As Texas lawmakers wrap up the first week of the 2025 legislative session, Gov. has signaled another public education priority he wants on their list: banning diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in K-12 public schools.

“No taxpayer dollars will be used to fund DEI in our schools,” Abbott said in a post on the social media platform X on Thursday, using the acronym for diversity efforts. “Schools must focus on fundamentals of education, not indoctrination.”

Barring DEI efforts at K-12 schools would expand a statewide ban for colleges and universities approved two years ago. The governor’s office did not immediately respond to questions from The Texas Tribune on Friday seeking more details on Abbott’s remarks.

His comments came in response to posted by Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Culture Project, allegedly showing a Richardson school district official answering questions from an individual who recorded the interaction and asked whether the district would allow a transgender girl to share a room with other students on a field trip. The school official, identified as the district’s executive DEI director, said the district would respond to the situation on a case-by-case basis with parental input.

Richardson school district officials said in a statement to the Tribune that only students of the same sex assigned at birth share rooms. The district also said its schools follow all anti-discrimination requirements, including a law stating that student-athletes must compete in events according to their sex assigned at birth.

“The district is not aware of any instance where this requirement was not followed, nor of any RISD-specific information suggesting the requirement should not be followed,” said Tim Clark, the district’s executive director of communications.

During the 2023 legislative session, Texas passed Senate Bill 17, which offices, programs and training at publicly-funded universities. Under the law, universities cannot create diversity offices, hire employees to carry out diversity-related initiatives or require any DEI training as a condition for employment or admission.

Since the law was passed, universities across the state have moved to shutter DEI offices and efforts. Those offices played a pivotal role in helping Black, Latino, LGBTQ+ and other underrepresented students adjust to life on college campuses and foster a sense of community among their peers.

Educational institutions across the country made promises following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer to work harder at creating more inclusive environments for their students. But many of those efforts have taken significant steps back as state officials have passed legislation to shutter them, labeling those efforts as left-wing indoctrination.

Abbott’s desire to now extend the law to K-12 public schools represents the latest attempt by Texas state officials to exert greater control over how educational institutions go about ensuring students from all backgrounds feel included, while limiting how they can teach and talk about gender, sexual orientation and America’s history of racism.

Abbott’s promise to prevent taxpayer dollars from flowing toward DEI initiatives at schools comes as public education spending is set to play a central role during the 2025 legislative session, which began earlier this week.

During the last session, House Democrats and rural Republicans’ efforts to block a school voucher program — Abbott’s top legislative priority for the last few years — came at the cost of not securing a funding boost for public schools, which has left Texas school districts grappling with multimillion-dollar budget deficits and other serious financial difficulties like school closures.

Abbott now says he has the votes to get a voucher program, which would allow parents to use tax dollars to pay for their children’s private education, across the finish line. He has also to increase public education funding this year.

The governor’s comments immediately drew praise from Sen. , R-Conroe, chair of the Senate’s Education Committee and author of the current DEI law.

“SB 17 has become a model for the entire nation, and I am ready to expand the law to protect the 6 million students in Texas schools from failed, divisive DEI programs,” Creighton wrote on social media. “Let’s get to work.”

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

These tensions escalated last year when a teacher disagreed with the superintendent’s decision to follow the advice of the school district’s lawyer and honor a transgender student’s request not to share their transition with their parents. The teacher went public and the results were swift and intense.

Hundreds of people descended on the next school board meeting. A local talk radio host said the superintendent wanted to “indoctrinate their children and … make them become gay and transgender.” Community members verbally accosted the schools chief in public saying, “You’re gonna go to hell. You never read the Bible.”&�Բ�����;

The fiscal consequences were also considerable, forcing the district to divert funds from planned professional development. Ultimately, five educators left their jobs in response to the spreading unrest.

This small community’s turmoil is one of many accounts included in a new , which tries for the first time to put a dollar amount on the costs of the culture war conflicts that have consumed school districts over the past several years. The researchers estimate that the nation’s public schools spent approximately $3.2 billion in 2023-24 dealing with divisive public debates over race, gender and sexual orientation, forcing them to spend money on legal fees, security, public relations and employee hours responding to misinformation, disinformation and public records requests. 

And although the researchers said their figures don’t account for the emotional and social toll on educators and students, their numbers do include a significant and related expense: staff turnover.  

“There are many different costs that are really consequential and are undermining the ability of educators to support student learning and well-being,” said John Rogers, a professor at UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies and the report’s lead author.

Data from the report comes from a national survey of 467 superintendents across 46 states conducted during summer 2024, followed by interviews with 42 superintendents across 12 states. Of those interviewed, 12 had taken the survey and reported moderate or high levels of conflict; the remaining 30 hadn’t taken the survey and were identified through professional leadership networks.

School districts were categorized as having either high, moderate, or low levels of conflict based on a series of questions about the nature of conflict related to culturally divisive issues, the frequency of and topics associated with personal or professional threats to superintendents and district staff and the financial and human resource costs.

Moms for Liberty, a high-profile parental rights group, was named specifically in the report in relation to board members they supported and other far-right groups accusing a western school district of indoctrinating students around sexual health issues. That superintendent cited having to spend roughly $100,000 to hire “armed plainclothes off-duty officers” and more than $500,000 in legal fees. Superintendents and school board members being attacked as pedophiles, groomers or sexual predators was a common refrain in the report.

Moms for Liberty did not respond to a request for comment. Closely aligned with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the group’s influence over school board elections is seen as waning even if battles over curriculum content and library books are still being waged.

Of the districts surveyed, roughly one-third experienced low levels of conflict, just over one-third experienced moderate levels and just under one-third experienced high levels. About 2.5% of superintendents reported no conflict. Overall, Rogers said those surveyed “look a lot like superintendents from the entirety of the (national) pool” in terms of their race, gender and whether they lead urban, rural or suburban districts.

Half of the schools chiefs reported that they experienced at least one instance of harassment in the 2023-24 school year. One in 10 said violent threats were directed toward them and 11% experienced property vandalism.

In order to calculate the overall fiscal costs, researchers asked superintendents about direct expenditures during the 2023-24 school year that were above and beyond what they previously would have spent for resources such as legal services or security; indirect costs, such as redeployed staff time; and employee turnover costs. 

To determine the cost of redeployed staff time, researchers took the number of hours that superintendents reported across these different activities and assigned them a dollar figure based on average district administrator wages from the . For each staff member that left the district, researchers assigned a dollar figure related to recruitment and new staff training based on research out of the .

Rogers noted that “there’s a certain imprecision” when it comes to calculating the cost of staff turnover because “you’re asking superintendents to draw upon the knowledge that they have to make this determination” of why educators and administrators left their positions. Follow-up interviews, he added, helped to bolster the reliability of these figures.

The researchers, who also include Rachel White of the University of Texas at Austin, Robert Shand of American University and Joseph Kahne of the University of California, Riverside, estimated that in their entirety, the conflict-related costs were more than enough to expand the national school breakfast program by 40% or hire “an additional counselor or psychologist for every public high school in the United States.”

Beyond the dollar figures, when speaking with superintendents, Rogers said he was particularly struck by the ways in which violent threats were playing out and how frequently it appeared there was a “concerted effort to disrupt, to foment conflict for the sake of fomenting conflict.”

For example, he heard from a number of superintendents whose districts spent an immense amount of time fulfilling public records requests they felt had been filed in bad faith. Once the materials were compiled, they often went unused, Rogers said.

The lasting implications of these in-district battles — beyond the fiscal costs — still remain unknown and appear to be shifting with the changing landscape. Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of the History of Education at The University of Pennsylvania, recently on his previous work around the culture wars’ impact on history teachers, writing, “It seems like I might have exaggerated them.”&�Բ�����;

But, he noted in an interview with �鶹��Ʒ this week, the effects on other educators and administrators are ongoing. Within the culture wars, he’s noticed less of a focus on race and critical race theory and more on gender and sexuality, hypothesizing that this may mean history teachers feel a lesser impact than English teachers, who might be more likely to teach directly about gender.

His sees the report as a reflection of the country’s “brittle and abusive” political culture. 

“This is the school politics chapter of a much broader story about the way that politics is conducted in America,” he said.

It appears that even as some of these more divisive players move on or are voted out, their political agendas may persist. That’s been the case in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County, one of the most closely watched regions for these debates. 

According to recent New York Times , despite Democrats sweeping the last school board election, not all contested books have been returned to school library shelves nor have teachers been allowed to display identity markers, like rainbow flags. Nearly a year after the Moms for Liberty-backed candidates were ousted, their presence is still felt. 

School was becoming the place he poured all his energy into, on the heels of his father’s incarceration and uncle’s murder. But simultaneously, from as young as four years old, disgusted looks from educators taught him schools were a place where he would be treated differently because he was Black. Being your authentic self, raw emotions and all, seemed to only be okay for white children.

He watched Eric, a Black classmate frequently isolated and paddled for disruptions or difficulty focusing, be expelled in first grade after bringing a water gun to school. From an early age, aunts and uncles imparting wisdom shared their experiences, told that they “would be lucky if they graduated.”&�Բ�����;

Marrying autobiography with research and analysis of education reform movements, Fuller recounts his educational life in devastating detail in Being Black in America’s Schools, “an American story that I honestly believe is begging to be told.”&�Բ�����;

From managing suicidal thoughts at eight to becoming desensitized to students’ humanity in pursuit of higher test scores working for a network charter, perpetuating the educational violence he thought he never would, Fuller verbalizes how policies landed in the mind of a Black child and educator. 

Amid debates of how and where Black history will be taught and a youth mental health crisis that is disproportionately felt by Black children, Fuller’s work has been described as a “beacon” that showcases “what keeps us captive while giving keen insights on what can free us,” by Abdul Tubman, activist and descendant of Harriet Tubman. 

Revealing the humans behind data and educational movements, Fuller shows the dehumanization happening in ways big and small in classrooms across the country. Tracked into advanced work in high school, for instance, he remembered how it felt to be isolated from his Black peers, then to see counselors write them, and their futures, off before they’d even graduated.  

“In the same way that the inherent racism in our criminal justice system is killing Black and brown people all the time, the inherent racism in our education system is killing the dreams of Black and brown children in the classroom,” Fuller, now an associate provost at The New School in New York City, told �鶹��Ʒ. 

