Legislators in 40 states nearly 200 anti-critical race theory bills since the start of 2021. Such measures typically describe classroom discussions of race and racism as divisive concepts to be avoided. But teaching a factual, unabridged version of the nation’s history is not inherently divisive. It is an opportunity to equip students with collaborative, critical thinking skills, which is the very purpose of public education. What is truly divisive is dragging educators through this political battle, creating collateral damage for students of color and white children alike, as the country emerges from the uncertainty caused by the pandemic.

A recent found that most voters, including parents, support teaching a full, honest account of history, warts and all. It is a disservice to American children if slavery and anti-Black racism are not included in textbooks, just as it is a disservice to avoid teaching about the removal of Native Americans from their ancestral lands and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Omitting sensitive but important topics shortchanges students of both knowledge and skill-building opportunities.

Rather than dwelling on what shouldn’t be discussed in classrooms, policymakers should focus on how educators use difficult topics as an opportunity to teach collaboration and communication. After all, issues like race, war, insurrection, religion and science are bound to come up, whether they’re in the curriculum or not. 

Through grantmaking and partnerships over the last decade, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Education Program has supported organizations that provide students with access to rigorous, relevant and innovative educational experiences. Using hard subjects as an opportunity to engage students in learning is what good teachers do. Now, they can combine these approaches with more recent research on and to suggest a path forward for talking about race and racism in schools. 

Based on this experience, we suggest four principles for teaching about these and other difficult topics:

• Be accurate: Schools should present history and current events in ways that are accurate and honest while encompassing multiple viewpoints. Children understand that good people, like admirable nations, aren’t perfect. They can handle the truth.
  
• Be affirming: It is well-established that students do better when they see their identities reflected in what gets taught, and by whom. As classrooms become increasingly diverse, schools must work harder to ensure that standards, curricula, text and teaching methods reflect and affirm these diverse identities. 
  
• Be age-appropriate. Teaching about race, racism and other potentially sensitive topics should be calibrated to the appropriate developmental age of students.
  
• Be interesting. Young people naturally gravitate to thorny issues such as racism. Schools should lean into this impulse, responding with a type of learning that inspires reflection, critical thinking, collaboration and the weighing of different perspectives. 

These types of engaging, inclusive learning experiences are already happening in some school districts — and the good news is, 17 states are education on racism, bias and related topics. Now, to promote the best classroom experience for students, teachers must have access to instructional materials that mirror public school students’ diverse identities and histories. Though there has been an increase in the availability of high-quality materials that simultaneously affirm students’ identities and engage their minds, teachers need more. 

It is also essential to give teachers the support they need. Educators are learning and adapting to a wider awareness and discussion of race. But they can’t be expected to do this important work while the threat of for any misstep looms over them. Teachers deserve sustained training on how to guide effective discourse on hard topics such as race, and ongoing professional development to help them continue to learn and improve. 

Lastly, schools should expand students’ critical thinking rather than restrict what they can learn. Equipping children with the knowledge and skills to deal with difficult issues has long been central to public education’s purpose. It’s time to embrace that purpose, and support teachers so they can deal skillfully with politically fraught topics. Only then can every young person become more knowledgeable, more active and more productively engaged in our democracy.

The rates of suicidal thoughts among LGBTQ youth have ticked upward over the last three years, according to the fourth annual survey conducted by The Trevor Project, a nonprofit suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth. While 45% of LGBTQ youth said they seriously considered suicide in the last year — including 53% of those who are transgender or nonbinary — and 14% reported they had carried out a suicide attempt. 

The survey comes at a particularly fraught moment for advocates of LGBTQ rights as Republican lawmakers push for rules that prohibit classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity, ban books featuring LGBTQ themes, curb transgender students’ ability to access gender-affirming medical care, participate in school athletics or use restroom facilities that match their gender identities. 

“When we take a group of young people who are already very vulnerable to poor mental health and then we initiate these conversations,” the hardships compound, said Jonah DeChants, a research scientist at The Trevor Project. Not only are young people being targeted by these laws, but they also now have to wake up and log onto social media or turn on the news and hear elected officials talking about their identities in very misinformed, ignorant and in many cases very anti-LGBTQ perspectives.”

DeChants stressed that LGBTQ youth are not “inherently more suicidal” than their straight and cisgender peers. Poor mental health outcomes, he said, are the result of “minority stress” like social stigma and are not the direct result of their sexual orientation or gender identity. 

“It’s the fact that you wake up and you have to navigate a society that doesn’t want to allow you to love who you want to love or express your gender the way you want to express it,” he said. “That is what creates these poor mental health outcomes, not young peoples’ internal identity.”

The survey suggests a simple path forward that could shield young people from serious harm: Welcoming communities. LGBTQ youth who felt strong affirmation from their families reported attempting suicide at less than half the rate of those who lacked social support. Suicide attempts were also reported at lower rates among LGBTQ youth who found affirmation in their schools and broader communities compared to those who felt ostracized. 

Yet fewer than a third of transgender and nonbinary youth reported that their homes were gender affirming. In the face of the stark uptick in anti-LGBTQ legislation in the last year, officials at The Trevor Project argue that affirmation isn’t political — it’s a matter of life or death. 

“The science actually shows that when communities push back against these attacks and choose to affirm LGBTQ young people — whether that’s talking openly about these issues and not banning discussions or books from libraries — those steps are actually potentially life-saving,” DeChants told ����Ӱ��. “Those have a real, positive impact on young people’s mental health.” 

The survey also identified stark racial disparities among LGBTQ youth who attempted to die by suicide in the last year. About a fifth of Black youth carried out a suicide attempt, compared with 12% of those who are white. 

