This summer, incoming ninth-graders at New Dorp High School on Staten Island are reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens by Sean Covey.

The rest of the school’s 3,051 students will choose from three options. Rising 10th-graders can pick from Fever 1793, The Pigman and A Wrinkle in Time. Choices for 11th-graders are I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Book Thief and Orphan Train. Seniors-to-be will read The Call of the Wild, The Picture of Dorian Gray or The Diary of Anne Frank.

All of the books, with the exception of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, were written by white authors. That means most of New Dorp’s non-white population —��nearly half of teens at the school —��won’t read any assigned authors of color this summer.

New Dorp isn’t the only New York City high school offering students similar options this summer. An analysis by ����Ӱ�� found that 11 of the city’s 26 largest high schools — those with more than 2,000 students — offer summer reading lists that are overrepresented with white authors.

����Ӱ��’s analysis of the 11 lists — schools with book lists online — found that on average, 46 percent of authors were white, while an average of 28 percent of students were white.

����Ӱ�� also found that, among the schools reviewed:

• An average of 11 percent of authors were Asian, while an average of 32 percent of students are Asian.
• An average of 6 percent of authors were Latino, while an average of 24 percent of students share that identity.
• An average of 30 percent of authors were Black, while 14 percent of students are Black.

“It’s embarrassing,” said Tanji Reed Marshall, a curriculum expert at The Education Trust. “What we have is this real, serious identity imbalance. It boils down to whose story is being told and whose story is not being told. Students are tired of a one-sided approach to the American identity.”

The problem of author underrepresentation in content hasn’t gone unnoticed at the city’s elementary and middle schools, with the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice for a more diverse ELA curriculum and book vendors that reflect student demographics.

In 2019, New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza culturally responsive curricula a matter of “life and death.” The NYC Reads 365 book list was updated, with an in Black authorship from 9 percent in 2018-19 to 25 percent this year, among other more inclusive changes to the 254-book resource.

“Our students should see themselves reflected in the books they read and the lessons they learn,” said DOE spokesperson Danielle Filson, who added that the department revised the 365 options again in February to encompass more non-white authors. “This list was compiled based on recommendations from students, parents/guardians, educators and community members and is more diverse and reflective of our city.”

But the city’s largest high schools are still falling short.

At New Dorp, 90 percent of the summer reading list . The student body, in contrast, is 52 percent white, 27 percent Latino, 10 percent Black and 10 percent Asian. At Curtis High School, also on Staten Island, 41 percent of students are Latino, while only 7 percent of authors on the list .

At Forest Hills High School in Queens, 71 percent of the summer reading list by white authors, compared to a white student population of 29 percent. Although 1 in 4 students is Asian and 35 percent of students identify as Latino, those groups saw themselves reflected in just 7 percent of assigned authors.

Even the school with the most representationally balanced list, Edward R. Murrow in Brooklyn, the same trend. While the student population is nearly a quarter Asian and a fifth Latino, authors with those backgrounds constituted just 13 percent of the school’s book roster each.

The other schools reviewed by ����Ӱ�� were the Bronx High School of Science, Brooklyn Technical High School, Benjamin N. Cardozo High School, Fort Hamilton High School, Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School, Midwood High School and Susan E. Wagner High School.

The NYC Department of Education declined to comment on the findings.

Lindsey Foster, a research associate at NYU’s Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, said that the trend reflects a troubling gap between what educators know about the benefits of representational learning materials and what’s actually being taught.

“In a city like New York that’s incredibly racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse, to have a lack of representation is very harmful to students,” said Foster, who contributed to “,” a demographic breakdown of books in curricula commonly used across local elementary schools.”You’ve got an overwhelmingly racially diverse student population, and book lists that simply don’t match that.”

Research shows that “culturally responsive” education — teaching that centers the student experience, so that kids can see themselves in instruction and the way it’s delivered — benefits white students and students of color alike. In San Francisco, for instance, the average freshman who an ethnic studies class improved their GPA by 1.4 grade points and attendance by 21 percent. In Tucson, Arizona, students who enrolled in Mexican-American Studies courses performed better in math, reading and writing — and were to graduate.

Foster explained that giving students representational texts is just the beginning of culturally responsive teaching. “I want to be clear that the lists are simply an entry point,” she said. “They’re a foundational precondition for culturally responsive sustaining education.”

����Ӱ�� also showed the lists to Gloria Ladson-Billings, a teacher educator who coined the term “culturally relevant” learning — culturally responsive learning’s cousin — in the 1990s.

She noticed some dated titles, like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Joy Luck Club. “That is a pretty old book,” she said of the latter, adding that teachers might consider other options written by East Asian authors, like The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, instead.

Ultimately, Ladson-Billings said, students benefit from reading more than just one book about a moment in time or a particular culture. For instance, a teacher might assign Heart of Darkness, a book that highlights the colonial experience and disparages the African continent, alongside a work like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

“The question then becomes, ‘How can two people write about the same place and have their stories be so different?'” she elaborated. “The role of the teacher shouldn’t be to get rid of Heart of Darkness. It’s to think about what book should be paired with it.”