Released in late July by Dafina, an imprint of Kensington Publishing, Fuller’s story exposes hundreds of anecdotes and presents models for transformative change in the education system. Uplifting models that champion children’s emotional wellbeing and cultures, like community schools and the freedom schools of the 1960s, he imagines a future where all children grow up learning Black history, critical thinking, and financial and emotional literacy in order to lead and “dream their way out of a dreamless land.”&�Բ�����; 

Drawing from time as an educator and administrator in and around Philadelphia, Boston and New York City’s schools, Fuller has also released a workbook companion for educators about how to concretely apply these concepts to the classroom at grade level. 

“I would have loved for them to tell me that I was worthy, to see me as their child, their nephew, a younger version of who they were, to see me the way I witnessed teachers often see my white classmates. To see me as ‘just a good kid.’ … To attempt to understand me rather than punish me. I would have loved for them to ask me about my hopes and dreams and then cultivate them in me. I would have loved for them to have fun with me and show me the joy they felt from being around me,” he writes. 

In conversation with �鶹��Ʒ, Fuller reflects on the importance of transforming schools to teach Black children to love themselves and what’s at stake when kids aren’t taught how to interrogate the world around them.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Jelani Cobb, writer and dean of Columbia’s journalism school, calls this “a book we needed yesterday.” Why write this now? What does it mean at this moment? 

Being Black in American Schools really came from a deep commitment of mine to marginalized children, all children, but specifically Black and brown children. And to liberatory education and powerful storytelling. I think this book is so important now in our current climate, given the attack on education that’s happening. The rhetoric in the conversation is pretty horrible.

It’s so important for us to have stories like this one to cut through a lot of the noise of the pundits, the politics because under all of that are the lived experiences of our students in our classrooms.

This book has been a four year journey really for me. In 2020 I was working for the New York City Department of Education. That was a summer where we had the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor all over our television screens. What pundits now call the racial reckoning was happening. 

For me as an educator, I was looking at the world and our society and seeing that we were calling to the carpet our criminal justice system in a way that I felt was very valid – starting to interrogate its inherent racism and its inherent flaws. 

I wanted us to have that same conversation about another major American institution, which is our educational system. In the same way that the inherent racism in our criminal justice system is killing Black and brown people all the time, the inherent racism in our education system is killing the dreams of Black and brown children in the classroom. 

I imagine that coming to that realization also shaped the storytelling form you chose for this, weaving in and out of your own personal narrative, research, and historical moments in education reform. How did you decide to do that, and why are those lived experiences so necessary for people to hear and hold? 

It was really important for me to craft the book in the way that I did and I actually fought really hard for it. [Powerful storytelling] is what’s needed to really inspire action and change. Storytelling is what connects us, it’s the human aspect. 

Over the years, through false narratives, through so many things, things get so politicized and so up in the air. There’s not enough of hearing the stories and the real lived experiences of people underneath all of the theories, underneath all of the data. It was really powerful to use my own story – one that is uniquely mine but is not unique, right? 

I talk about being a child of an incarcerated parent growing up. There are millions of children right now who are living that experience. I talk about being one of a few or sometimes the only a Black child or student of color in my classroom as I was being tracked in school [into advanced coursework]. There are hundreds of thousands of children that are experiencing that right now. 

My own story was authentic to me, I knew I could tell it well and analyze it now from my lens as an educator, but also, I felt like it was one that so many people could connect to. I weave in the research and the history and keep it greater than the story because I think it helps people connect to the point that I’m trying to get across … This is what happened, and this is what this means, and this is how it looks.

That comes across in moments like when you describe working in youth development in Philadelphia, seeing the distrust in the community, both for strangers coming to their door and for education after . You feel it, the lived impact of those moments. 

And at so many points, you describe having to advocate for yourself, against the bias of white educators who assumed you cheated or wanted to discipline you or your friends more harshly than your white peers. You show why believing a phrase you repeated often, “I deserve to be here,” was necessary. How do you instill or encourage that in youth who are systemically underserved, and how might we get to a point where youth don’t have to be such fierce advocates? 

I am a strong believer in advocating for yourself, especially as a marginalized person in this world and in our society. In schools, I think how you encourage it is through developing their critical consciousness, developing their own empowering concept of self. 

We come from a legacy of being marginalized, being pushed to the side and being told that we are less-than in society. Because of that, we’re not necessarily the first to advocate for ourselves, especially where we feel discredited or feel like we are seen as second-class citizens. 

I always encourage students that I work with and parents that they deserve to have quality education, they deserve to have a quality experience, and their voice deserves to be heard. 

That advocacy is so important and as you see in the book, my advocacy saved me in many ways. That was something that was really important in my household; my mom taught me to be an advocate for myself because she was an advocate for me. I had that, but not every student is gonna have that because parents come with their lived experiences as well.

To your other question, how do we get to a point where we don’t need to … I think at some level, we will always have to advocate for more for ourselves. That’s not trying to be bleak, but I just think that’s reality. How we get to a point where there’s not much as much advocacy needed is really, the point in the book: to first acknowledge that our educational system was, in its current designs and its original intention, not designed to properly educate Black and brown people well. And then start to interrogate the designs – how we restructure an education system so that it serves all students. 

You also explore why early childhood education is particularly important for forming a sense of self. Reports keep coming out revealing how many millions of young children – for some states like New Mexico, one in two – are experiencing parental incarceration, abuse, death or other ACEs [adverse childhood experiences]. How can educators better support the earliest learners with these lived traumas?

And also RST or racial stress trauma, which is still severely underreported. I believe that every child born outside of the nucleus of what American society is, whiteness, experiences some racial stress trauma. 

We know that from the age 0 to 5, so much of your child’s development takes place. Their mental development, their identity of self. When that is compounded with trauma, we have to address that – in our early childhood centers, our Head Start centers, and as soon as they’re entering into school. 

I normally break it down – at the earliest stages, our children have to love who they are. So what does that mean? However they identify needs to be honored, uplifted and they need to be seen, empowered and know that they have a place in our society. They’re not second class in society, they’re not “other” in society. They are front and center and important in society. You do that through building authentic relationships, and in curriculum. Liberatory curriculum is age appropriate, but also brings in the identities of those youngest learners in ways that are normalized, uplifting to their identities. 

The reality we need to face in America is what you just mentioned, most of our students are coming into the classroom with some form of trauma. We are creating an education system that is just ignoring it. Early childhood is also extremely underfunded. We need more mental health counselors and specialists in our early childhood centers … to think about the designs of your classrooms, schools and how you are addressing the needs of your students.

People will probably read this and be like, well, we don’t even have them in our middle or high schools. But that just tells you how much mental health children’s mental health is put on the back burner. We see it in the numbers. . We have to start putting our resources behind these things. 

That’s a part of liberatory education too, providing them with the tools and trained individuals to help them cope with the traumas that are the reality of living in America. 

You go through some models that try to do this very thing and put a huge emphasis on building up Black children – like community schools, the , and in . That emphasis on love, grace and empathy, it’s not something that’s necessarily taught to teachers in preparation programs. How do you remind educators or leaders who are currently in positions of power of that, to champion kids’ humanity? 

It is not taught in our teacher professional development programs as much as it needs to be. There are programs out there – I mention one, Glenn Singleton’s Courageous Conversations work which does great educator professional development around race – but there’s not a lot.

I’m not saying that children shouldn’t learn in your classrooms, but they won’t be able to learn if they’re in your classroom where they don’t feel safe or loved or like they are seen. 

I always say what moves people is storytelling. But also there’s and data out there that actually shows the more a child feels included in the curriculum, the more the child feels safe, or the better relationship the child has with their teacher, the better they’re going to do academically. There’s so much talk on disparities and how do we close the gaps … [We need more] access to that data showing that we need to have an emphasis on identity development and affirming curriculum. We need to have an emphasis on building authentic relationships. We need to have an emphasis on deconstructing bias in your practice. 

When I finished this book, we weren’t in the present day, of course. Now I’m thinking about the potential of what could happen with current policies, like book banning and the banning of diversity and inclusion, and what could come with Project 2025. I think where we need to focus is really on the grassroots. 

At the end of the day, regardless of what’s happening from a legislative standpoint, we still have millions of kids in the classroom that we are responsible for and can’t let fall through the cracks. If they ban diversity, equity and inclusion, so you can’t say those words, then don’t say those words, but still affirm your students in the classroom. Still honor their identity in the classroom. Those are the conversations that we need to be having with our teachers. 

We get caught up on, this is banned now so we can’t do this, or now we can’t teach AP African American studies. No, you can still honor your students and, and you don’t have to call it that, but you can still do it in the classroom on the ground. Our kids are suffering and we can’t continue to allow them to suffer at the hands of a small minority of people.

Particularly as you’re mentioning the hyper emphasis, especially after the pandemic, on learning losses and academic performance. I keep hearing from educators that we cannot lose the person in all of that, because it’s going to make it that much harder to do anything else. 

I hear sometimes this distinction that, oh, well, if we honor our student’s identity or if we really have a focus on what people like to call “soft skills,” they’ll lose the focus on the academic outcomes. Those two things are not separate, they go hand in hand. Children do better when their lived experiences are brought into the classroom, when you tie in real world current events and their lived experience, when you’re able to connect that to what you’re trying to teach them. They feel they feel more connected to what they’re trying to learn and therefore have better outcomes. 

Speaking of censorship and fear culture, in your writing, you express exactly why learning Black history, accurate history, is important for all children at every stage of education. Referencing the first ethnic studies course you took as a college student at Emory, you said it enabled you to “finally put theory and evidence behind many of mine and my family’s experiences. It was as if up until this point, I had been in a battle without armor.”&�Բ�����;

Can you speak more on this, which alludes to a James Baldwin quote, about what you found in that course that you wished you had gotten earlier or that you think youth need exposure to today?

My dad was a part of the mass incarceration of nonviolent criminals who faced very long sentencing for drug related charges. I had experienced that act of violence by my society. Then growing up in South Carolina and experiencing on the ground discriminatory comments … I experienced all of that, that legacy of slavery, of racism that was passed down from generation to generation in our American society. 

