Editor’s note: This story, and a draft report linked to in the story, include references to racist, Islamophobic language and bigoted views that are violent in nature.

Newark Public Schools leaders failed to “quickly and consistently” respond to racist and bigoted incidents against Black students and teachers at a city school designed to embrace world cultures, according to a draft of a scathing report that district officials have sought to keep private.

A , obtained by Chalkbeat Newark, details harrowing examples of how Black students and teachers at the Newark School of Global Studies were “subjected to acts of anti-Blackness and anti-Black racism.” The review also highlighted how the school’s response failed to address the problems, and in some cases, magnified racial issues.

The May 2023 draft of the report written by the consulting firm Creed Strategies is the public’s first look into the firm’s review of the cultural, racial, and religious dynamics at Global Studies that pushed some Black students to transfer and teachers to resign. The draft obtained by Chalkbeat is not the latest version of the report. But the district has fought to keep all versions of the report private, nearly two years after Newark school board leaders commissioned it.

Attorneys for the district have argued in court filings that the report is a “predecisional draft document” and therefore exempt from the state’s public records law. If portions of the report were disclosed, “it would have a chilling effect” on the district’s ongoing efforts “to improve dialogue and sensitivity practices” at Global Studies and other schools, according to a court record outlining the district’s opposition to the Newark Teachers Union lawsuit seeking the release of the report.

In 2023, the Newark Teachers Union filed two lawsuits against the district over the release of the report, but the union agreed to  without its release.

The draft report paints a picture of a campus where Black students and teachers reported being called racial slurs by Latino students, the N-word was commonly used among non-Black students, and where complaints by Black students were often dismissed or minimized by administrators and non-Black staff. A male student was repeatedly called an anti-gay slur in class while a teacher was present, and other students made threats to “take off” and “stomp on” the hijabs of Black and Arab Muslim female teachers, according to the review.

Read takeaways from .

Many of the allegations in the draft report have  substantiated in , and are mentioned in lawsuits against the district. The issues also caught the attention of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who hosted a town hall to discuss unity among Black and brown communities months after students spoke publicly about their experiences.

Former Global Studies teachers filed a lawsuit against the district alleging that school and district leaders created a hostile work environment where they experienced racial discrimination and retaliation, according to the lawsuit filed in Essex County Superior Court last spring. The lawsuit is ongoing.

The former teachers also filed claims with the U.S. ​​Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The department opened an investigation into the claim on Dec. 21, 2023, and it is ongoing.

Paul Brubaker, the district’s communications director, did not respond to Chalkbeat’s request to provide a copy of the full Global Studies report. Instead, in an emailed response, he reiterated the district’s stance that the report is “privileged and confidential.” Brubaker said the school board “reserves the right to take any and all appropriate action to prevent or redress injury to itself,” district staff, school or students.

Brubaker did not respond to questions about the district’s efforts to fix the problems at the high school, how it changed its policies to address racial problems, and the professional support it has provided teachers with since the incidents at the school surfaced.

Superintendent Roger León promised to fix the problems

Staff, parents, and students were interviewed by Creed Strategies’ six-member review team about their experiences at the high school and were anonymously quoted throughout the draft report. The research team was made up of professors and education experts with experience in school leadership and representative of the demographics at Global Studies.

In interviews with Creed researchers, Black students described a “sense of betrayal” when their peers and adults used racial slurs, according to the draft report. Most Black students “felt stunned, at a loss for words, or angry” when the incidents occurred, the report read.

When asked by researchers about the reported incidents, some of the staff responded defensively, while others said they did not know about the issues until students spoke publicly in 2022, the review found. Teachers reported that the lack of transparency about the issues at Global Studies limited their ability to understand what was happening and eroded morale, the report read. Other staff said the aftermath of the issues becoming public caused “some upheaval” at Global Studies with “very few” attributing the chaos to the racist incidents Black students and teachers had described in 2022, the draft report stated.

But  revealed that school administrators had known about the issues before they became public, and a parent begged state and district officials for an end to the harassment against her son. School leaders missed an opportunity “to address the professional learning needs” of teachers to be responsive to the incidents and create “culturally responsive” learning, according to the draft.