Marshall, the curriculum expert, wasn’t surprised to see the dramatic underrepresentation of Asian and Latino authors in ����Ӱ��’s data. In fact, she said, she’s seen worse in other districts.

“The numbers cut through,” she added. “Are the lists giving readers a wide sense of identity possibilities? You want to give kids as many as you can. We can do more. We can do better.”

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the correct title for The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir.

When Kendall Smith was taught about Reconstruction of the American South after the Civil War, she was told it was the nation’s attempt to right the wrongs of slavery.

“They said that was the purpose and that they did it,” said Smith, now a senior at Cleveland’s MC2STEM High School. “I was never taught that isn’t what happened.”

Smith wishes she had learned about Reconstruction’s failures — of how slavery was replaced with sharecropping and Jim Crow laws — and history’s blunt truths without “watering down” uncomfortable facts.

“We should know everything … the good and the bad,” she said. “It’s hard to move on when we don’t know everything.”

How well schools in Cleveland handle racial issues is under increasing scrutiny after the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed this summer. For many, making sure the district’s students — 64 percent of whom are Black — know the context behind racial issues today is a priority.

The same scrutiny is happening for schools across Ohio, though not always with the same local urgency in a state that’s 82 percent white and 13 percent Black.

Ohio’s state school board put the issue at the forefront last week, when board members criticized persistent learning gaps between white and Black students and condemned “white supremacy, hate speech, hate crimes and violence in the service of hatred.” With a 12-5 vote, the majority-white board called for anti-bias training for themselves and Ohio Department of Education employees.

The board also directed the department to re-examine state tests and learning expectations in all subjects to make sure that “racism and the struggle for equality are accurately addressed.”

“We must confront our own bias,” Board President Laura Kohler said. “We must learn about how racism impacts society and how to recognize and eliminate racism perhaps even in our own hearts. We must begin to understand people who have experienced things that we have not.”

A small but growing number of critics say an honest review of will find that they downplay racial and social aspects of the nation’s past, burying them in a rush to teach other material on state tests.

“Everyone’s addressing racism now, but our curriculum doesn’t really allow us to address it,” said John Adams, a Cleveland high school history teacher who has presented his concerns to state Superintendent Paolo DeMaria.

Adams and others say Ohio teaches slavery and the Civil War too early, uses euphemisms like the “forced migration” of Black slaves and treats wars, not social issues, as the dominant part of history.

Shari Obrenski, who taught social studies for 21 years in Cleveland before becoming head of the Cleveland Teachers Union in April, agrees with Adams’s assessment.

“The social studies curriculum is still very much whitewashed,” she said. “That’s how social studies has been taught for generations.”

Schools or teachers that want to present a broader look have to fill in gaps with extra work or classes.

For many, that takes a separate Black history class. But those are usually electives, like at nine of Cleveland’s 32 high schools, and not required classes.

Black history classes should be mandatory for all students, says Lavora “Gayle” Gadison, the social studies content manager for the Cleveland school district. Other teachers in Ohio are also quietly exploring whether Ohio could require Black history classes statewide.

Gadison said Cleveland students need Black history classes to see patterns of racism over time and not see it just as isolated events.

“You have these protests, and people are outraged by the treatment they’re seeing by the police,” said Gadison. “But this is not brand new. If everybody knew this history, then folks would know that this is just a continuation.”

Gadison has also tried to supplement Cleveland’s history lessons by inserting portions of a “” anti-bias curriculum from the Southern Poverty Law Center into eighth-grade history outlines. She plans to add Teaching Tolerance to extra grades soon.

The Teaching Tolerance additions would highlight that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War, that slavery shaped beliefs about race and that white supremacy was a by-product of slavery.

The Cleveland school district, like schools in cities like Chicago and Memphis, also works with Boston-based , a national group that provides teaching materials and training to add depth to history and English classes.

“There is a lot of pain in this nation’s history, tremendous pain, tremendous brutality,” said Kristen Miller, a social studies teacher at Cleveland’s John Marshall School of Information Technology. “Do we teach that raw pain? No.”

Facing History helps her cover those issues in a meaningful way.

“It taps into so many unknown and often unheard-of voices in history,” said Miller, who has used Facing History to add perspective to her classes for years and just started teaching a Black history class last year using Facing History’s approach. “There’s definitely room to bring in voices that are not as strongly represented in the standards.”

Facing History’s partnership with the Cleveland school district has been growing over time. The , and the organization works closely with four other schools to bring lessons to students and with another 18 schools to provide materials or training for teachers.

Standards at the root

A top concern is Ohio’s choice to teach slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction in eighth grade. The subjects are not revisited in high school, unless individual teachers choose to.

“You can teach kids about these things when they’re younger, but then they don’t have the cognitive abilities to fully grasp the magnitude of what happened,” Adams said.

Adams has already asked the state superintendent to make the Civil War era part of high school history classes to cover that hole.

Adams and Gadison have also suggested changing Ohio’s eighth-grade standards to highlight slavery and colonialists’ mistreatment of Native Americans throughout the year. They would also adjust the standard covering Reconstruction to highlight constitutional gains for former slaves but also Southern opposition and rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

“This is one of the most important statements,” they note. “We must get it right.”