When I got to Emory, I learned about redlining. I learned about mass incarceration. I learned about Jim Crow laws, I learned about all of these things and it was like, wow, no, I get it now. This isn’t just something that is happening. This is very intentional and it’s by design. It almost was an empowering thing because, as much as I had my family trying to let me know the great contributions of Black people in our society, your lived experiences are telling you a lot of different things counter to that. 

Without having the knowledge of, oh wow, our American society was designed to have these outcomes for this group of people, Black people. It’s not that we’re not as smart, or we’re just not as successful or we’re just not as capable. 

Now I understand the corrupt designs behind that lived experience, why my family and those around me have that experience. Now I understand it and I can go forward and combat it. I think that’s so important for our students to experience. 

The Baldwin quote came from a where he also said, children see everything, they are like a sponge. They’re observing everything but they can’t articulate necessarily what it is that they’re observing. But they know that something is off. They know that there’s some “terrible weight” on their parent’s shoulders that menaces them. That terrible weight is racism, is white supremacy. 

We’re experiencing that every day. Our children are experiencing it every day and they can’t necessarily articulate it. But if they’re not being taught the true history, they’re not being taught how to interrogate society, be civically engaged, and understand those individuals that were critical thinkers of our society – individuals like Baldwin, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King. If they’re not taught the designs of our American society, then that is still a very disempowering curriculum that perpetuates racial propaganda and a social caste system in America. 

It’s so important at the earliest stage I got a little bit of it at home. My first [classroom] experience of it was when I got to college, but children need to be experiencing that at the earliest ages of early stages of their educational experience that is developmentally appropriate. 

I just want to emphasize that perspective and name that it runs counter to the narrative that I often hear used to minimize the importance of teaching Black history or systemic racism: this is going to teach kids to hate America, that they will feel depression, not pride. 

I hear those same things that you’re talking about, we don’t want to feel bad, or sometimes, we don’t want kids to feel guilty for things that they had nothing to do with. But to teach truth and to learn truth is empowering for everybody. It puts everyone on the same playing field. 

It’s so empowering for a Black child to know, hey, it’s not just because of who I am innately. It’s because of the legacies of how this country was designed and policies and practices that took place that impacted my ancestors and now have impacted me. Then, what can I do now to change those things so that my legacy can be different? Or my children, grandchildren, whoever’s can be different? That’s empowering for a white child too, like, oh, this is, this is where we messed up in the past. Now what can I do to make sure that we don’t repeat that in the future? 

This book is also referred to as a call to action. To whom and for what are you calling out for? 

There are three things I hope people get from this book. One is first just the knowledge and the acknowledgment that our educational system and in its original intention and current designs was to perpetuate a racial and social hierarchy within our American society. 

Then, let’s look at the designs of our educational system and figure out, in what ways is this design perpetuating that hierarchy so we can start to redesign, reimagine, make necessary change. So that those in power who are able to make the change from a legislative perspective, do that. Those in power who are able to make the change from a school design perspective, do that. Those in power who are able to make the change from interactions with students in the classroom, do that. And then those who maybe are not a parent or educator per se but are interested in the ways that we educate children in this country, they can then start to advocate for those for changes within their local communities and school systems. 

My hope is that this book really inspires us all to action. All of us play a part in that. You don’t have to be senator or work for the federal Department of Education. I hope that this book really makes everyone feel like they all have a part in it and they all can be actors agents of change. 

Republican Tom Horne, a 77-year-old Harvard-educated attorney, is returning to the job he held from 2003 to 2011, before completing a four-year stint as state attorney general. His critics worry he will reverse progress made under Democratic incumbent Kathy Hoffman, whom he narrowly beat, and will relax standards around the state’s newly expanded and long fought-over voucher program. 

His re-emergence alarms those who remember how he proudly dismantled bilingual education in the state earlier in his career and pushed to ban an ethnic studies program credited for better engaging Hispanic students by teaching them about their own history. Now, Horne is fixated on another topic, a new iteration of one of his older concerns: critical race theory. 

The catch-all term used by conservatives to describe the teaching of systemic racism is, in Horne’s view, an extension of the problem surrounding ethnic studies, in which children, he argues, are taught to view each other through the lens of race.

“What matters is what we know, what we do,” Horne told �鶹��Ʒ. “Race is entirely irrelevant. My opponents say race is primary. I don’t want to teach kids that race is primary, but that they have to treat each other as individuals.”

A court ruled in 2017 that the ethnic studies ban he lobbied for against the Tucson Unified School District was and But Horne disagrees, maintaining the same position more than a decade later. 

Horne, who calls himself “the opposite of a racist,” said he supports teaching history in totality, including “the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow…[and] what happened in Oklahoma,” a reference to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. He advocates for a curriculum that teaches every student about the contribution of all groups, he said.

A former state legislator who also served on the board of Phoenix’s Paradise Valley School District from 1978 to 2002, Horne has made numerous other pledges which he believes will bolster student performance and make campuses safer. 

He vowed to renew the state’s focus on testing, turn away from social-emotional learning, push for more guns on campus, impose stricter school discipline — and amp up newly expanded universal Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, signed into law by outgoing Gov. Doug Ducey in July. The program gives families approximately $6,500 a year per student to spend on private school tuition or other educational costs, like tutoring. It was initially offered to only a limited number of students, including those who attended failing schools or were in foster care, but is now available to all.

Critics say the new program will benefit the rich, not the poor as Horne has previously stated. But parents across the country, frustrated by school closures and disastrous distance learning efforts, are pushing for greater flexibility in their children’s education: A ballot measure to kill the voucher expansion in Arizona failed to gain enough signatures this election cycle.

Beth Lewis, co-founder and executive director of Save Our Schools Arizona, which formed in 2017 to oppose universal vouchers, has worked in education in the state for 12 years, with half of that time spent as a teacher in a Tempe elementary school. She said Horne’s plan will exacerbate inequality. 

“I’ve always taught in extremely low-income schools,” she said. “I see the impact of defunding public education … to not have counselors, aides, books and computers … and to have that money go [instead] to families already sending their kids to elite private schools — and who make millions — is painful,” she said. “It’s outright lying.”

Prior to the expansion, just 12,127 children participated in the ESA program, state education officials said. The figure shot up to 42,842 by early December: Approximately 67% of the applicants did not have a prior record of public school enrollment. It’s unclear how many were already enrolled in private school or who were being taught at home. 

But the voucher program is not Lewis’s only concern: She worries Horne’s election will mark a major regression in other, critical ways. 

“There is a fear we will take 10 or 20 steps backward,” she said. “He has an antiquated belief system. It’s not just that he’s conservative but an extremist, authoritarian. He’s all about forcing guns on campus. It’s all about the tests, this grind culture, punishment — a punitive nature around school. As a teacher, I just don’t think that’s what our kids need or deserve.”

Nicky Indicavitch, a parent and volunteer in her local school district, said Horne’s vow to dismantle social-emotional learning — he calls it “a front for CRT” — will take away a critical tool teachers use to help students manage their stress, bolster their performance and improve the classroom environment. 

“I have seen firsthand what happens when young people are not given the skills they need to manage complex social settings and how disruptive their behavior can become,” said Indicavitch, who has experience in social work. “Tom Horne vowing to remove this valuable piece of education will only cause our children, their classmates and educators to struggle more.”&�Բ�����;

Controversial record perhaps forgotten

Bill Scheel, a long-time political consultant, said Horne has always been a divisive candidate centering on race-based issues. 

“He really has not changed his stripes or tactics in 20 years,” he said.

Horne was wise to stay away from the public spotlight since he last held office in 2014, Scheel said. Prior to that, he was investigated by numerous entities, including the FBI, for . 

He paid a $10,000 fine and no criminal charges were filed: Horne said he was .

“Under the First Amendment, if you run for public office, people can lie about you without any consequence,” he said. “There is a lot of lying that goes on.”

Horne also was criticized for hiring an assistant attorney general, Carmen Chenal, despite her : He said recently that she was amply qualified and did an excellent job, particularly by utilizing her skills as a Spanish speaker. 

Horne also was alleged to have left the scene of a in 2012, an incident that led to yet another scandal: Chenal was with Horne when the accident occurred in a parking lot near her apartment. The two married in 2020. 

As for the damages done to the other vehicle, Horne said at least some of it can be attributed to the vehicle  

All of these incidents come decades after the released damning findings about Horne’s previous business, allegations he dismissed in a recent email because they happened in the 1970s.

“He kept himself under the radar and I guess, to his credit, he did not attach himself to the Trump ticket,” Scheel said. “That kept some of that fire away from him.”

Trump-backed candidates across the country, including in Arizona, suffered : Kari Lake, a MAGA Republican who narrowly lost the race for governor of the state, has . Attorney general candidate Abe Hamadeh, another Trump pick, is just hundreds of votes behind his Democratic opponent and is .

Raised and spent over a $1M 

Horne stuck with CRT longer than others, but it’s not clear if his desire to limit classroom discussions of race — along with his opposition to bilingual education — were persuasive in a year when Arizona voters also approved a measure .

Beyond the low profile nature of the race, Scheel noted Horne far outspent Hoffman. The former preschool teacher and speech language pathologist was not a career politician, he said: She was elected amid a swarm of similar victories for . 

“He raised and spent over $1 million,” Scheel said. “She had $300,000.”

Hoffman’s nearly non-existent campaign allowed her challenger to be largely unharmed by a revelation that might have leveled another candidate. Horne was found to be in close ties with disgraced former state Rep. David Stringer, who was accused, in 1983, of with him. 

Stringer rather than disclose documents related to the case. 

Most recently, . Horne initially Stringer but later stepped away from him, telling �鶹��Ʒ he paid Stringer cash to return his in-kind contribution to the campaign. 

The issue never really gained traction with voters. 

“That’s where more money could have elevated that current scandal and really damaged him,” Scheel said. 

Douglas Cole, chief operating officer of HighGround, a Republican-leaning political consulting firm, said Horne has long remained focused on the issues. 

“He’s a policy wonk,” Cole said. “He always has been. He was that way as a [state] legislator, in the House of Representatives. He takes on controversial issues he believes in and fights for them. He gets pretty passionate about where he thinks things should go.”

