve a deeper understanding.

Teachable Moments

“We ask students to think about their identity in relation to a community,” Brooks explains. “Identity maps are complex. They turn on more than one axis. What other identities can you be part of?” He describes a classroom where cliques are fixed and impermeable until two students realize they have something in common—say, playing the piano—and the walls separating people come tumbling down.

Brooks came to Facing History after serving as the dean of faculty and chief academic officer at Connecticut College, where he also held the Elie Wiesel Professorship in the department of Religious Studies. He took the reins from Facing History’s founder and longtime leader, Margot Stern Strom, a trailblazer in the movement to teach the Holocaust through encouraging students to walk in the shoes of others. “Stern Strom’s insight,” Brooks says, “is that history can be used to teach what it means to make good choices.”

The Holocaust carries great meaning for Brooks, as a subject he researched and taught for decades, and as a personal matter—as an American Jew who grew up in Minneapolis in the 1960s, when “Gentiles Only” signs remained a fresh memory. At the same time, upon meeting with teachers, he realized that other subjects, including current events, could also spark meaningful dialogue and what he calls historical thinking. “Skills like recognizing cause and effect and building an argument matter whether or not you become a history major,” he says.

Facing History has made racism in America a central topic of its curriculum development. Just as the Holocaust arose out of a long history of anti-Semitism in Europe, there are historical factors to consider when we watch TV coverage of a police officer shooting an unarmed black man.

Take, for example, Facing History’s that accompanies the documentary film, The Murder of Emmett Till. The subject engrossed the history class at Overton High School in Memphis so much that they researched lynchings in their area and tracked down the great niece of one of the victims. They pushed for a historical marker at the site where Ell Persons was lynched one hundred years earlier. Khari Bowman, then a senior, “I wouldn’t have discovered activism without this experience because I’m a shy person. It’s brought out someone who is outspoken and who is excited to share knowledge with others.”

According to Facing History’s metrics,

• 94% of students reported that they gained skills relevant to analyzing world events.
• 81% of students feel they are more capable of recognizing racism, anti-Semitism and prejudice.
• 82% of students have stood up to someone who made a bigoted or racist comment. (“When they can articulate why offensive comments are damaging, they realize they have agency to make it better,” says Brooks.)
• Students register to vote at a rate that is 20 percentage points higher than the average for U.S. citizens their age. (“Pulling the levers of power includes pulling the levers in the ballot box.”)

Given Brooks’s background in higher education, how did he adapt to a nonprofit focused on younger students? “Most of what happens is the same,” he answers, downplaying the difference between academia and nonprofit life, citing the common demands of collaboration and problem solving. He also credits the commitment of his team—“not just the program staff, but development, IT, HR, everyone fully believes in standing up against bigotry and hate. They live to make the world better.” Leff points out that Brooks played a large role in assembling this team.

The COVID Pivot

The present moment has challenged Brooks and Facing History like never before. “At various points,” he recalls, “People have told us that our mission matters ‘now more than ever,’ but this time it’s especially true.”

For one thing, the crisis is exposing “the meanest and most despicable fault lines in our society.” Mentioning horrific discrimination against Asians and Asian Americans, Brooks marvels that in this day and age, people are still asking Can we trust the immigrants?

“Stress always releases bias,” he states. “Our universe of obligation is supposed to grow as we get older, but the pandemic shrank it, as people worry about nothing else besides themselves and their families.” Case in point: The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of March 2020.

Another challenge struck at Facing History’s core method for training teachers—its popular and transformative in-person workshops. The organization was already starting to embrace online platforms, but the pandemic has meant accelerating the shift.

Brooks reached out to the teacher community, asking What do you need? More than a thousand responses came down to a twofold request: more tools for teaching remotely and curricula for teaching social-emotional learning.

Facing History launched a virtual Community Conversation Series, starting with actor and activist George Takei (best known as Star Trek’s Lieutenant Sulu) discussing his family’s wrongful incarceration during World War II and ways to confront today’s anti-Asian racism.

The hate unleashed by the pandemic targets more than Asians, of course. Jews, the perennial scapegoats of history, are also in the crosshairs, and Brooks is prepared. Late last month, the Facing History office in Memphis partnered with three local organizations to present a screening and panel discussion of via the PBS online platform OVEE, and similar events are in the works.

“We all get to decide what goes viral,” asserts Brooks.