Some interviewees cited in the report also framed “Black women and girls” as “easily triggered and angry” when discussing the incidents at the school, the review notes. “Instead of focusing on the systemic racism that Black women and girls are speaking up against, there was a sense of defensiveness,” the draft report says. In claims filed by former , they alleged they “suffered harassment and racial hostility by students and supervisors” and felt their “worth as a teacher and human being has been diminished.”

Newark school board leaders commissioned the review of Global Studies at the start of 2023 in response to Black students speaking publicly about a pattern of racist harassment on campus. The May 2023 draft provided the district with three recommendations, which were released publicly, and meant to be “proactively implemented” to tackle anti-Blackness and build Global Studies’ understanding of diversity, the draft read.

A mix of Global Studies parents, students, teachers, some board members, and community advocates have been calling on Superintendent Roger  the full report on the high school and address the problems. León promised students he would fix the problems at the school but he has not said what changes or efforts have been made at Global Studies, one of the district’s top magnet schools. Deborah Smith Gregory, president of NAACP Newark, is one of the advocates who has called on León to release the Global Studies report but has been ignored, she said during a school board .

“It seems that the rule of the superintendent is being sanctioned by the board with little oversight and question,” said Smith Gregory in December.

Despite calls for transparency, the Newark school board last month quietly  to remove one of its longest-serving members after her daughter filed a legal claim against the district alleging racial harassment and discrimination during her time as a student at Global Studies. A New Jersey judge denied the petition but the state’s commissioner of education will issue a final decision by February.

School leaders did not communicate seriousness of harassment

Students reported racist incidents at the high school since  during remote learning in 2020, while the number of Black students has decreased steadily since then, according to the draft.

According to the draft report, Global Studies’ leaders had a “limited response” to the harassment reported by students and “centered impact rather than intent” of the incidents. Interviews found that some school staff learned about the incidents through their relationships with students and the teachers involved. A “very small group” said “they had no knowledge of the incidents before the students’ public comments” in November 2022, the report read.

Staff interviewees also said “the effect of the public reports and media” on the school environment led to “chaos” and “ill feelings,” the draft states. Some suggested that the feelings were “intensified by the lack of clear communication about why students were complaining and leaving the school,” the report read.

“I think that has made some students more like, upset, angry … Unraveled things a little bit. So that’s like an unfortunate thing that it’s like kind of causing some upheaval,” said one interviewee in the report.

As part of the review, teachers and administrators told researchers about 11 reported incidents. Discipline for those incidents ranged from written apologies and cultural sensitivity training to mediation and suspensions, according to the draft. Of the consequences, 22 students had in-school detention, seven received out-of-school suspensions, seven had a parent conference, six received mediation, four participated in out-of-school counseling, three received after-school detention, and three more had a conflict resolution session, according to the draft.

With one exception, Black adult interviewees expressed their belief that Black students experienced racial harm at the high school, while six out of the seven non-Black, non-Latino adults interviewed said “they believed the students and expressed concern about their well-being,” according to the report.

Some said they were also aware of racist incidents against Black and Asian American teachers in the building, the report found. The former teachers who filed a lawsuit against the district claimed they also suffered “severe emotional problems” leading them to seek “psychological counseling” after experiencing racial harassment at the high school. But nine interviewees also suggested the reports of Black students and media coverage “were exaggerated and wanted to set the record straight,” according to the report.

Others lamented the school’s approaches to addressing the incidents and “lack of communication about them were eroding teacher morale,” according to the draft. One teacher specifically suggested that because of the public scrutiny, “administrators started to backtrack reports stated about one of the formally reported incidents,” the report read.

“I want to say that when I hear these recordings about what people are saying and including the students that are in the school, to me, it feels like they’re talking about another school. Because I do not see that. You know, I have not heard that,” an interviewee told researchers.

Missed opportunity to support staff, teachers at Global Studies

One of the main draws of Global Studies was that it promised students would “develop a global perspective” through second-language immersion, exploration of different cultures and career pathways that emphasized international relations in business and diplomacy.

But the overall environment at the school – and the way it was run – led to administrators “missing the opportunity to represent the diversity of its students’ lived experiences and aspirations within the environment and their learning,” according to the report.

When Global Studies opened its doors in 2021 following remote learning, the school was newly renovated and well maintained with college-related signs throughout hallways. But researchers found that the overall tone of the school lacked “the spirit and vitality typical of a high school,” with much of it resembling an elementary and middle school, according to the report.