No matter his ambitions for schools, his is a supervisory and regulatory position: Scheel isn’t sure how far Horne will get with a Democratic governor and, likely, attorney general. Cole agreed. 

“If he wants to make sweeping changes, he would have to convince 16 senators, 31 members of the House and a governor of the opposite party,” Cole said. “He’s operating in a different paradigm. He’s not a lawmaker.”

Despite this, Horne, a lifelong pianist who plays with local orchestras and supports funding for the arts, is determined to make change. 

He promises to investigate and quash any ethnic studies programs that have cropped up since he last held the post, saying the situation is much worse now than it was a decade ago: The teachings, he said, are more widespread.

“I have been fighting CRT since 2010, for 12 years, and for a long time felt like a voice in the wilderness,” he said. “It wasn’t until the last couple of years that the rest of the world caught up.”

One thing that stuck out to Republican candidate Tracy Cramer in talking to voters in Woodburn, Gervais and Salem, Oregon, recently was how upset parents still felt about how K-12 education was handled during the pandemic.

She said they were frustrated with long school closures and concerned about some lessons overheard or seen in online classes.

“I can’t believe the amount of parents I’ve talked with who have pulled their kids out of public schools to find alternative sources,” said Cramer, the Republican nominee to represent Oregon’s 22nd House District, which runs from Woodburn through north Salem.

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Capitalizing on parent frustration with schools during the pandemic, several Republican candidates are platforming nationwide calls for “parents’ rights” and school choice. They want curriculum posted online and for parents to be able to opt out of certain lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity. Many oppose lessons they feel are too closely tied to critical race theory, an academic framework that looks at the roles of race and racism in U.S. history, law and institutions. They also want taxpayer dollars to flow to private and religious schools.

The candidates hope championing these issues in their campaigns will galvanize voters. It’s a strategy that’s been tested by Republican candidates in other states, with varying degrees of success.

In 2021, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s win was attributed by many to his outspoken opposition to the teaching of critical race theory and his commitment to expanding charter schools in the state. In Oregon in 2021, some conservative school board candidates won after campaigning against critical race theory, mask and vaccine mandates and what they saw as heavy-handed state control in education curriculum.

But some experts are skeptical about how effective criticizing public education is as a political wedge to help candidates win, especially in Oregon.

Christopher Stout, an associate professor at Oregon State University who researches and teaches about politics with a focus on race, gender and public opinion, said interest in education wedge issues tends to be temporary. They can also alienate undecided voters that Republicans are hoping to win, and the more moderate Republicans the party might be hoping to win back, he said.

“I do think some of the voters that conservatives are trying to win back don’t see some of these issues like critical race theory and sex education as, as big of threats as other issues,” Stout said.

Defining the issues

Kori Haynes, the Republican nominee to represent Oregon’s 39th House District in Clackamas County, said voters in the county want more control over what their kids are learning at school.

When classes went online, more parents saw what was being taught.

“We kind of got a glimpse of what was behind the curtain as far as what our children were learning,” Haynes said. “It raised a lot of questions around the content.”

An example she offered was learning about gender and sexuality in classes other than health, as well as lessons in which students might be asked to consider topics differently based on their ethnicity and skin color. That, she said, is critical race theory by another name.

“CRT is definitely still in our schools,” she said. “It’s kind of sneaky because it’s called DEI: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.”

Haynes wants a “parents’ bill of rights” that requires schools to post curriculum for all classes online, that outlines what information parents are entitled to from public schools and that allows parents to opt out of some lessons.

Oregon schools are to share course information and instructional materials with parents who request it, according to Peter Rudy, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Education. Parents can also make a public records request. When it comes to sex education, parents are allowed to opt out by filling out a form on the department’s website and submitting it to their child’s school.

Both Haynes and Cramer believe taxpayer dollars should be allowed to go towards charter, private and religious school tuition. Oregon public schools get about $12,450 per pupil from the state.

“The money should follow the student,” Cramer said.

But Cramer would not comment on whether those private, religious and charter schools should have to follow the same state and federal laws as public schools to accept and educate all students who show up, without question.

Several attempts over the last few years to get a ballot measure in front of Oregon voters that would amend the Constitution and allow taxpayer dollars to go to private and religious schools have failed to get enough signatures for approval by the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office.

School board elections

In Oregon, recent school board elections have served as a litmus test for the success of education wedge issues in political campaigns.

In 2021, an influx of conservative candidates bolstered by donations from Oregon Right to Life – a nonprofit anti-abortion group affiliated with the National Right to Life Committee – ran and won seats on several school boards statewide. The anti-abortion group is opposed to teaching sex education in schools, and it rallied around candidates who were also opposed to mask mandates and wanted curriculum posted online out of fear that critical race theory was being taught.

It was part of a conservative takeover of school boards that swept the country in 2021, according to Stout.

“Conservatives have been much better than liberals at focusing on local elections,” he said.

“Up until then, I think people largely ignored those races.”

In some districts with new conservative majorities, superintendents were ousted by their boards for complying with mask and vaccine mandates. And in Newberg, the board ousted its public schools’ superintendent for pushing back on the board’s attempt to ban pride flags and Black Lives Matter signs in classrooms.

In some school board races, appealing to voters on such issues was unsuccessful.

When Sami Al-Abdrabbuh, a member of the Corvallis School Board, ran for reelection in 2021, his opponent campaigned under education wedge issues such as “parents’ rights,” and claimed student equity and inclusion policies were distracting the teaching of basic subjects.

Al-Abdrabbuh won the race. He credits his success with telling voters that equity and inclusion policies are about making students feel safe at school and talking with them about how school choice would pull money from public schools.

“Taglines expire after election day, but public schools have been and continue to be the lifeblood of our democracy,” he said. “These wedge issues might motivate voters in one election. But long term, voters will see these issues are hurting public schools.”

The risks

According to answers from a questionnaire by the conservative political action committee Oregon Mom’s Union, 48 out of 50 Republican candidates running for state office support school choice; allowing Oregon students to enroll in any public school in any district; removing the cap on the number of students in each district allowed to join virtual charter schools; requiring all class curriculum be available on school district websites; and ensuring “the fundamental right of parents to be the principal decision-maker for their children’s education.”

David Kilada, who runs Intisar Strategies, a political consultancy, is working with a number of these Republican candidates on their campaigns. Many of them have made criticizing current education policies and the teaching of critical race theory major issues in their campaigns.

“It’s a big issue on the north coast, in the Salem area. Statewide it’s a concern for voters,” Kilada said. “And nationwide. You saw the Glenn Youngkin election in Virginia.”

Candidates are also using education issues to criticize their Democratic opponents. In one Cramer’s opponent Anthony Medina, a Woodburn School Board member, is accused of disrespecting parents because he voted against a school-choice measure.

“The crux of the issues for both very conservative voters as well as those in the middle is about parents having to make a big stink about an issue for it to be addressed,” Kilada said.

“I think that the last two years and what happened because of Covid highlighted many of the existing problems.”

Kilada and the candidates he represents say that parents want more control over where their kids go to school, what their tax dollars are spent on and what their kids are being taught.

Stout, from OSU, said there is an underlying resentment and distrust of public schools post-pandemic that could work in Republican’s favor.

“Parents were upset about school closures and the impact on their personal and professional lives,” Stout said.

In 2020, white, college-educated women began drifting from the Republican Party. Stout said channeling frustrations with schools among that base might be a way to bring them back to the party, but it could backfire.

“At the same time it’s mobilizing your base, it also has the power to alienate others and to mobilize them against you,” Stout said.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

Democrat Wes Moore cruised to a 22-point victory over Republican candidate Dan Cox. He will become Maryland’s first Black governor. In an election night interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, the governor-elect touted “big things” in store for Maryland, including “offer[ing] a service year option for every single high school graduate.”

Throughout the Maryland gubernatorial race, GOP candidate Dan Cox has done his best to keep education culture wars issues front and center. 

The state legislator named a right-wing parent leader as his running mate after her group lobbied to remove a Queen Anne’s County schools superintendent who . And in his only public debate against Democratic challenger Wes Moore, the Trump-endorsed candidate railed against “transgender indoctrination in kindergarten,” a problem he blamed on books that “depict things that I cannot show you on television, it’s so disgusting.”

The approach takes its cue from several recent GOP campaigns, most notably that of Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. The Republican’s 2021 win over high-profile Democrat and former governor Terry McAuliffe was propelled largely by controversy over K-12 curricula and COVID school closures, said University of Maryland political science professor Michael Hanmer.

“You don’t have to go too far to see what happened in the Virginia governor’s race. There, education was a really big deal,” the professor said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cox campaign was trying to leverage some of the same themes that the Youngkin campaign was able to.”

But so far the strategy has not traveled well across state lines.

As of late September, Moore led Cox by a 2-to-1 margin with a 32-percentage point advantage, according to a of 810 registered voters carried out by the University of Maryland and The Washington Post.

“The times are different, the candidates are different and there’s a lot of differences between Maryland and Virginia,” said Hanmer, whose Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement co-sponsored the poll. “It’s a really steep climb for Cox.”

Democratic candidate Wes Moore is a Rhodes Scholar, combat veteran, anti-poverty advocate and best-selling author. Sporting an endorsement from the state’s largest teachers union, he says he plans to boost educator pay, reduce the number of youth that schools send into the criminal justice system and fund tutoring initiatives to help students recoup learning they missed during COVID.

In their Oct. 12 debate, following Cox’s attack on what he called queer “indoctrination” in schools, Moore locked eyes with the camera and delivered an alternate message.

“I want to say to all of our LGBTQ youth and families, I see you and I hear you and all policies that will be made will be made in partnership,” he said.

On the issues

Nearly a quarter of Republican voters say they plan to cross the aisle and cast their ballot for Moore, which could prove a death blow for Cox in a state where there are already twice as many registered Democrats as Republicans.

Among the Frederick County lawmaker’s GOP opponents is the state’s popular term-limited incumbent Gov. Larry Hogan, who has repeatedly called Cox a “” and “.”

Cox did not respond to requests for comment, but his running mate Gordana Schifanelli said public opinion surveys do not phase their campaign.