Racism as the central issue?

At the core of the debate is how dominant racism was in shaping this country. Though some, like Adams and Gadison consider it central, others don’t.

At last week’s school board meeting, two residents objected to the Ohio Department of Education listing The New York Times 1619 Project as They objected to its claim that “out of slavery grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system.” They said the claim overstates history, is inaccurate and should be removed from the department’s list of resources.

Ohio Department of Education officials defended its accuracy, and it remains.

State school board members also were divided over the board’s anti-racism resolution. While board member Linda Haycock talked about her gradual understanding of how white privilege has benefited her, board member Mike Toal was uncomfortable referring to privilege in the resolution.

Toal said he doesn’t understand the concept well, much like many residents who might push back against the overall effort.

“It’s a very contentious concept,” said Toal, who is white; he voted for the resolution despite his concern. “Maybe it’s not as contentious in certain segments of the population.”

Board member Lisa Woods, who is also white and represents a mostly white region about 45 minutes southeast of Cleveland, wanted clear definitions and proof of the systemic racism and hate speech condemned in the resolution. She read several letters that challenged any statement that Ohio has systemic racism since it was never a slave or Jim Crow state.

“These are serious but unproven accusations,” said Woods before voting against the resolution.

Board Vice President Charlotte McGuire, who is Black, also voted against the resolution.

“I don’t believe in systemic racism,” she said, explaining that systems are just made up of individuals who determine how systems work.

And she questioned the idea of privilege, saying she has succeeded even after attending segregated schools in Memphis growing up, because adults encouraged her.

“When you talk about privilege … am I privileged?” she asked. “I could talk about Black privilege, for example, because of my achievement in life. A lot just has to do with the hearts of people.”

On a recent summer Tuesday at noon, a straggler checks into a Zoom meeting, where 107 teachers, administrators and school counselors are listening to Paul Forbes deliver a lecture on implicit bias, the human tendency to judge others based on stereotypes unwittingly internalized.

Forbes is the New York City Department of Education’s director of educational equity, anti-bias and diversity. He’s run these mandatory workshops for two years, but the past four months have been different, with schools shuttered by a global pandemic — one that still threatens September’s reopening — and a national reckoning taking place over the long-standing inequities faced by Black Americans.

“Now, more than ever, this is incredibly important,” Forbes told ����Ӱ��. “People have been quarantined, folks have been sheltering in, and people are seeing things in the news and on the streets. They’re starting to think about the introspective work needed to understand their historical context. This is an opportune time to reflect.”

His is a hopeful take on how hundreds,��or potentially thousands, of staff will process a required professional development exercise that was contentious even before COVID-19 struck. Then again, Forbes’s work is fueled by optimism, predicated as it is on the idea that the nation’s largest school district can use empathy to move a mostly white teaching corps toward a more mindful approach, as they teach 1.1 million students who largely don’t look like they do.

At the forefront of Forbes’s mind is how this gap in life experience plays out in the classroom. New York remains one of the nation’s most segregated school systems. Across the city, Black students are at disproportionately higher rates and in gifted and talented classes less frequently than their white and Asian peers. In 2018, a white teacher drew outrage after on a student while teaching a lesson about slavery.

As Forbes explains in his workshop, the policies and procedures that have led to those problems can’t change until the administrators who put them in place —��and the teachers who uphold them —��take some time to examine the subtle preferences that they carry into daily interactions.

He likens this process to darkening a window so that it turns into a mirror. Workshop proponents say the endeavor is long overdue and might just stand a better chance at success now that, following weeks of protesting, a majority of Americans across racial groups say they the Black Lives Matter movement.

But tackling the underlying assumptions of 130,000 employees has never been an easy feat, and it certainly isn’t now, with 5,551 school safety officers, who were under the supervision of the New York Police Department, beginning their transition to the DOE. That move, in part a response to last month’s police brutality protests, will include continuing the officers’ training in de-escalation, implicit bias and restorative justice work, a DOE spokesman .

In person, the implicit bias workshop was a five-hour affair held in a rented space. Now, it consists of three hour-long, self-paced sessions, followed by an hour-and-a-half-long videoconference led by Forbes or one of his five colleagues.

Like the in-person version, the virtual session introduces a number of social psychology terms, including affinity bias (the tendency to side with people who share things in common with us), confirmation bias (the habit of preferring information that validates already-held beliefs) and conformity bias (the desire to align with a group’s opinion).

Before the pandemic, attendees were clustered to discuss by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on the danger of a single story, draft poems about the people and places that shaped them, and chat about the origins of their names.

These interactive elements are no longer built into the workshop; the team tried using breakout rooms initially but ran into too many technical problems to keep them up.

Instead, the pandemic iteration is a lecture punctuated by three chances to engage using the Zoom chat box. Attendees are invited to vote on their musical preferences, guess student graduation rates by demographic, and select the most widely held American bias —��which, it turns out, is ageism, a point Forbes drives home by playing of “Forever Young” by Alphaville. The workshop addresses not only age and race but also gender, disability and sexual orientation. Viewers don’t have to participate in the chat to pass the class.

Researchers are still trying to understand how to decouple people from their prejudice in a way that sticks. Some data show that implicit bias workshops on that front.