Most classroom walls were decorated with word walls and inspirational posters or pictures, the report found. Wall displays “rarely demonstrated” how students grappled with topics like geographical and linguistic diversity and global political institutions, the report found. The main theme of the school, which highlights students as global citizens, was often tied by staff to specific celebrations such as Hispanic Heritage and Black History months and notable figures, according to the report.

Additionally, most teachers lacked previous high school teaching experience, according to the report. Students spent “extended periods of time sitting silently” and had a lack of dialogue in classrooms, the report found.

Early on, the school and district administration had not cultivated an environment that encouraged staff to examine and challenge their assumptions of implicit bias and other forms of racism, according to the report.

When Black students spoke about their experiences of racial harassment, school administrators hosted a staff discussion of a book called “Courageous Conversations About Race,” according to the report. But staff members weren’t clear about why they were attending the discussions and told Creed researchers the conversations felt “surface-level” and “lacked transparency and support, and limited their capacity to understand and address the issues” that were happening, the report read.

“There was a missed opportunity to address the professional learning needs of instructional staff to be responsive to these issues as a part of student learning,” the report said.

Response did more damage, leading to transfers, resignations

After Black students spoke out publicly, district leaders held assemblies largely viewed “as insufficient and ineffective” by others, according to the report.

During the 2022-23 school year, Global Studies principal Nelson Ruiz held an assembly for the entire school where he told all students not to use the N-word or they would be suspended, according to the report. The school’s zero-tolerance for the N-word was “not only viewed as harming victims, but it also policed the language and speaking practices of Black students,” the report read.

Interviewees also discussed a pizza party for Black students that some students felt “was an attempt to drive their attention away from the issue,” according to the report. During the , a former Global Studies student said school administrators called members of the Black Student Union “and gave us pizza, candy and even soda,” in what she felt was an attempt to silence students. Ruiz did not respond to calls, a text, or emailed questions from Chalkbeat about his response to the incidents.

León also held an assembly during the 2022-23 school year, specifically for the junior class, where students were told, “If they don’t feel comfortable [at NSGS], basically they can leave,” a student interviewee said. Students interpreted León’s comment as “If you don’t like it, you can leave,” according to the report. Student interviewees also felt as if school staff were not facilitating their transfer requests because of a lack of communication between León and the school, while others said it was because the school “did not want to lose high-achieving Black students,” the draft report stated.

Those findings echo what students had told Newark school board members. During the January 2023 board meeting,  they were being told by guidance counselors that they couldn’t transfer. One student told board members that Leon’s speech “didn’t feel like it had any empathy and it gave very much, ‘if you don’t like it, then go home.” Another student said “a vast amount of students” lined up outside of the guidance counselors’ offices the day after León’s assembly. A third student said guidance counselors told her multiple times that she couldn’t transfer and if she left “how would that make us feel.”

Staff interviewees also said high-performing Black students were the first students to try to transfer out and some considered how that would impact the school’s image, according to the draft report.

The transfer rates of Black students have “significantly increased” each year at Global Studies in comparison to all other student groups, according to data included in the draft report. Black students have been less likely to complete an academic year at the school than their peers at Newark School of Data Science and Information Technology, Newark Fashion and Design, and Newark Vocational, the report stated.

At the end of the 2021-22 school year, six Black students transferred out of Global Studies and in the following school year, another seven Black students had transferred as of March 15, 2023, according to the report. During the 2022-23 school year, three Black female teachers resigned, all from the same department, and two Latino students were transferred out, the report notes.

Throughout the report, researchers also found that the school’s restorative approach to the issues did not adequately address “the persistence or saliency” of racist comments by students. To address the incidents, administrators called for parent conferences and time of reflection with students that led Black students to feel emotionally unsafe about being forced to work with students who used racist language toward them and were allowed to remain in classes, according to the report.

The practices also “created an atmosphere where some Latino students felt they could use racist language toward Black students and teachers without consequence,” the draft reads.

Staff members who were interviewed said they were following district policy and “employing a restorative approach” to discipline students while others acknowledged they had an “educative role” to address the use of racial language by non-Black students, the report found.