“I am not paying attention to the polls, which are very biased and steered towards narratives some people want to promote,” she said in an email.

In a race that “revolves around people/parents who are very concerned about education,” she said the GOP ticket is advocating a pivot away from “BLM [Black Lives Matter] curriculum and equity outcomes” in schools. Instead, “turning back to basics: logic, foreign languages and, yes, cursive writing.”

sharlimar douglass, leader of the Maryland Alliance for Racial Equity in Education who does not capitalize her name, doubts whether Cox’s and Schifanelli’s “parental rights” agenda includes the rights of Black families like hers.

“This whole piece about the ‘parents’ rights’ to me falls into what we’ve seen nationally, like white parents’ fear and people not wanting children to learn the true history,” she said.

The lieutenant governor candidate dismissed the criticism.

“This is not about Black or white,” she said, explaining she does not oppose kids learning about slavery but rather the “political push to segregate children into oppressors, oppressed and depressed.”

Moore’s education agenda largely steers clear of curricular concerns around race and gender, focusing instead on policy issues like addressing the state’s teacher shortage and expanding access to early childhood education. 

“We are going to … honor the people who fight for our kids — teachers, administrators, custodial workers, cafeteria workers — the people who make our schools places where children can thrive,” Moore said in a statement emailed to �鶹��Ʒ.

He also says he plans to by creating $3,200 savings bonds for every Maryland baby born on Medicaid, lifting the prospects of children who are disproportionately Black and Latino. He has not said how he plans to pay for the roughly $100 million-a-year program.

The Democratic candidate’s campaign has not been without setbacks. In early October, the reported Moore’s Baltimore home had an unpaid water and sewage bill of over $21,000, which was then paid off within hours of the story’s publication. And details regarding his Baltimore roots presented in his 2010 memoir have been .

However, if those issues don’t dissuade voters and Moore cruises to victory, not only will it be his first time in elected office, he also would become the Old Line State’s first governor of color and quite possibly the following the midterms.

Investing in education: Maryland’s Blueprint

Moore has promised to fully fund the , landmark legislation that, when fully implemented in 2032, will infuse an additional $4 billion annually to help schools in the state boost achievement and close equity gaps. 

“My opponent is a danger to our state. His plans would certainly defund our schools, and I’m going to do the opposite by ensuring that every Marylander has access to a world-class education,” Moore said.

Robert Ruffins, who has advocated for the Blueprint for years as assistant director of state advocacy at EdTrust, said there are “incredibly high stakes” for education in this gubernatorial election because the implementation of the 10-year plan could hinge on whether it sees support from the state’s top officeholder. In Maryland, he explained, the governor has broad power over funding levels because they put forward the state’s working yearly budget.

“The governor being committed to the Blueprint, and to the funding of the Blueprint, and to being a partner in having it implemented properly is going to be absolutely critical to our success,” added William Kriwan, who chaired the legislative commission that crafted the policy and is now vice president of the board responsible for overseeing its rollout.

As a member of the House of Delegates in 2020, Cox the legislation. Even so, it passed with bipartisan support.

But while the Maryland policymakers orchestrating the Blueprint’s implementation have their eyes on plans a decade or more out, the Democratic governor hopeful said he’s focused on what happens between now and Nov. 8.

“We’re not taking anything for granted and will continue to run as if we’re 10 points behind,” Moore said.

Late Thursday, Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker issued a preliminary injunction in a suit challenging the employer portion of Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act, suspending enforcement of the law in the workplace. The Obama-nominated judge wrote in his Honeyfund v. DeSantis : 

“In the popular television series Stranger Things, the ‘upside down’ describes a parallel dimension containing a distorted version of our world. Recently, Florida has seemed like a First Amendment upside down. Normally, the First Amendment bars the state from burdening speech, while private actors may burden speech freely. But in Florida, the First Amendment apparently bars private actors from burdening speech, while the state may burden speech freely.”

A separate lawsuit filed Thursday morning challenges the portion of the law that applies to colleges and universities.

A federal lawsuit filed Thursday charges that a Florida law designed to “fight back against woke indoctrination” by limiting classroom discussions of race and gender violates the constitutional free speech rights of college students and professors.

Florida’s Stop Wrongs Against Our Kids and Employees (Stop W.O.K.E.) Act took effect July 1. It prohibits workplaces and schools from requiring training or instruction that may make some people feel they bear “personal responsibility” for historic wrongdoings because of their race, gender or national origin.

But Jerry Edwards, staff attorney with the ACLU of Florida, one of the legal organizations behind the case, said the law unconstitutionally censors the free expression of higher education students and educators.

“The Stop W.O.K.E. Act is a shameful result of propaganda and fearmongering,” he said in a statement. “A free state does not seek to curtail the inalienable right to free expression in its college and university classrooms.”

The Florida Department of Education did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Florida is one of 17 states that have sought to restrict how educators cover topics related to race and gender, according to a . 

However, it’s the only state that applies its censorship law to higher education, said Leah Watson, senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program.

“There is a longstanding history in the Supreme Court and courts across our country of recognizing the freedom of professors, lecturers and educators in higher education to determine what to teach and how to teach it,” she told �鶹��Ʒ. 

Seven Florida professors and one undergraduate are named as plaintiffs, represented by the national ACLU, ACLU of Florida, NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the law firm of Ballard Spahr. The suit names the state university system’s board of governors and several other officials as defendants. It requests an injunction seeking an immediate halt to enforcement of the bill in colleges and universities.

Plaintiff Russell Almond is an associate professor teaching statistics at Florida State University and covers how to use race as a variable in empirical research. Provisions in the Stop W.O.K.E. Act that prohibit educators from presenting “colorblind” ideologies as racist put his teachings in jeopardy, the lawsuit charges.

Another professor, Dana Thompson Dorsey, will teach a course in “Critical Race Studies: Research, Policy and Praxis” at the University of South Florida this school year. She fears that explaining how racism is embedded in American institutions — a central aspect of the scholarly framework — could put her in violation of the law. While the Sunshine State does not explicitly ban Critical Race Theory, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office has said the law is intended to .

“In Florida, we will not let the far-left woke agenda take over our schools and workplaces. There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida,” DeSantis said after he signed the bill into law in April.

The act forces many educators to present foundational principles of their disciplines in a “false light,” presenting them as “disputed when it’s honestly not,” said Watson. 

Plaintiff Johana Dauphin, a senior at Florida State University, worries that she will be ill prepared for graduate school if the law interferes with her professors’ ability to convey key understandings that students in other states receive.

“I fear that this law will cause my professors to avoid discussing race and gender altogether, which will result in my perspective and lived experience as a Black, female student being effectively minimized and erased in the classroom,” said Dauphin. “As a student, I deserve to see myself and the issues that impact me — including issues around race and gender — reflected in my classroom discussions.”

Thursday’s filing marks the third lawsuit the ACLU has brought against a statewide censorship law. Similar cases in Oklahoma and have yet to be decided.

A previous legal challenge seeking to prevent the Stop W.O.K.E. Act from taking effect was dismissed by a federal judge in June. Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker clarified in a 23-page order that he was not “determining whether the challenged regulations are constitutional, morally correct or good policy.” Rather, the four plaintiffs — two professors, a student and a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant — .

Other lawsuits challenging the Florida law remain undecided. At an early August hearing, Walker appeared to arguments leveled against the state by several businesses, including a Ben & Jerry’s franchise. The federal judge emphasized the vagueness of a particular section that labels training discriminatory if it causes an employee to believe a person of “one race, color, sex, or national origin cannot and should not attempt to treat others without respect to race, color, sex or national origin.”

“Apparently, I’m a person of below-average intelligence, because I have no idea what that means,” said Walker.

John Ohlendorf, an attorney representing the state, defended the provisions: “The state of Florida has a compelling interest in preventing employers from forcing employees to listen to speech that suggests one race is inherently superior to another.”

The case brought Thursday is “framed differently” than prior challenges, Watson said. It has yet to be assigned, but it’s possible Walker could be the one to review it. Should that happen, the ACLU hopes for a speedy ruling, as he has moved in a matter of weeks on previous decisions around the bill. 

“We’re confident the Stop W.O.K.E. Act unconstitutionally infringes upon academic freedom and students’ right to learn,” said Watson. “I’m not able to comment predicting what the court may say.”

For the past year, Texas educators have struggled with a new law targeting how history and race are taught in the state’s public schools.

Some administrators thought it meant they needed to teach an of the Holocaust. For other school officials, the pressure of adhering to new restrictions about how to teach social studies was too much and for some it was the last straw: . In one district, a Black principal was after being accused of teaching critical race theory, which he denied doing. He eventually reached a settlement with the district and resigned.

Now, eight months after the enactment of a law designed to de-emphasize the role of slavery and racism in American history in Texas social studies classes, state Sen. , R-Mineola, the author of the state’s so-called , appeared before the State Board of Education in an attempt to offer better guidance about the law he helped craft.

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“That bill is not an attempt to sanitize or to teach our history in any other way than the truth — the good, the bad and the ugly — and those difficult things that we’ve been through and those things we’ve overcome,” Hughes said. “No one is saying that we don’t have systemic racism. But what we’re saying is, we’ve made a lot of progress. We have a long way to go. But the way to get there is to come together as Americans.”

His testimony came as the board was considering how to update the state’s social studies curriculum standards, known as the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or the TEKS. It’s a process done every eight years for the state’s 5.5 million public school students.

The drafts of the updated curriculum are . Some changes being considered include the addition of a course on personal financial literacy and separate courses that focus on Asian and Native Americans. The SBOE will have a final vote on adopting the drafts in November and can choose to amend them.

Hughes’ appearance before the 15-member board was the first before the group since the law went into effect . He clarified that the intent of the law, also known as was to make sure that no student comes away from class feeling guilty about the roles of their ancestors.

“We still teach that really bad things were done by people of particular races, and it may be that in teaching those things, students may feel guilty about that,” Hughes said. “What we’re saying is you don’t say, ‘Little Johnny, little Jimmy, you should feel bad because of what your forebears did.’”

Over the past year, conservative lawmakers have been focused on critical race theory, a university-level approach that examines how racism is embedded in all aspects of society. The term used by conservatives as a catch-all phrase to include anything about race taught or discussed in public secondary schools even though it is not taught in Texas schools.