Almost all youth who are transgender or nonbinary — an overwhelming 93% — said they worry about state or local laws denying them access to gender-affirming health care, and a similar share said they were concerned about being denied access to the bathroom. More than four-fifths of transgender and nonbinary youth said they worried about being denied access to school athletics. 

The survey also highlights the extent that LGBTQ youth are targeted with harassment and physical violence — attacks that ultimately heightened their risk of suicide attempts. More than a third of LGBTQ youth reported that they have been physically threatened or harmed due to their gender identity or sexual orientation, and 73% said they’ve experienced discrimination at least once in their lifetimes. 

The pandemic has also taken a detrimental toll on LGBTQ youth, the survey found. More than half of survey respondents — 56% — said their mental health was poor most of the time or always due to COVID-19. 

The online survey was completed by nearly 34,000 LGBTQ youth in the U.S. between the ages of 13 and 24 between September and December 2021 — even before officials in states like Texas and Florida launched the latest round of policy attacks against LGBTQ youth. Among survey respondents, 45% are youth of color and 48% identify as transgender or nonbinary, making it one of the most diverse surveys of LGBTQ youth ever conducted, according to the nonprofit. 

Another recent survey, released in March and conducted by Morning Consult for The Trevor Project, found that or censor school curricula featuring LGBTQ topics. Just 1 in 3 adults expressed support for laws that ban gender-affirming medical care for minors. 

The latest survey results resemble data released in March by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which found that LGBTQ youth were significantly more likely to consider or attempt suicide during the pandemic than their straight and cisgender peers. Reported rates of physical abuse, homelessness and hunger were also disproportionately high among LGBTQ youth, the CDC survey found. 

While 73% of LGBTQ youth reported experiencing anxiety and 58% said they struggled with depression, Trevor Project survey respondents also highlighted major barriers to mental health care. In total, 60% of those who wanted mental health care in the past year said they were unable to receive the help they needed due to a range of issues including the fear of discussing their mental health concerns, the lack of affordability and the fear of getting outed to their parents. 

If you are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. For LGBTQ mental health support, contact The Trevor Project’s toll-free support line at 866-488-7386.

Exactly half have no mandate that schools teach sex education, from the Institute reveals, and only four of the 26 require curricula to cover the topic of contraception. Twenty-three allow districts to skip over consent entirely.

Restricting abortion access in a country that already limits young people’s resources for learning about sexual health is “a horrifying picture,” said Cassandra Corrado, a sex educator who works with high school and college students in Florida, where an abortion ban now is expected.

“We’re going to have a lot of people being afraid of their own bodies and we’re going to have a lot of people turning to unreliable sources of information,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Teens who receive comprehensive sex education are significantly less likely to have unwanted pregnancies than those who don’t get lessons on the topic or receive abstinence-only teachings, show. The five states with the — Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Alabama — are also among those set to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned.

Nationwide, only 29 states and Washington, D.C. require public school students to receive any form of sex education and just 18 require such teachings to be medically accurate.

With the map of U.S. sex ed laws patchy at best, a published by Politico on Monday evening revealed that the Supreme Court appears poised to reverse the 1973 Roe decision, which guarantees federal constitutional protection of abortion rights. Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed Tuesday that the .

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” writes Justice Samuel Alito on behalf of the majority. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

If the 50-year-old ruling falls, 22 states have laws that will immediately take effect outlawing abortion, including trigger bans and clauses in their state constitutions. Analysts expect four more to ban the procedures legislatively.

Matisse Laufgraben is a rising sophomore at Indiana University Bloomington where she works as student leader promoting sexual well-being on campus with the organization . Attending school in a state that has enacted 55 abortion restrictions and bans in the past decade, paving the way for a comprehensive ban should Roe be struck down, she’s hyper-aware of the fallout for her and her peers.

“If you get pregnant, you [will] have to deal with the consequences. There’s no escape,” she told ����Ӱ��. “It takes away that freedom for women.”

Despite Laufgraben’s work to inform peers about consent and healthy relationships, there’s still a “​​scary amount of sexual assault cases and sexual violence” on campus, she said. The prospect of abortion access rolling back in her state amplifies such fears, she explained, especially for female-identifying students who are more likely to be assault victims.

“It feels like we don’t have control over what happens to our bodies. … We don’t have control over whether or not we get sexually assaulted. And then we don’t have control over whether or not we want to have the baby,” said the college student. “It really just feels like everything is turned against us.”

The state abortion bans have an inverse relationship with rules requiring comprehensive sex ed. Of the 26 states expected to enact abortion bans in the coming months, only Iowa, Tennessee and Utah mandate sexual education in school and require that lessons be medically accurate. South Carolina is the sole state among the 26 that orders schools teach sex education and also requires lessons on consent.

Meanwhile, were filed in U.S. statehouses during the first three months of 2022, including “Don’t Say Gay” laws and bans on trans-related books in school. Many of the laws would bar educators from discussing or providing students with materials involving sexual orientation and gender identity, according to the .

“It’s not a coincidence that … state abortion restrictions are getting tighter at the same time as we’re seeing more restrictions on sex education, more restrictions on trans youth and how they can engage in schools,” said Corrado.

With laws stipulating what schools staff can and can’t discuss in Florida classrooms, many of her colleagues have to walk a “fine line,” she said, in order to deliver the information that youth — especially those who identify as queer, trans or nonbinary — need for their sexual well-being.

“As sex educators, one of the conversations that we’re having all the time right now is ‘How can we … protect our careers and also still be giving people the information that they need,’ ” said Corrado.

Even though schools in her state legally must provide lessons on sex education, she said, they often give students an incomplete or even false picture. According to state law, curricula need not be medically accurate, may promote religion and must stress the importance of abstinence.

“We shouldn’t assume that students are getting [accurate] information in schools right now, because they might not be,” said Corrado.