One teacher acknowledged that education “on the background of why some of the things [students] say to each other are so hurtful” would be useful.

“I think especially for recent immigrants, they come here, and they hear that kind of dialogue, and they adopt it thinking like they’re gonna be proud and part of American culture and have no background for it, and don’t realize that for them, it’s not appropriate to talk that way,” according to the teacher.

The report  build school staff’s capacity to identify cultural gaps, create a racially conscious and inclusive environment, foster conversations about race, and assess the effects of anti-Blackness on the school system.

Researchers also noted that “the courage and resilience” of Black students at Global Studies who assumed leadership positions in school organizations, participated in extracurricular activities, and are high achievers demonstrated a level “of social awareness and activism” by challenging racial discrimination.

Their efforts were aligned with the Global Studies theme, the report found.

This was originally published on .

Chris Riback: Sonya, thank you for coming to the studio.

Sonya Soni: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so grateful.

Chris Riback: You are affiliated with Boston University, however you co-head the Los Angeles Youth Commission. First, why is that work so important to you, and second, do you spend half your life flying back and forth, Boston to LA?

Sonya Soni: That’s a great question, Chris. The reason why this work is so important to me is mostly because I’m obsessed with identity, ancestry, and a sense of belonging and where we come from, and so I always really was passionate about how we keep families together. My great-grandmother was a freedom fighter in India, and she helped found a nonprofit on girls’ rights, but over the decades, it turned into an orphanage, so I spent a lot of my youth at the orphanage. I really saw how youth had families, but they were being trafficked and warehoused into these orphanages under this myth of benevolence that they were being saved, rather than because of structural poverty and casteism, these youth were being separated by their families, where they found the most sense of belonging.

Then when I moved to Los Angeles County, which is the largest child welfare and juvenile justice system in the country, I was seeing a lot of the same patterns that I was seeing abroad, which was most youth of color were actually being impacted by the child welfare system. Black families were being surveilled, policed, and separated by child protective services. The same way that Black men were being separated by their families through the prison system, I was seeing Black mothers being separated by their families by the child welfare system. The public imagination is mostly around how the child welfare system was protecting children, but it was actually causing a lot more harm and structural violence on these families, so that’s really where my passion started for this work.

Chris Riback: It’s so extraordinary, in a challenging sense, how connected everything is. One thing, it can all just snowball, and I would assume, correct me if I’m wrong, but focusing in just one area may not even be enough. You kind of have to focus all around. Is that accurate?

Sonya Soni: Yes, that is so accurate, Chris. What I really got to see when I came to Los Angeles County was that there was a larger web of carcerality that was surveilled-

Chris Riback: A web, yes.

Sonya Soni: Yes, that was surveilling, policing, and institutionalizing youth of color, and how the child welfare system was so interconnected to youth incarceration. About 75% of youth who are in foster care were also being sent to youth prisons and camps, and so that’s when I really got to see it wasn’t enough just to tackle child protective services and the myth of benevolence around foster care, but also to think about how youth prisons and camps are involved in also institutionalizing youth. That’s really where my passion came for both tackling youth incarceration and child welfare at the same time.

Chris Riback: I understand that you believe that there is a place for something that I think you call poetry in policymaking. What is that? It’s a beautiful phrase.

Sonya Soni: Yes. A lot of the youth organizers I was working with in South Los Angeles, there’s a coalition called Youth Justice Reimagined, where a lot of them were artists, writers, activists, and they really wanted to use their backgrounds in hip hop, spoken word, and poetry to think about how to be changemakers. I really got to see how so much of the policy we were writing in Los Angeles County was so devoid of our humanity, and it was so sterile and cold and devoid from the actual political context in which families were being separated. I created a policymaking through poetry workshop, where youth organizers were able to really grapple with their identities, both politically and personally, to think about how they want to write policy that actually infuses our humanity and our complexity in the way we write our policy. It was also a way for policymakers and youth organizers, the very youth who are systems-impacted, to come together to also grapple with their different identities and how that shows up when they are writing policy when they’re writing their poetry together.

Chris Riback: I don’t mean this to be silly. Anti-racist, I understand, or I think I understand what it would mean to be non-racist, to not have racism as part of oneself. Is anti-racist something beyond that, where it’s almost actionable to try to address racism? What is anti-racist?