The law — and the political rhetoric — has resulted in calls for greater scrutiny not only on what is taught but what information students should have access to when it comes to sex, gender and race. Last year, state Rep. asked that be conducted into which schools had books from a list of 850 titles that were mostly about race and LGBTQ issues.

SB 3 was the state’s second attempt in a year to curb how social studies classes are conducted in Texas. It replaced an earlier bill, , which was passed in June 2021. At the time, Gov. said more needed to be done to “abolish” critical race theory in Texas classrooms, and lawmakers went to work to craft a more restrictive measure. The result was SB 3.

Hughes backed education board chair , a Republican, when Ellis said that it’s the job of the state board to determine what is taught, not the law.

Board member , a Democrat, told Hughes that his law had already caused damage to the public school system and questioned if the lawmaker consulted with teachers and teacher groups before authoring the bill.

“We always talk about teachers leaving in droves and this was one of the reasons,” Davis said. “Teachers were literally scared to teach even the TEKS that existed because of this.”

During public comments, response to the board’s proposed standards were overall positive. There was one suggestion to change the term “internment” to “incarceration” when talking about how Japanese Americans were forced from their homes after the Pearl Harbor attack and detained by the federal government. There was also a call from some for more inclusion of Asian Americans in Texas social studies curriculum.

“I’m a Muslim American student,” said Ayaan Moledina, who testified on Monday. “Every year in school, we watched the same video about 9/11. Never ever has one of my teachers talked about the hate that has been directed towards Muslim Americans after 9/11. It is beyond me how this would be so controversial. Is having empathy controversial?”

Over the last year, there has been debate over whether SB 3 would affect the revision process, and until now, the drafts are pretty inclusive, said Chloe Latham Sikes, deputy director of policy at the Intercultural Development Research Association.

“This was a really good foundation for [the board] to start adopting standards,” Sikes said.

Carisa Lopez, senior political director at the Texas Freedom Network, a left-leaning watchdog group often involved in public education issues, said she likes the direction so far the board is taking. But she and others want to see whether board members make later additions before November.

There were some against the proposed curriculum, because they viewed them as anti-American.

“The changes I have seen so far, they’re anti-America and anti-Christian,” said Jackie Basinger, chair for the chapter of Moms for Liberty in Travis County. “Inequalities will exist as long as there are lazy people.”

Disclosure: Texas Freedom Network has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

This article originally appeared in a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy.

He was a senior at Colorado State University and worked as chair of All The T.E.A. in Denver, an organization focused on HIV education and advocacy. Would the new outcry over teaching critical race theory — originally an academic framework used to understand structural racism, now a GOP catch-all for lessons addressing race, sex and gender — interfere with his team’s access to schools, he wondered?

“A lot of [our] historical work has been going into public schools and doing basic sex ed, HIV 101s and talking about how race and LGBT issues intersect with sexual health and with HIV specifically,” said Babcock. “So it was a really scary year to think about the ways that we might end up losing that access in certain counties.”

So far, the group has not been blocked from continuing its work in any districts, said Babcock. But in Fort Collins, his college town, some parents on May 24 against gender and sexuality alliances in local schools, underscoring to Babcock the barriers his organization is up against, especially in areas with large swaths of conservative-leaning parents.

It’s one example out of many students shared of how the hot-button issues facing education this year impacted youth nationwide. With the school year having now drawn to a close, �鶹��Ʒ convened members of its Student Council to share how the key K-12 storylines played out in their own lives.

Staffing shortages

For Mia Miron in Pomona, California, staffing shortages impacted her learning. Across the U.S. this past school year, there were more open positions at K-12 schools than during any previous year going back at least a decade, according to . At Miron’s school, her math teacher left early in the year, and from then on, her class was led by a long-term substitute.

“That kind of set me behind,” the eighth grader said.

She now is attending summer classes offered by her school to catch up and prepare for the transition to high school.

Diego Camacho, who recently graduated high school in Los Angeles, also attended a school that was short a math teacher. During his junior year, they were forced to combine the pre-algebra and pre-calculus classes, with students mostly learning from online Khan Academy lessons, he said.

Mental health

Numerous students articulated struggles with mental health. Sydnee Floyd, a high schooler in Franklin, Tennessee, said that during the first year of COVID, she experienced bouts of depression as the pandemic shut down many of her favorite activities. 

To make matters worse, in her community, she felt a stigma around discussing issues like depression or anxiety. 

“It’s kind of like you shove it to the corner and you don’t really talk about it,” she said.

But fortunately, a teacher who, Floyd said, was “like my second mom” picked up on the girl’s troubled state.

“She could tell that I was struggling and she just asked me an honest question. ‘Are you OK?’ And I was like, ‘No, I’m not. I’ve been really struggling,’” Floyd recalled. “So she got in contact with our school counselors, and got me the help I needed.”

In Needham, Massachusetts, Maxwell Surprenant’s school tried to take an honest accounting of the mental health difficulties its student body was facing. The administration carried out anonymous polling during fall 2021 to better understand young people’s stress and anxiety on the heels of COVID. 

“They found that our student body was, on the whole, generally more stressed than the average stress level of high school students, but had very few cases of extreme anxiety,” said the high school senior. “Most people reported having resources and people to talk to, friends to reach out to, good support systems.”

At the same time, in his own life, Surprenant deepened several friendships as his school rolled back COVID protocols like mandatory masking. 

Because lockdown had taken away so much, “everyone wanted to make the most of the relationships that they had going forward,” he said.

School safety

Just weeks after the school shooting at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, left 19 fourth graders and two teachers dead, several students had school safety at the front of their minds.

Babcock said he personally knows two victims of mass shootings. A friend of his survived the in Douglas County, Colorado, and his older sibling’s close friend died in the of 2012. There’s a psychological impact of proximity to those sorts of tragedies, he explained. 

“It does really make you feel like you always have to look for an exit,” he said. “This year, it was really painful to see that nothing had really changed since my senior year (in high school) when the Parkland shooting had happened.”

At Za’Nia Stinson’s school in Charlotte, North Carolina, a bomb threat this year brought a SWAT team to her school, complete with a bomb-sniffing canine unit. The disruption made her reflect on just how difficult it would be to learn in an environment where such threats are more common. 

“It’s so sad that someone goes to school to learn and has to worry about, ‘Will this be my last day or not?’” said Stinson.

Missing school

High rates of absenteeism plagued school districts across the country this year, as students missed class due to quarantine and poverty-related issues exacerbated by the pandemic, such as needing to work part-time jobs. 

In Floyd’s Tennessee district, she reported that a bunch of her peers “kind of just gave up on school.” By her estimation, more people were absent than usual throughout the year, but not necessarily because of COVID — instead taking days off “to live their life a little bit more.”&�Բ�����;

“They kind of just went and did what they wanted to after being kind of locked down for two years,” said Floyd.

For Joshua Oh, who just finished eighth grade in Gambrills, Maryland, many of his peers struggled to stay up to date with their coursework after testing positive for COVID and being forced to quarantine. He personally caught the virus over winter break when he wouldn’t fall behind in school, but infections went up this past spring amid the second Omicron surge.

“A lot of people’s grades have tanked … and the teachers haven’t really exempted them from grades,” he said. “For friends, they’ve had to either email teachers or just have a low grade or just try to get extra credit or re-do [assignments] and get a late work [penalty], which deducts a couple points.”

Devin Walton, a rising high school sophomore in South Torrance, California also struggled with missing school. But in a reminder that normal teenage life events also continued through the pandemic, his absences had nothing to do with COVID.

“I would sleep almost the entire day and whenever I did wake up, I would just go eat something and then go back to sleep. And my mom was getting worried about me because she thought I was sick or I was depressed,” Walton explained. “But it turns out, I was just going through a major growth spurt and I was getting really tired.”

Paths forward

Most of the young people on the council agreed that life is still not fully back to normal after the pandemic, and teachers can be a key support.

“Students right now are really feeling disconnected,” said Babcock. 

It goes a long way when educators find meaningful ways to connect with young people, he believes. 

“Just making sure that, from the first day, teachers are making themselves known as a safe person for a variety of issues, whether it’s bullying, LGBT issues, experiences of race in the classroom,” he said. “There are so many ways that you can make yourself open to students.”

Thoughtful personal touches can also have a big impact on improving classroom environment, reflected Mahbuba Sumiya, who finished high school in Detroit with virtual learning and is now a rising sophomore at Harvard University.

“During the remote senior year of high school, some of my teachers would play music in the background while everyone was getting into the meeting to bring the energy,” she said. “The small things that educators do inside and outside the classroom to share love mean a lot to students like me.”

Another tactic, suggested Oh, is more hands-on activities in class. At the end of the year, he designed and built a diorama of an environmentally friendly eco-city in his science class, which, he said, allowed him to feel engaged and have fun at the same time.

Educational games that encourage healthy use of phones and laptops, like can also be a good tactic to boost engagement, suggested Stinson of North Carolina.

To make up for time lost to the pandemic, teachers should encourage students to link learning to the real-world issues they care about, suggested Camacho, in L.A.

“Educators that listen to their students will quickly discover what their students are passionate about. Educators, now more than ever, should push students to explore their passions,” he said.

For all COVID robbed them of, Walton observed, it also was a potent reminder to be grateful for the day-to-day interactions that in-person school can bring.

“When I was in lockdown, I thought, ‘Oh yeah you have to stay at home all day, this is going to be a nice long break,’” the California teen said. “And the longer I was at home, I was more like, ‘This is starting to get boring. It’s not as fun as I thought it would be.’”

“The more we were in lockdown because of this pandemic virus, the more we realized how much school meant to us.”

Years from now, if Stinson has children one day, she knows what she’ll tell them about living through this extraordinary period.

“I would tell my kids that this was a very crazy time. It was a weird time.”

This story was brought to you via �鶹��Ʒ’s Student Council initiative, an effort to boost youth voices in our reporting. America’s Promise Alliance helped in the recruiting of our diverse 11-member council and the idea was conceived as part of Asher Lehrer-Small’s Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship.