“The relative scarcity of field experiments testing effectiveness leaves ambiguity about whether diversity training improves attitudes and behaviors toward women and racial minorities,” the authors of one paper in 2019. “One-off diversity trainings that are commonplace in organizations are not panaceas for remedying bias in the workplace.”

Rachel Godsil is a co-founder of the , an organization that gained recognition for anti-bias workshops coordinated with Starbucks in May 2018. Around that time, officials at the NYC Department of Education approached Godsil’s staff and asked them to help shape their own training.

While she acknowledges that research shows that success from the workshops is minimal, Godsil argues that they’re still useful.

“We’re not suggesting that the five-hour training will make people unbiased,” she says. “It’s really hard to reduce biases. The goal is to have teachers understand the vulnerability it takes to engage with students differently.”

She hopes that the steps outlined in the session —��spending more time with people from different backgrounds outside of work, imagining oneself into different perspectives and slowing down —��might change how participants interact with students in the fall.

As Forbes put it on the Zoom call, “You’re not going to end a session and be cured or healed or saved or sanctified. But you’ll be more aware.”

The Brooklyn-born sports fan is in his 23th year with the DOE, where most recently he was working with young Black and Latino men to boost their graduation rates.

During quarantine, Forbes spends his days leading the remote workshops and his nights reading the feedback he receives from staff. He misses the in-person sessions, where he could see them nod and shake their heads and call out from the audience.

“This work is about human connection,” he says. “A piece of that has been the face-to-face.”

In the current format, he can’t tell what’s happening on the receiving end for most participants during the lecture. Unlike some of his colleagues, Forbes turns his camera on, but attendees don’t have to.

“You could cook while you’re doing it. You could be on your computer shopping,” he says. “I can’t tell if you’re not paying attention.”

When the pandemic shuttered schools in March, it cut the in-person workshops short and shattered the possibility that the DOE might make the June 2020 deadline to train all employees that had been publicized in emails to school leaders a year earlier. By mid-May, the department was running the live sessions over Zoom, three times a day, four days a week.

The DOE has trained about 55,000 school-facing staff — less than half of all employees. Of those, just under 9,000 have done the workshop remotely in the past few months. Department officials say they’re working with superintendents on an updated timeline for completion, with the aim of wrapping up by June 30, 2021.

So far, the department has spent $6.3 million on the workshops, leaving $16.7 million of the total set aside by schools Chancellor Richard Carranza in 2018 for one of the cornerstones of his school improvement agenda. Forbes acknowledges that’s money his team could lose, given the city’s fiscal crisis.

“COVID-19 disrupted a lot,” he says. “I hope we’re fully funded to do what we need to do. I’m also pragmatic and know that cuts are going to occur, and that everyone’s going to feel it. If I find we only have two people, I’ll do what I can.”

Despite controversy over the workshops —��some educators have said they’re too ““; others have at the mere suggestion that they harbor biases —��teachers who spoke with ����Ӱ�� reported that, overall, they’ve found the sessions useful.

Nicole Brennan, a science teacher at Queens Explorers Elementary School in Ozone Park, said her initial frustration over having to take the workshop evaporated quickly as she sat through a session in February.

She was moved by the scope of biases addressed, she says, and was struck in particular by the part that tackled gender.

“I never really thought before about the pressure boys are under, especially when it comes to athletics. That opened my eyes a bit,” she says, adding that the experience has influenced how she interacts with her 20-month-old son. “I’ve been thinking about how to be careful about the things I say to him.”

Another science teacher, Mike Loeb, who teaches seventh-graders in the Bronx, also found the experience informative.

“It was as effective as a one-off professional development workshop can be,” he says. “I believe being an anti-racist teacher is a requirement these days.”

Loeb says he’s seen some educators push back against the idea of re-evaluating their race-based inclinations during his work as a school union representative.

“It gets thorny very quickly,” he says. “There are folks who feel like, ‘I have biases, I need more [training].’ There are others who say, ‘This is a whimsical, fluffy, liberal agenda.'”

A few teachers interviewed by ����Ӱ�� hadn’t taken the workshop, and some were surprised to learn about the new deadline. Several hadn’t heard that it had moved online at all — including officials with the United Federation of Teachers. Others wondered how effective an online version could be. Most said the work is a step in the right direction but that the department could do more to support educators in their pursuit of mindful teaching.

Forbes says the workshops were never meant to be a silver bullet; rather, they were meant to fit into a broader push by the department to understand disparities among students.

He cites the “equity teams” organized by 29 districts around the city as an example. Each has selected two incubator schools, which have been collecting data on the demographic composition of school suspensions and gifted and talented classes.

Prior to the pandemic, the plan had been to add 17 more districts into the mix. According to Forbes, budget cuts could threaten that.

“We’ve had a couple of starts and stops,” he says. “We’ll see what happens now.”

It’s almost 2 o’clock. Forbes has somehow addressed death and discrimination, COVID-19 and in the span of 90 minutes, endearing himself to at least some of his vast audience in the process —��although given the format, what most of them are thinking is anyone’s guess. He invites attendees to unmute themselves, and a cascade of voices fall forward, blipping in and out, thanking the team and signing off.