Sonya Soni: That’s a great question. I think this term has been in our public imagination, especially since 2020, after George Floyd’s murder, and there’s been a little bit of confusion around what that actually means for our everyday lives and how we show up to the movement. To me, anti-racism, really the heartbeat of it is what are the actions we can take? It’s not just believing that racism is unjust, but how are we practicing that in our everyday lives through the policies we support, through the ways that we show up in our advocacy for our fellow brothers and sisters that are a part of the communities of color? It’s really about how do we take an active stance in it, rather than just believing in it?

Chris Riback: It’s about being active.

Sonya Soni: Yes.

Chris Riback: We are all products of our past, ancestry matters, but I got the sense that your ancestry is particularly meaningful to you. Tell me about your grandmother.

Sonya Soni: Thank you so much. I could talk about ancestry all day. It’s like a personal passion of mine. So much of the work that we do in movement work and organizing work comes from our ancestors. My great-grandmother, she was a freedom fighter very close to Mohandas Gandhi during India’s fight against British colonial rule. She was one of the first women to be a part of the movement to bring other women to fight against the British Empire. She was jailed very much for speaking out and writing against the British Empire. She started a nonprofit organization focused on advancing the rights of girls and widows.

Then, 80 years later, I started working at that very nonprofit. It’s at the foothills of the Himalayas in Northern India. That is where I got exposed to the orphanage system and how detrimental orphanages are for child development and child mental health, and how 80% of those orphans actually had families to be there, but because of structural poverty, they were being sent there or trafficked there. It was really because of her that started my passion for youth justice, and to really think about trans-border politics and also trans-border solidarity of how so many of these issues are so similar. Whether I was working in Kashmir, India or now in South Los Angeles, all of the ways that youth are being trafficked, surveilled, police, and separated from their families are so similar, due to whether it’s casteism or structural racism.

Chris Riback: It’s no surprise that you’re motivated in the ways that you are, it’s in your DNA?

Sonya Soni: Oh, yes. Well, I hope so. Yes.

Chris Riback: Sonya, thank you for coming by the studio.

Sonya Soni: Yes, thank you so much. Thank you.

For many Black people in America, the past year of virtual working and schooling has meant a reprieve from some of the daily traumas that racism visits upon Black life in our country. As a Black woman, my reentry into “regular” life means a return to in-person workplace and personal microaggressions. For Black children, the return to in-person schooling can mean reentering classrooms that are antagonistic to their very identities.

In the wake of a global pandemic and last year’s racial uprisings, schools and districts have implemented school- or district-wide diversity, equity and inclusion training and begun planning additional mental health supports to help students navigate the residual effects of a year of loss. But these measures are simply not enough.

If our public education system does not urgently and directly address the culture that Black students experience in classrooms, it will continue to fail them. In the absence of remote learning, Black students will be exposed to the tangible differences they uniquely feel when they cross the threshold into their classrooms.

Before COVID, Black students were or removed from class at higher rates than non-Black students, they faced racial aggressions around their or cultural dress and endured systematic disenfranchisement that barred them from attended by their peers. During COVID, Black students’ lack of was characterized as disengagement, continued even in the virtual space and, in many districts, was most acute for Black students. After COVID, the education sector has a choice: return to the status quo or finally address the anti-Blackness that undergirds these discriminatory outcomes for Black students.

At the Center for Powerful Public Schools, we believe that powerful public schools are essential to an equitable society, economy and democracy. We equip educators with tools to create equitable classroom experiences. Sadly, as executive director of an organization deeply focused on equity, when I try to think of classrooms that fully affirm and support Black children, too few come to mind. Instead, what is true, both in digital and in-person learning environments, is a persistent lack of safety and care for the vast majority of Black students.

However, when I walk into the classrooms at Baldwin Hills Elementary School in Los Angeles, I am able to see, hear and feel first-hand a school that is confronting the status quo. Principal Letitia Johnson-Davis has created . She and the teachers at Baldwin Hills have built the kind of affirming and holistic classrooms that all Black children deserve.

In culturally affirming, pro-Black classrooms like these, students receive assignments that celebrate who they are, engage with teachers who have deep relationships with them and their families, and are able to see their interests and identities embedded in curricula and school policies. Recent Los Angeles Unified School District parent revealed that many Black families experience their children’s schools as “indifferent and even hostile to them.” Schools like Baldwin Hills ask the question: What would it feel like for Black students, families and communities to feel revitalized and uplifted in their interactions with schools?