In a recently published article, political scientist Alex Garlick found that sudden increases in legislation at the state level are associated with more bills introduced in Congress on the same topic in the following legislative session. The correlation, which is particularly strong among Republican office holders and those within the same state delegation, suggests a consistent pathway of political messaging between state capitals and Washington, D.C.

Garlick, an assistant professor at the College of New Jersey, argued that anti-CRT proposals have already proven beneficial for some conservative lawmakers by driving press coverage and excitement among the GOP faithful. If Republicans win control over one or both houses of Congress in the midterm elections, as prognosticators expect, they will likely pass a similar piece of legislation — even though it would have “no chance” of being signed by President Biden, he added.

“By introducing these laws at the state level, Republicans are finding positive engagement with the media, their base, and donors,” Garlick said. “That indicates to me that we’re likely to see more of this at the congressional level.”

The study relies on an intensive examination of bills introduced in all 50 states and Congress between 1991 and 2016. Using a comprehensive index maintained by the data company LexisNexis, Garlick exported approximately one million citations of state and federal legislation, then grouped them into 22 separate policy areas. For each policy area, he tracked the timing of when bills were filed, irrespective of whether they were passed — first in statehouses, then in the next two-year session of Congress.

In 12 policy areas, including education, Garlick found that a marked increase in legislative attention at the state level tends to precede a similar increase at the national level. Specifically, an increase of less than two bills per state in any policy area would yield about five new bills in the next Congress. 

Some evidence emerged suggesting a partisan dimension to the phenomenon, which Garlick calls “bottom-up diffusion.” By accessing information from civic data initiative Open States, which records the partisan affiliation of members introducing bills, Garlick found that between 2009 and 2016, Washington Republicans proposed more laws related to a given policy area after an increase in such bills proposed by state-level Republicans the previous session. Additionally, congressmen are more likely to take up the proposals of state representatives and senators within their own states.

For Garlick, political diffusion is a reflection of how state political organizations relate to their federal equivalents. In an era when most experts agree that the political and media environment is “nationalizing,” — with national debates around issues like racism and public health predominating over local concerns — bottom-up diffusion shows how lower-level actors can drive the conversation. Garlick likened the interaction to the way in which local fast food franchises implement menu or branding changes, but still mostly replicate the offerings of their parent company.

“You can see some experimentation at your local McDonald’s, but generally they’re serving the same thing,” he said. “For the Republican Party, what they’re serving is usually small government, tax cuts, etc. What’s been interesting in the past two years is how much education has moved into that basket of goods.”

According to Education Week’s , lawmakers in over 40 states have introduced CRT-related bills just since last January. But they have been passed in just 14 of those states, while they have stalled, been vetoed, or remain under consideration in the rest. The relatively low rate of adoption, at least thus far, indicates that the attempts may be best understood as “messaging” legislation, aimed at appealing to interest groups and deliberately highlighting issues that are uncomfortable for the majority party. 

National polling has split on the question of whether schools should be more tightly regulated in their efforts to teach students about controversies relating to gender, sex, and race. In the meantime, and measures have already found among Republicans in Washington, suggesting that the national GOP will be prepared to take the baton — and, contingent upon majorities elected this fall, take votes — on K-12 legislation next year. 

Garlick said that the explosion of new K-12 items on state agendas are indicative of two interlocking trends: both the “renewed interest in using education policy to reach ideological goals,” and the often stymied progress of new legislation in Washington. The rapid progression of school-related issues being addressed by legislatures, from COVID remediation to trans athletes to CRT, offer a guide to where politicians’ attention is turning.

“In this gridlocked, polarized reality of the last 20 years, Congress has really taken itself out of the game on a lot of major issues, so we need to look at other forces that are actually driving the political process. That’s why messaging legislation does matter, and why more attention needs to be paid to the states. Because that’s where politics is changing in a rapid way.” 

But according to public opinion data released Monday, Democrats and Republicans are actually internally divided by significant generation gaps in their attitudes toward certain aspects of education. Younger Democrats are much more likely to favor school choice than their older counterparts, pollsters found, while Millennial and Generation Z Republicans look more favorably on teachers’ unions than Baby Boomers.

The polling was administered in March by the research group SocialSphere on behalf of Murmuration, a reform-oriented nonprofit. Roughly seven months ahead of a midterm election cycle that could shake up control of Congress and state governments, its findings strongly suggest that voters of all backgrounds see public education as a crucial issue after two years of COVID-related tumult. 

SocialSphere founder John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy Institute of Politics and a former advisor to the Biden presidential campaign, said that he and his colleagues had detected significant, generational cleavages within the parties across a host of focus groups conducted with respondents from around the country.

“The new generations of voters, who have already played a significant role in the 2018 and 2020 elections, leave their partisanship at home when they go to vote and engage with schools,” Della Volpe said. “The old framework that has governed education politics really is not relevant in 2022.”

With a sample of nearly 7,000 registered voters, the research combines and weights a single national poll with additional surveys in nine states and Washington, D.C. Several — California, Texas, Tennessee, Colorado, and Georgia — are holding gubernatorial elections this fall, while the nation’s capital will choose its mayor. 

shows President Biden’s party facing tough odds in November, with discontentment around the economy and foreign affairs driving voters toward a typical midterm flip; those trends were crystallized in last year’s surprising breakthrough by Republican Glenn Youngkin, who won the Virginia governor’s race after focusing intensely on pandemic school closures and the backlash against equity politics in schools. 

But when asked which party’s education values aligned most closely with their own, just 34 percent of SocialSphere respondents chose the GOP, compared with 44 percent who sided with Democrats. Another 22 percent said they were unsure. In state-level polls, Democrats were favored on education among voters in California (where they led on the issue by a 19-point margin), Colorado (17 points), Georgia (seven points), New Jersey (26 points), Texas (10 points), and Washington, D.C. (66 points); Republicans held an advantage in Louisiana and Missouri (both by five-point margins), while responses were within the margin of error in both Indiana and Tennessee.

Perhaps more notable than the clash between the parties are the fissures within each. The controversy over critical race theory in K-12 classrooms has acted as the main dividing line between left and right during the Biden era, with outraged parents in multiple states launching dozens of recall efforts against school board members over the teaching of controversial topics like race, gender, and sexuality. Some political experts see the emergence of anti-CRT activist groups like Moms for Liberty as reflecting a populist wave that could both deliver Republican victories this fall and change curricula in classrooms going forward.

Surprisingly, the issue may split Republicans more on the basis of age than it unites them in ideology. Asked whether school districts should teach “all aspects of American history,” including the legacy of slavery and racism, 59 percent of Millennial and Gen Z Republicans said yes, while 28 percent favored banning such lessons. Among Republicans in the Baby Boom and Silent Generations, just 44 percent supported teaching about these subjects, while 46 percent said the practice should be banned if it made white students uncomfortable. The resulting gap between the party’s oldest and youngest voters stands at 33 percentage points. 

Those findings jibe with those of other national polls, which have generally shown widespread support for teaching about the persistence of racism throughout U.S. history. , however, that responses to the issue can vary greatly depending on how questions are phrased.

Teachers’ unions, typically viewed with suspicion on the right, engendered similarly disparate responses. Millennial and Gen Z Republicans gave local unions a favorability rating of plus-15 percent (44 percent favorable versus 29 percent unfavorable), while members of Generation X rated them minus-10 (32 percent favorable versus 42 percent unfavorable.) But those over the age of 57, falling into the Baby Boom and Silent Generations, were much more hostile (25 percent favorable versus 55 percent unfavorable.) While political perceptions can change as young people come to be more aligned with the positions of their favored political party, Della Volpe argued that “nothing in this data” suggests that the views of younger Republican voters will come to resemble those of their parents and grandparents.

Age gaps were apparent on the left as well. The idea of school choice — defined for respondents by SocialSphere as “​​the freedom to choose the educational environment that serves [one’s] children best, regardless of financial ability or home address” — received support from 61 percent of the youngest Democratic voters, but just 38 percent of the oldest. Overall, Democrats above the age of 57 viewed school choice slightly unfavorably (38 percent support versus 44 percent opposition). By contrast, the national Democratic Party has spent much of the last decade distancing itself from alternatives to traditional public schools, which it largely embraced under Presidents Clinton and Obama. Democratic officials at the state and local levels have attempted to curb the growth of charter schools, while the party’s 2020 platform called for “measures to increase accountability” from the sector.

Della Volpe, who recently about the political emergence of Generation Z, said that his past surveys of people in their 20s revealed a cohort that prizes choice and agency above all.

“We see a group that is less supportive of school choice, and they’re aging out of the electorate,” he said. “They’re being replaced by others who value choice, specifically when it comes to their children.”

Pandemic fallout

More broadly, the SocialSphere data indicates that voters across partisan, racial, and gender demographics count public education among the most important political issues of the day. Fifty-two percent of all respondents rated K-12 schools as “very important,” with majorities in all but three state-level surveys saying likewise. That represents a larger share than those rating immigration, climate change, and the protection of traditional values very important, though somewhat lower than inflation (73 percent), the economy (73 percent), health care (67 percent), crime (61 percent), and foreign policy (56 percent). 

Somewhat larger shares of African Americans and Hispanics characterized education as very important (60 percent and 58 percent, respectively) than whites (49 percent). But when asked whether Americans “need to do more as a nation” to ensure that all children receive a high-quality education, the margins among members of different racial groups were virtually identical. Some 60 percent of Republicans agreed with that sentiment, along with 72 percent of Democrats.

The poll’s results also indicate significant, though possibly divergent, support for changes to the U.S. education system. Fifty-three percent of voters, and 55 percent of parents of school-aged children, agreed that the post-COVID recovery was “the time to begin working on the big ideas and changes necessary to improve education,” while 38 percent of voters said they’d prefer to “get back to normal.” But while Democrats agreed on the need for new reforms by a 60-31 split, only a slight plurality of Republicans did (49-43). 

Emma Bloomberg, the founder of Murmuration, said in an interview that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were likely behind the public’s willingness to embrace new approaches. Dissatisfaction with schools’ performance, especially with regard to lengthy closures, may have convinced parents that extensive new measures would need to be taken to help their children catch up from two years of lost learning.

