This story from Education
Week emphasizes many valid points listed below from numerous sources
with this headline:
“Lawmakers Push to Ban 1619 Project from Schools”
Key points:
The school curriculum linked to the New York Times 1619
Project — an initiative that aims to reframe U.S. history by putting the legacy
of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at its center — is once
again the target of Republican lawmakers, who seek to ban the materials in
three states: AR, IA, and MS who say the lesson plans misrepresent U.S.
history.
The Arkansas and Mississippi bills for example, call the 1619 Project “a racially divisive and revisionist account.”
The Iowa bill
claims that it “attempts to deny or obfuscate the fundamental principles upon
which the United States was founded.”
All three propose that school districts choosing to use the
curriculum lose part of their state funding, in proportion to the time and
resources devoted to teaching the material.
The
1619 project garnered intense public interest when it was published in August 2019.
It has received critical acclaim, including a Pulitzer Prize
for journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones’ flagship essay. She spoke out against the
Iowa bill saying on Twitter: “I grew up in Iowa and Iowa public schools are
what gave me my start in journalism in high school, where I took the Black
studies course that taught me the year 1619. This bill now exists seeking to
censor my 1619 work from other Iowa public school students is shocking &
sad. Attempting to control what teachers can teach in the name of patriotism is
seeking indoctrination not education. Education should open our minds, not
close them. The children of my home state deserve better than that.”
Those three state bills all use the same or similar language
as legislation proposed in July by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) who seeks to ban all
U.S. schools from using the 1619 materials.
That also echo proposals by Trump, who, in his final few months in office, said he would ban states from teaching the project.
Cotton further
accused history educators of teaching children to “…hate their own country.” He
convened a 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education.”
Jonathan Zimmerman, an education historian at the University
of PA Graduate School of Education said and noted that “previous challenges to
the 1619 curriculum, from Trump and Cotton, were mostly symbolic, and that Federal
education law prevents the recommendation or banning of specific curricula at
the national level,” adding: “At the state level, it’s a different ball of wax.
Historically, school curriculum (but not how teachers should teach) has been
determined at the state level.”
Zimmerman further said that something about this cultural
conversation feels different: “Most disputes over history since the 1920s in
this country have been about who gets included in the story. Movements for
representation resulted in more people of color, and more women, being inserted
into the dominant narrative of continual progress toward a more perfect union. This
is the first time we’re debating in a substantive way not just who should be
included, but what their inclusion does to the story. I think the Republicans
are right when they say the 1619 Project is a threat. I just think it’s a good
threat.” He concluded: “Critiques about the teaching shouldn’t preclude
teachers from bringing the material into their classrooms, Teachers don’t have
to — and in fact, shouldn’t present the 1619 Project’s conclusions as unalloyed
truth. The goal isn’t just to replace one narrative with another.”
Stephanie Jones, an assistant professor of education at
Grinnell College said: “Whether these bills pass or not, they still demonstrate
the persistence of backlash to curricula that center on Black history and Black
stories. Attempts to gloss over the more challenging parts of the country’s
story in schools didn’t start with the Trump presidency, and they won’t end
with its conclusion. This type of mishandling of curriculum has been in place
since U.S. public schools have been in place. They were not designed to educate
Black children, and they were not designed to educate white children to be
critical of anything related to the foundations of this country.”
A bit more:
Mark Schulte, the Pulitzer Center’s education director said:
“Attempts to ban the 1619 materials stem from a really unfortunate misreading of
the project itself. The lessons aren’t designed to convince students to believe
certain ideas, but rather to encourage them to question. What would it mean to
center the experience of Black Americans in our telling of U.S. history? What
if we understood the beginning of slavery in this country as a foundational
moment? It’s deliberately provocative. It’s the kind of thing teachers love,
because it gets students thinking, it gets them debating.”
Cleopatra Warren, a high school economics and history
teacher at Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy in Atlanta, who
is also a teacher fellow with the Pulitzer Center, said: “The proposed
legislation feels like an attempt to other Black children –reminiscent of slave
codes, Black codes, and Jim Crow laws which forbade Blacks from reading,
writing, or learning about their history. Preventing teachers from using the
curriculum promotes a singular narrative that centers whiteness. It’s important
to teach students about the history of struggle and contestation in the United
States.”
Warren uses the 1619 Project curriculum to discuss the
transatlantic slave trade and institutional slavery and to teach the importance
of primary sources — especially those that shine a light on the experiences of
Black people and other people of color, concluding: “Not having the capacity to
bring this alive in my classroom would involve an erasure.”
While the 1619 Project has seen popularity with many
teachers, it’s also faced criticism from some historians, who object to the
interpretations and conclusions that the essays draw — such as the claim that
one of the primary reasons the colonies decided to declare independence was to
preserve the institution of slavery.
Stefanie Wager, the president of the National Council for
the Social Studies (NCSS) said: “I see a little bit of irony in the three
state bills.”
While Republican lawmakers usually champion the right to free speech, they’re now attempting to quell dissenting voices in the classroom, she said. She has heard frustration from members in state councils that lawmakers are choosing to intervene on this one resource, when materials selection is “normally a non-issue” in these states.
The Iowa Council for the
Social Studies (ICSS) mentioned this in a statement to Education Week, writing
that the proposed legislation would “take away local control and dictate what
can and cannot be taught in Iowa,” which would be “inconsistent” with ICSS
values. Wager concluded: “Any good social studies teacher is certainly using a
variety of things in their classroom, and asking their students to critique
what they are reading. The work of historians, the work of social studies
teachers, is engaging students in uncovering that evidence, and challenging and
weighing that evidence. To try to squash that, or stop that in any way, is not
the mark of a quality social studies educator.”
Arkansas Council for the Social Studies President Olivia
Lewis issued a statement asking the State Education Committee legislators to
rescind the bill, along with another that would prohibit teaching certain
courses on race, gender, and social justice writing in part: “Both bills convey
a misunderstanding of history and social studies education as a set of static
facts that teachers present to students. … Social studies teachers and students
must have the opportunity to engage in inquiry and debate without fear of retaliation.”
My 2 cents: For the record
I have a graduate degree in education and I have taught grades 7-12, also at
the community college and regular college levels. Plus, I worked on Army education
issues for 22 years.
My stance on this overall issue:
Yes, most if not all education policy is at state and local levels; and yes, we
have and still need Federal guidelines (not on how to teach per se at either
level); but, no, we need no state or local laws and rules on how or what
precisely must he taught and / or how teachers should teach. That to me and I
suspect to most seasoned educators and classroom teachers is a “bridge too far”
as the expression says.
Sadly, with this new “post”
Trump GOP mindset on this issue and many other social issues in particular,
well that keeps us divided. We are apt to see issues and problems remain the
same way: Deeply divided and that harms the nation overall. Government policies
must not be one-sided raw partisan and narrowly centered as we see today – post
the Trump era. That serves no good for any of us and especially nation-wide.
The B/L: The Feds and
States should continue to provide guidance, and rules, and such along with
proper funding for what to teach and such, and always with educator input, but
not on how to teach once the curricula are approved and in place.
Related to this general
topic is this fine article from
The Hill (re: Teachers on edge over
critical race theory debate).
Thanks for stopping by.
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