The pathway to classrooms and schools that are free of microaggressions, bias, anti-Blackness and racism is clear. First, schools must require professional development centered on providing culturally relevant and ongoing instruction for current teachers as well as teacher candidates. When businesses have severe incidences of racial bias or prejudice, those businesses require all employees to undergo diversity, equity and inclusion training. Education should be no different. Every part of the school community, including board members and support staff, must be trained in identifying their own biases and assumptions. Engaging in this kind of professional development should be mandatory, and no one should be able to opt out.

Next, schools and districts must develop clear and consistent communication and messaging around the eradication of anti-Black behavior, built in collaboration with parents and community. At the center of this communication must be clear metrics to assess how Black students and families experience the changes that are implemented. Data around how many Black children are suspended or access to advancement opportunities within school buildings must reflect this shift toward equity.

Finally, teachers must learn how to facilitate discussions about racism, discrimination and bias in their classrooms and among their peers in education. Schools and districts must communicate that if teachers are not ready to do what it takes to ensure all children are safe, they should no longer be teachers.

When students return to classrooms in the fall, many — in particular, Black students — will be wrestling with the myriad traumas we’ve faced throughout this year. The environment students enter at this pivotal moment could be life or death for them. Targeting the dismantling of anti-Blackness and institutional racism for classrooms is critical to student well-being. Our kids cannot wait for equity any longer.

Dr. Alicia Montgomery is executive director of the

When Tulsa, Oklahoma fifth-grade teacher Akela Leach began her lesson this May on the race massacre that took place in the city’s Greenwood District 100 years earlier, her young students knew they were entering contentious curricular territory.

The state of Oklahoma had recently passed a that observers described as an “,” part of a across the country to scale back discussion of systemic racism in the classroom.

At the outset of the lesson, a student raised her hand. A family member had told her that the new law might prevent them from talking about the Tulsa Race Massacre in school. It wouldn’t, Leach told her students, explaining that the 1921 event was a key element of their city’s history.

“They literally cheered that we were going to still learn it,” remembers the social studies teacher.

Further, it seemed the political milieu deepened students’ interest in the lesson.

“I’m learning something that someone doesn’t want me to learn,” Leach’s fifth-graders thought, “so this must be really, really important.”

“We know forbidden information,” one student exclaimed with glee.

Educators in the city have been preparing to tackle the topic for over a year. In February 2020, state lawmakers moved to . Last summer, Tulsa Public Schools held a in collaboration with the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission to help teachers learn to confidently lead conversations on the grim event. And the district recently rolled out new resources for educators, complete with .

As of this May, Tulsa public school students in grades 3 to 12 now learn about the violent episode in social studies class.

As those lessons were first beginning to unfold in classrooms across the city, and as the race massacre’s June 1, 2021 centennial was fast approaching, state lawmakers took up and quickly passed a bill to ensure that no teacher would make a student feel that “by virtue of his or her race or sex, (he or she) bears responsibility for actions committed in the past.”

“Unfortunate is really much too weak a word” to describe the timing, Erica Townsend-Bell, associate professor at Oklahoma State University and director of the school’s Center for Africana Studies, told ����Ӱ��.

“It’s really troubling … that it is signed as we come to the 100-year commemoration and remembrance of the Tulsa Race Massacre.”

Over the Memorial Day weekend, the city marked the anniversary with a ribbon-cutting to the Pathway to Hope at Greenwood and a Monday night candlelight vigil. On Tuesday, to visit with living survivors and descendents.

Back in the classroom, as Leach ventured into this history, she said, her fifth-graders rose to the occasion. They discussed Jim Crow segregation and why Black Tulsans, in order to prosper, had to create their own thriving community. One student analogized the roiling racism of early 20th-century Tulsa to a volcano with pressure building up and up until it finally erupted in 1921 in white violence and destruction.

“They were able to tackle something that many people would think would be too heavy for them,” said Leach. “But it really isn’t.”