A few people stay behind to chat with Forbes in the 20-minute window he has before his next meeting.

“I’d turn on my camera, but I’m still in my pajamas,” one says sheepishly, adding that the name-related part of the session really resonated with her, given that her own comes from adopted Sicilian and Arabic roots.

“Very nice,” Forbes smiles. “By the way, I’m in my pajamas, too.”

The world has changed since D.C.’s social studies standards were created 14 years ago.

A few events stand out for State Board of Education member Jessica Sutter: the election and presidency of Barack Obama; the landmark marriage-equality Supreme Court ruling; and now, historic protests and a global pandemic ravaging communities of color that have once again forced the nation — D.C. included — to take an introspective look at whose histories have been uplifted or buried.

“To think about how we teach history and whose stories predominate … It is not for the faint of heart,” said Sutter, a former middle school social studies teacher.

Sutter and a newly appointed , however, are up to the challenge, and they will spend the next half year combing and critiquing a that informs schools’ curricula by outlining key events and skills that students should learn by grade.

The work is important “now more than ever,” Sutter said, with culturally responsive education critical in the coming months and years as schools look to re-engage students and recoup from COVID-19.��

“It’s just so important that students see themselves in the way they’re being taught and in what they’re being taught,” said Fadhal Moore, a committee member and former eighth-grade history teacher at D.C.’s E.L. Haynes Public Charter School. “If there’s a huge disconnect between students’ lives and what happens in the classroom, they check out.”

Though the standards were early on, five committee members interviewed by ����Ӱ�� were quick to point out wanted changes: More space for history and culture that doesn’t revolve around a white, often European, narrative; giving students better tools to be engaged citizens and voters; and introducing more diverse perspectives in the K-2 grades. D.C. Public Schools’ curriculum is based on the standards; as many as three-quarters of D.C. charters also use them.��

Officials say the standards play a vital role as a guidepost for educators. And they reflect what D.C. considers relevant history.��

It “sends a signal of what are the things that we are saying we value,” said Scott Abbott, DCPS’s director of social studies, “and what is actually important.”

Tying in more diversity

The mix of educators, administrators, students and experts on the committee agree that the standards don’t give equal attention to non-white cultures and people. E.L. Haynes Public Charter School teacher Jessica Rucker counted the number of times the word “American” appears in the current standards: 171 times.��

If “American” were “replaced with the words ‘white people,’ it would more clearly illustrate the what and who we expect students to know,” she told other committee members July 7.

Moore has taken notes, too. African history before European colonization is sparse. The standards for the Industrial Revolution don’t explicitly suggest uplifting diverse voices, like that of a Latino child or a Black woman. One of the most striking to Moore is there are “no non-Western-society history standards” until seventh grade. And even when continents like Africa do emerge, European history is often still the backdrop. In ninth-grade World History, for example, center on Europe or how periods like the Renaissance influenced other cultures.

“Most students’ interactions with persons of color outside of Europe are going to be simply victims of European expansion and growth. Not exclusively, but by and large,” said committee member Michael Stevens, social studies director at Friendship Public Charter School. While that network doesn’t use the standards, it hopes to adopt the updated version.

Students feel this imbalance of perspectives in the classroom. In a with Sutter in March, one student lamented that there “isn’t a lot of positive history” about Black people that’s taught. A few others said history lessons often feel stagnant, rarely connecting past oppression of communities of color to present-day struggles.

Across D.C. public schools, of students are Black, 19 percent are Latino, and 11 percent are white.

https://www.instagram.com/tv/B-IZemeBMIH/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

“We talk about slavery, we talk about segregation, we talk about the civil rights era … [and] a young learner, just going off the textbook, would think that racism ended there,” said Alex O’Sullivan, a rising junior at BASIS DC Public Charter School who is on the committee. He wants more attention paid to systemic issues like housing segregation or the war on drugs and the resulting mass incarceration of Black men.��

Committee members also feel there are gaps in civics education, which encourages students to explore their identity within society and teaches them how to be more engaged citizens.

There aren’t any civics standards between grades 3 and 11, Moore said. He intends to push for updated standards that include skills-building across grades: how to organize a protest and obtain necessary permits, craft petitions and pen letters to local politicians, for example.

“You do not become a citizen at 18. You are always a citizen,” he’d tell his students. So “what does that mean for you to start to interact with that now?”��

Standards for the younger grades, in general, need to be more “robust,” committee members like Sutter and Abbott said. The current K-2 standards focus on basic concepts such as reading a map, identifying American symbols like the Statue of Liberty and learning to respect others. The one outlier — which Abbott said he wishes there were more of — is a section on Maya, Inca and Aztec civilizations in first grade.

Sutter thinks kids can handle more. In second grade, for example, when kids learn about American citizenship, there should also be discussion about Dreamers, she said. More specifically, “What does that mean, and how are these students and families supported if they are not ‘citizens'”?

“I have a 4-year-old nephew who can name you every dinosaur and pronounce their multisyllabic name correctly,” she said. “We underestimate young children.”