Teachers, she says, have a responsibility to address difficult topics — “hard history,” Leach calls it — even if it’s uncomfortable. In the 1921 massacre, a white mob killed hundreds of residents in Tulsa’s Greenwood district and , erasing years of Black success.

It’s about “teaching the truth of what happened and not just the surface level,” she said, even if it shows our country or our ancestors in an ugly light.

District leadership seems to agree.

“There is hard history that we need to confront,” Tulsa schools Deputy Superintendent Paula Shannon told ����Ӱ��, adding that the recently signed statewide legislation “doesn’t impact us at all.”

“We’ve worked very hard to build a culturally responsive curriculum that is not mired in politics,” she said. “And so we’re going to continue to do what we believe our kids deserve.”

Superintendent Deborah Gist, a Tulsa native who grew up attending the city’s public schools, said that she didn’t learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre until she was an adult living halfway across the country in Florida. “Our team will never let that happen again,” Gist wrote in a .

Critical race theory, the controversy du jour , is not an ideology, said Townsend-Bell, the Oklahoma State University professor, but a lens of thinking that considers how political systems are “racialized and exclude certain populations.”

The Oklahoma law does not expressly mention critical race theory. It also specifies that no content laid out in the , as the Tulsa Race Massacre lessons are, would be prohibited.

While Townsend-Bell sees how the bill may have been intended to “chill” educators’ efforts to teach the uglier sides of the state’s past, she says the actual content of the law does no such thing. Its focus is on ensuring students don’t feel guilty or culpable for historical events, but Townsend-Bell said teachers looking to grapple with such episodes ought to focus “primarily not on individuals, but on institution, systems and policies.”

In other words, explained Leach, the Tulsa fifth-grade teacher, the law is “more about how you’re teaching something, versus just the topic itself.”

She says the bill seems to be “written for a problem that didn’t really seem to exist.”

“I don’t think that it’s the norm that teachers are going around and telling students that they’re responsible for racism, or telling them that they are inherently racist, because they’re white,” she told ����Ӱ��.

The elementary educator was part of the team that developed lesson plans on the 1921 race massacre, and she emphasizes that the content is age appropriate and thoroughly vetted.

In fifth-grade classrooms, discussion focuses on resilience and rebuilding Greenwood. The predominantly African American district was known as thanks to its prosperity. Students learn about how its residents salvaged elements of the neighborhood and rebuilt their livelihoods, albeit with untold lasting damage, after the violent episode that reduced it to rubble.

Leach explained that a team of teachers, district leaders and curriculum experts carefully reviewed each unit. They considered how lessons would feel for people from every imaginable perspective: a new teacher, a white teacher instructing mostly Black students, a Black student, a Latino student, a white student and more.

“[The curriculum] was designed to be inclusive,” she explained. Her classroom has a majority of white students, but also includes Black and Latino students.

Thanks to the district’s careful planning and the training opportunities offered to staff, Leach feels confident that Oklahoma’s new law will not affect how she or other Tulsa teachers approach their lessons. But she could imagine that educators with fewer supports or less confidence in the content area might feel differently.

“Someone who was hesitant to teach this or doesn’t feel comfortable teaching it … it can make them fearful,” said Leach. “It kind of gives people an out.”

Oklahoma state Representative Kevin West, the bill’s sponsor, told ����Ӱ�� that it will be up to the state education department to implement the provisions of the bill. They will specify who decides whether a teacher is acting in violation of the law and what the repercussions might be, he said. That rule-making process will begin in the fall, Annette Price, spokeswoman for the Oklahoma State Department of Education, wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��.

“Until then, the bill stands on its own for districts to follow,” she said.

But while Leach worries that the threat of repercussions could deter some teachers from covering tough topics like the Tulsa Race Massacre, Townsend-Bell wonders whether it might have the opposite effect and actually motivate teachers to prepare more thoroughly for such lessons, out of fear that tactless classroom leadership could land them in violation of the law.

“I could imagine a world in which, because of this bill, folks feel a little bit more compelled to make sure that they know what they’re talking about, to inform themselves a little bit better, before they walk into the classroom to share that with the student population,” said the professor.

“What we could actually ironically see is some better teaching around these histories because of this concern that, ‘I don’t want to mess it up.’”

Lead Image: The Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous Black enclave, was reduced to rubble after the 1921 race massacre. (Universal History Archive/Getty Images)