Holding district, schools accountable for change��

Committee member Laura Fuchs is more focused on holding DCPS and charters accountable for not cherry-picking standards “they’re most comfortable with.”��

The H.D. Woodson Senior High School teacher takes issue with current DCPS World History curriculum. It suggests, for example, that teachers spend 12 days on a U.S.-Russia Cold War unit, while another unit covering more ground — the ramifications of World War II, the Cold War and colonization on Africa and Latin America, regions with largely Black and Latino populations — is allotted 11 days.��

“The standards, that’s just one thing,” she said. “The problems I’m facing in my classroom” exist because the standards are being prioritized “in a very poor way.”

Committee member and sixth-grade geography teacher Melanie Holmes felt a similar disconnect between the standards and curriculum recently. “I’m working on curriculum for my individual school [] right now … and [while referring to the standards] we just found so many good standards that are left out” of what’s provided to teachers, she said at the meeting.

Some teachers find they have autonomy to craft organic and diverse lesson plans. Emory Calhoun at Dunbar High School brings in historians to talk about Georgetown’s Black history, and he has students call his aunt, who lived through the civil rights movement. Cosby Hunt, an AP U.S. history teacher at Thurgood Marshall Academy, takes his classes through Jacob Lawrence’s portraying the Great Migration of African Americans from the rural South.

Both acknowledged that having that flexibility can depend, though, on a school’s management style, and how new a teacher is to a particular subject.��

Abbott, DCPS’s social studies director, said the district works with teachers to develop curriculum. It brought in six educators this summer to serve as “race and equity fellows” who are looking at the curriculum “through this lens of anti-racism, anti-bias” to identify short-term fixes as the standards review process continues. Abbott added that the district is “looking forward” to expanding course offerings for its African American History and Culture elective — the most popular non-AP elective last year.��

The committee will submit recommendations to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education in December and will advise that office as it formally rewrites the standards in 2021. The State Board will vote on the revisions in March 2022, to go into effect the 2022–23 school year.

When Donald Hess tells his students that their New Orleans high school is named for a man who amassed a fortune trading slaves, their reactions are typically swift, starting with disbelief and turning quickly to anger.

Wow, I didn’t know that.��

Why didn’t anybody tell me that?��

Why hasn’t anybody changed the school’s name?

Hess tries hard not to influence his students’ emotions, which in his experience are the fuel that will propel them to connect the answers to those questions.

No one tells Hess’s juniors and seniors about John McDonogh before they find their way to his classroom because most Louisiana schools teach only very basic information about slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction — and precious little of it involves the way that brutal legacy shaped their communities.

“It’s just the basic, ‘Blacks were slaves, slavery was bad, here’s a couple of Black people who did good,’” says Hess.

Walter Stern, a New Orleans native and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who authored a biography of McDonogh, says the slaveholder’s legacy and the way it shaped the schools is a “perfect vehicle” for teaching about the city’s history. “He provides a window into showing both how deeply entrenched white supremacy and the subjugation of Black New Orleans has been,” says Stern, “as well as how Black New Orleanians have used the power available to them to create institutions that serve them.”

Among Louisiana plantation owners in the early 1800s, McDonogh was considered both odd and benevolent. A miser who had few friends, at one point he was the nation’s largest landowner, a feat he accomplished in part by and then, when well-heeled neighbors moved out, buying adjacent properties for a song. He sometimes allowed his slaves to buy their freedom, although he believed that once emancipated, they should be sent to Liberia.

McDonogh left half his estate to the city of New Orleans, to be used to open public schools for both Black and white children. He wanted the students to plant flowers around his grave on his birthday, leading to the creation of a holiday, Founder’s Day. It was celebrated each year until 1954, when Black New Orleanians — whose children were forced to wait in the heat until white children had placed their bouquets — protested and the holiday was eliminated.

There is no complete record of the schools opened in his name, though there have been at least 40. But contrary to McDonogh’s instructions, the city used his bequest at first to open schools only for white children. His money also was used to fund the Confederate Army’s defense of the city during the Civil War.

Half a century passed before the Black community was finally able to get a public high school for its children. In 1917, white students attending McDonogh 13 moved into a newer, nicer building, and Black students moved in. The school was renamed McDonogh 35 — it’s where Hess teaches today, in a new, $59 million building dedicated in 2015. Throughout the decades, McDonogh 35 has been a center for academic excellence, says historian Stern: “For years, the Who’s Who of Black New Orleans came through it.”

Though most have been renamed, McDonogh school buildings still stand throughout the city, his name a permanent part of some facades. McDonogh 35 is one of two that still bear his name; the other is McDonogh 42, part of the same network of schools, InspireNOLA Charter Schools.

As this summer’s protests of police violence against Black people swept the country, InspireNOLA’s leaders announced they had asked NOLA Public Schools to take McDonogh’s name off 42 but not 35. The historical roots — entwined but distinct — of the disparate requests are the subject of one of the hardest lessons Hess teaches.

McDonogh’s legacy is not something most of the city’s students learn about, much less in any depth, in part because there are few teachers of African-American studies. Hess says he doesn’t know of any others outside InspireNOLA schools.

Like generations of his family, Hess expected to graduate from McDonogh 35. But Hurricane Katrina forced his relocation to a mostly Black high school in Houston, where he was exposed to African-American history for the first time. Understanding the magnitude of what he hadn’t been taught propelled Hess to become a teacher.

A former history and social studies teacher who sits on the board of the East Baton Rouge Parish Public Schools, Dadrius Lanus says Black perspectives are rare in U.S. social studies and history lessons in general, but Louisiana’s standards — the specific pieces of knowledge students are expected to learn — are particularly weak.

What material is covered is typically divorced from local context, says Lanus. “If you go to Massachusetts, I guarantee you those students are learning about Boston,” he says. But connections between Louisiana’s brutal racial history and local culture? “It’s a taboo issue.”

As a teacher, Lanus took his students to former plantations. Disciplinary issues in his classes plummeted and engagement rose. “When you ask students why they’re not learning, it’s because they’re bored,” he says. “The way to change [student] engagement would be to change the curriculum to something they connect with, something that’s relevant.”

But U.S. teachers, and particularly the 80 percent who are white, are no more comfortable talking about race than anyone else who was educated in American schools. “When we’re talking about slavery and Black Lives Matter and where that comes from in history, a lot of teachers don’t feel equipped to take that on,” says Bethany Jay, a professor of history at Salem State University in Massachusetts, who trains history teachers.

“Slavery usually emerges as a real topic in the 1830s with westward expansion and as an economic and political issue, and then it goes away until the Civil War, when it’s magically solved,” she says. “They never deal with slavery as a lived experience.”

Broadening academic standards nationwide would be one way to deal with that, but that’s a politicized, uphill battle. Easier, Jay and Lanus say, to create resources incorporating diverse voices for teachers of history, social studies and other subjects to use to create lessons that go further.

To that end, Jay was one of a team of scholars who contributed to “,” an effort by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project. In addition to essays on the problematic way slavery has been handled in schools, the group created teacher training materials and classroom resources for all grades.

“We’re really not understanding American history if we’re not studying the whole, rich cast of people who were a part of it,” she says.

Lanus echoes the point, adding that it’s not just Black voices that are missing. “This isn’t just African-American students; this is about students who are Muslim or homosexual or transgender,” he says. “Those are things we can’t have a discussion about.”

School had been out in New Orleans for two weeks when protests began sweeping the country. A statue of McDonogh was wrenched from its stand in a park and dropped into the Mississippi River —��later to be fished back out and hidden.

What now stands where the John McDonough bust used to be in Duncan Plaza. Today, protesters took down the statue and threw it into the Mississippi River. McDonough was a white slave owner with ties to New Orleans

— Andrés Fuentes (@news_fuentes)

Hess imagines that when McDonogh 35 reopens in August, the intensity of students’ feelings about his classes will be magnified.

All summer, hard questions have been landing in his email inbox. He can hear his past lessons behind them.

How can you tell whether a business with a Black Lives Matter sign really supports racial justice, or just wants to keep Black people’s money flowing?

That student, Hess is confident, took in the point of lessons on the power of Black Civil Rights-era boycotts of the bus system in Alabama and businesses on New Orleans’ Dryades Street.

What changed with the killing of George Floyd by police? What made the protests this time different from Alton Sterling? Trayvon Martin? Sandra Bland?��

But also, Why hasn’t anything changed? Why is this still going on?

He may not have those answers, but Hess is proud that his kids are connecting their past to the present, and maybe even a better future.

“It’s very like Black people to take something used against us and make it something to be proud of,” he says. “It’s on us now to make decisions.”

(San Antonio) — Every year, thousands of Texas fifth-graders read from a textbook that tells them they and their families are “illegal immigrants” here to take jobs from classmates.

Students are also asked to consider how supply and demand made slavery necessary throughout the antebellum South.

These and other examples from Texas textbooks and state curriculum standards have been for years.

Now, amid the global pandemic and racial reckonings of the summer, educators are concerned that, whether or not they return to class in person in the next few weeks, students will find most social studies and language arts lessons more problematic and less relatable than ever.

“Distance learning proved that student identity, community and human connection are essential for schooling in 2020,” said Jennifer Rosas, an assistant principal in San Antonio Independent School District, alluding to the scores of students who struggled to stay engaged during spring’s school closures. “Now more than ever, let’s let our history, yes Black and Brown history, guide how we teach and how they learn.”

Textbooks used by districts across Texas have long been as biased and politicized, with events often presented from a white, conservative viewpoint, Rosas and other educators said.

A survey of current textbooks yielded examples such as:

These texts, of course, don’t write themselves. Savvas Learning, the publisher, did not respond to a request for comment.

Texas’s curriculum is governed by the State Board of Education, whose 15 members are regionally elected by voters. All 10 current Republican members of the State Board of Education are white, and all five Democratic members are people of color.

The heavily Republican board has, for decades, kept conservative beliefs ensconced in public school classrooms.

The in science curriculum continued until 2014. The political fight was the subject of a 2013 documentary, .

Sex education, which is currently under review by the board, is mostly nonexistent, except for that abstinence be taught as “the only method that is 100 percent effective in preventing pregnancy, STDs, and the sexual transmission of HIV or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, and the emotional trauma associated with adolescent sexual activity.”

There’s work to be done, conceded Republican State Board of Education Chair Keven Ellis, but there has also been progress.

In the 1980s and ’90s, he said, states across the nation started correcting historical inaccuracies in curriculum, such as previous teaching that kidnapped Africans were better off as slaves. Many of these inaccurate standards were adopted in the 1920s as the families of the last generation of Civil War veterans were, he said, “trying to protect their legacy.”

In 2018, the board revised fifth- and eighth-grade history standards to reflect the expansion of slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War. It had previously been listed third, behind states’ rights and sectionalism. The board also removed Stonewall Jackson as an exemplar of “effective leadership.” The fifth-grade standards online do not yet reflect the latest revision.

The adoption of a Mexican American Studies elective and forthcoming African American studies elective also showed progress, Ellis said: “It’s important for students to see themselves in the material they’re studying.”

Fellow board member Marisa Pérez-Díaz, a Democrat, says that progress was hard won. She advocated for the ethnic studies courses and recalls being told by her Republican colleagues that the courses were “a big ask.”

Some now have bigger changes in mind.

Spurred by the deaths of Black Americans including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain, a group of Texas public school alumni have started a for the State Board of Education to revisit state teaching standards for core courses.

“We’ve seen over the past few weeks that major corporations and government officials rose to the opportunity to do their part in dismantling systemic racism,” Ankita Ajith, one of the four authors of the petition, wrote to ����Ӱ��. “It’s time for the Texas SBOE to do the same.”

The standards, known as the , or TEKS (pronounced by Texans as “TEEKS”), downplay the lasting effects of racism, the petition charges. It points specifically to the absence of events like the Tulsa Massacre and policies like the race-based redlining of neighborhoods during and after the New Deal. Where significant events and people in black history are included, the petition claims, “vague language leaves too much room for individual teachers to teach to their personal biases.”

In San Antonio, advocates of ethnic studies agree.

“If you really want to get to the root of the issue, it’s the TEKS,” said Lilliana Saldaña, co-director of the Mexican American Studies Academy at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “The standards center whiteness and a settlers’ and colonial narrative.”

Even when presenting the devastation of conquest, slavery and land seizure, she said, the heroism of settlers and colonists is preserved through “the use of language that sanitizes the effects of colonialism.”

Personal politics

“The TEKS are very shallow,” Pérez-Díaz said; they reflect political compromise, not academic consensus or scientific rigor. Because of the composition of the board, Pérez-Díaz said, racial realities are framed as political positions — students are asked to consider “both sides” or “positive and negative effects” of slavery and land seizure from Mexicans and Native Americans.

One assignment in the fourth-grade textbook We Are Texas suggests that Confederate soldiers in the Civil War were fighting “to preserve their way of life,” staying silent on the indefensibility of slavery. It compares their cause to that of Native Americans who did not want to give up their tribal lands to western settlers.

On the other hand, some things are not up for debate in the TEKS, Pérez-Díaz said. Students learn a lot about patriotism and being a good citizen, she explained, but texts portray protestors as radicals.

From kindergarten onward, state standards require teachers to explain the principles of capitalism and the benefits of “free enterprise” in the context of local, state and American history.

Talking only about the benefits of free enterprise minimizes the harm done to Mexican ranchers and agricultural workers, indigenous groups, and enslaved people, Saldaña said.

One fifth-grade standard reads: “Evaluate the effects of supply and demand on business, industry, and agriculture, including the plantation system, in the United States.”

Such equivocation on the realities of slavery has led to repeated controversy as teachers assign students to consider the “” and textbooks describe enslaved Africans as .

Actual immigration, which affects more than 1 million Texas school children, is also presented solely as a primarily political and economic issue.

One fifth-grade standard reads, “Analyze the effects of exploration, immigration, migration, and limited resources on the economic development and growth of the United States.”

Two portions of the textbook Building Our Nation reference the standard when discussing immigration, and both passages point out that Americans had good reason to fear for their jobs with the influx of immigrant labor.

More than reading a rainbow

When revisiting the standards in 2018, the state used “diverse perspectives” as one of its criteria for determining the characters and historic figures students should study.

César Chávez and Malcolm X are presented as an afterthought, without elaborating on their views on economic, legal and education systems that favored white people, Rosas said.

“They never really tell you [what] they are pushing against.”

HIgh school electives in ethnic studies do address these issues.

Diversifying curriculum, requiring that more people of color and different cultures be represented in textbooks, is not enough, Saldaña said. “We need to be more explicit.”

This has as much to do with how teachers teach as with what they teach, she explained. The teacher has to value students’ perspectives on historical and current events.

“That’s when your students start to be engaged,” Saldaña said. “It’s also about how you relate to your student. [Culturally responsive teaching] cultivates relationships based on trust and on solidarity.”

In their vagueness, she said, the TEKS do leave room for this kind of teaching, but teachers need additional tools and training. Through the University of Texas at San Antonio’s MAS Academy, Saldaña and her colleagues offer a more complete view of Texas and American history so that teachers will be able to address state-required skills and knowledge in a way that keeps their students, the majority of whom are non-white, at the center of the story.