“I can’t think what else it could have been, other than this pandemic offering a window into those classrooms — there’s nothing like actually seeing how your kids are or aren’t learning — and then the bungled reopening by so many districts…has just left families feeling like the school system didn’t prioritize their children,” said Bloomberg.

Bloomberg said she was heartened to see bipartisan willingness to expend greater national resources in pursuit of a better K-12 system, adding that she hoped younger partisans would vote their beliefs in the coming months. The eldest daughter of one of America’s most prominent advocates for school choice, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, she said that Millennials’ relative detachment from political orthodoxy could make them “more reasonable and attuned to the impacts of policies on communities” — if they actually made it to the ballot box.

“Young voters get a lot of hype, and it’s always ‘Will they or won’t they turn out?’ This moment really does feel like…an opportunity to engage younger generations. If they believe deeply in the importance of a high-functioning public education system, that gives me hope not only for this cycle, but certainly for the cycles ahead.”

In a time of political polarization, the nation’s Republican and Democratic governors agree on one thing: They want students in school.

“I want to be crystal clear: Students belong in school. We know it’s where they learn best,” said Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, one of 27 governors to echo that sentiment in recent weeks in their annual State of the State addresses.

FutureEd of 47 governors and partnered with �鶹��Ʒ to convert our analysis into a series of interactive maps. Surprisingly, the most divisive issues of the pandemic, such as vaccine and mask mandates, got little attention in this year’s speeches. Instead, governors from both parties voiced support for such post-COVID priorities as increasing pay for teachers and vocational opportunities for students, and addressing students’ and educators’ mental health needs.

A partisan divide did emerge on teaching racial history and expanding parents’ rights to know what’s taught in classrooms — issues that many Republican governors embraced but Democrats largely avoided.

Sixteen governors pitched boosting teacher salaries, including giving across-the-board raises and increasing starting pay, making compensation a top priority across party lines. Some governors also talked about providing one-time or retention bonuses, particularly to address teacher shortages that some districts and charter school organizations are experiencing.

Hover over a given state to see the specific proposals for 2022: 

If you’re having trouble viewing the interactive maps, click here.

Governors in Missouri, South Carolina and Indiana proposed increases to the base salary of all new teachers. The governors of New Mexico and Alabama proposed 7 percent and 4 percent pay raises, respectively. And Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds announced that her state will use federal COVID relief funds to award a $1,000 retention bonus to teachers “who stayed on the job through the pandemic and who will continue teaching next year.” Many governors spoke of the pay initiatives as a way to applaud teachers for their work they have done over the last year, acknowledge that they deserve higher compensation and help keep them in the classroom, though research suggests that small bonuses rarely influence educators’ employment decisions.

Career and workforce programs also drew bipartisan support, with 24 governors calling for expansions at the high school and college levels. Delaware Gov. John Carney, a Democrat, announced plans to expand the state’s Pathways program to provide more workforce opportunities for interested middle and high schoolers. Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois pledged to create a Pipeline for the Advancement of the Healthcare Workforce that would invest $25 million in community colleges to recruit and train frontline health care workers. Republican Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee pledged $200 million to help double the state’s skilled workforce by 2026. And Missouri Gov. Michael Parson, a Republican, pledged $20 million to expand programming in the state’s 57 career centers. 

Thirteen governors endorsed expansions of social-emotional supports in schools, in many instances connecting students’ growing mental health struggles to the pandemic. New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul shared hopes to add more mental health professionals in schools to “heal the wounds inflicted during the isolation of remote learning,” and Whitmer announced similar plans to hire over 560 new school nurses, counselors and social workers in Michigan. Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little pledged to invest $50 million to improve behavioral health care across his state. 

Thirteen governors proposed investments in early education, including expanding access to early learning opportunities, improving the quality of programs and implementing free, universal pre-K. Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, pledged to invest $25 million in federal funds to expand access to early childhood education programs and $12 million to increase pay for child care workers. Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis committed to implement “free, universal preschool” by 2023.

Many governors addressed the teaching of racial history — a political and ideological battleground of late — but nearly all were Republicans. Seven Republican governors promised to keep “critical race theory” out of their states’ classrooms, even though the topic is typically not taught in K-12 schools. While some explicitly mentioned efforts to pass legislation to accomplish that goal, others voiced concerns about what they said were the theory’s dangers, without making specific calls to action.

Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves spent several minutes in his speech promising to support anti-CRT legislation and asserting that “no school district shall teach that one race is inherently superior or that an individual is unconsciously or inherently racist because of how they are born. No child will be divided or humiliated because of their race.” Likewise, newly elected Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who signed an banning critical race theory in schools on his first day in office, proclaimed that schools “should not use inherently divisive concepts like critical race theory.” Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis was brief but to the point: “Our tax dollars should not be used to teach our kids to hate our country or to hate each other.”&�Բ�����;

Among Democratic governors, the subject rarely came up. Only one — Delaware’s John Carney — mentioned teaching racial history in schools, highlighting a recently signed bill “ensuring that a robust, accurate, Black history curriculum is taught in Delaware public schools.”

Likewise, Democratic governors largely avoided the politically charged subject of parents’ rights. When they referenced parents, it was largely in the context of learning opportunities. Kansas Democrat Laura Kelly announced $50 million in Learning Recovery Grants that “will give parents the ability to sign their kids up for … whatever their child needs to close the learning gap.”

In contrast, 10 Republican governors framed parents’ rights in the context of teaching about race and exposure to inappropriate content in school libraries and curricular materials. Governors in three states — Florida, Georgia, and Alaska — specifically supported establishing or upholding a parents’ bill of rights, while many other GOP leaders advocated curriculum transparency laws. “Let’s require all that a child is taught, all curriculum and academic materials, be put online and available to search and review by every parent, grandparent and interested citizen,” Arizona Republican Gov. Doug Ducey said in his address to state lawmakers. Lee proposed a law that would ensure Tennessee parents know what materials are available to students in school libraries. Many other governors praised the importance of strengthening parents’ rights but presented no strategies for doing so.

In Idaho, Little proposed $50 million for new Empowering Parents grants to help parents cover the cost of computers, tutoring or other services to address their children’s educational needs. Eric Holcomb, Republican governor of Indiana, noted that the state will be releasing its Graduates Prepared to Succeed Dashboard so parents and community members “can have easy public access to robust data regarding school performance.”&�Բ�����;

Half a dozen Republican governors voiced support for expanding school choice, about the same as in past years. These include three governors who suggested that funding should follow students to whatever school they attend, public or private, and three who proposed increasing investments to start new charter schools. Lee touted a plan to create new charter schools throughout Tennessee in partnership with Hillsdale College, a Christian college in Michigan. The schools would stress “civics,” he told Tennessee lawmakers. The president of Hillsdale College chaired former President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission, established to promote “patriotic education,” partly in response to The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which examines inequities in American life through the lens of slavery.

Many governors used their State of the State addresses to call for greater investment in education. Governors in three states — Indiana, Michigan and Virginia — proposed what they called “record investments” in their K-12 systems. Polis wants to increase per pupil funding in Colorado by $1,000. Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee’s budget includes more than $430 million for new education facilities. Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Hawaii Democratic Gov. David Ige want to restore budget cuts caused by the pandemic. 

While few governors mentioned the billions of dollars in federal aid they’ve received to help them respond to COVID-19, the federal funding undergirds many of the investments and policy initiatives outlined in their addresses. The question, at a time when many state leaders have been drawn deeply into cultural conflicts and partisan posturing, is whether governors will commit themselves, and the unprecedented federal resources available to them, to reversing the devastating consequences of the pandemic on students and student learning and to returning to the daunting task of educating every student to high standards. 

Bella DiMarco is a policy analyst at FutureEd, an independent, nonpartisan think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. Nathan Kriha is a FutureEd research associate.

Nikkolas Smith is not surprised by the book bans and culture of fear dominating schools in his home state of Texas.

If anything, recent events make his work as a children’s book illustrator and self-described “artivist” more urgent.

“I’m gonna keep making books that will probably be on banned lists… because all they do is tell the truth about history. And it’s just ridiculous that accurate history is trying to be suppressed, basically, by those in power who have benefited from racism for centuries,” said Smith, who collaborated with Nikole Hannah-Jones to illustrate The 1619 Project for children. 

Growing up in Houston, he was taught to celebrate the tales of Davey Crockett and the Alamo — “whitewashed” stories “always from one perspective:” glorifying those who owned and killed other human beings, he told �鶹��Ʒ.

Now, alongside the words of Hannah-Jones and children’s book author Renée Watson, Smith’s art flips the script to teach young readers the legacy of slavery rooted in humanity; a Black history rooted in joy. 

In Born on the Water, the to The 1619 Project, Smith’s paintings bring the cultures of West Africans to life, showing the pre-enslavement history often omitted from classrooms.

“One of the things that me and Nikole talk about is there’s so much rich history, and culture, and so much joy in these tribes and these people that were stolen from their land,” Smith told �鶹��Ʒ. “You really have to understand all of that to understand how heavy it was, and how tragic it was… We really just wanted to show that life.”

From his plant-filled Los Angeles home, Smith paired Hannah-Jones and Watson’s poetry with family traditions, beautiful hair, dances, imagery that evoked death and spirits. Using a digital , his illustrations began as monochrome shapes and skeletons in Photoshop, impressions of how he felt after reading and internalizing their verses. 

The book hit shelves last fall amid a wave of proposed state laws aimed at preventing students from learning a mythical “critical race theory” and “divisive concepts.” In , legislation attempted to ban the 1619 Project explicitly. So far, Florida has succeeded.  

While a vocal minority of lawmakers and parents believe school aged children are too young to grapple with just how violence against Black people was intrinsic to the nation’s founding, many for the content. Born on the Water topped bestseller lists as families headed into 2022, looking for ways to talk to children about the country they’ll inherit. 

Smith’s artistic approach seemed a natural fit. In digital paintings, he added layer after layer of color and symbols — clouds modeled after picked cotton, the shape of a person sinking underwater, or a green toy tied to a tree, the only sign of life left after colonizers stole a tribe — to convey anger and fear in ways young readers could feel without being traumatized by explicit violence.

Long-inspired by Nina Simone “,” he’d balanced trauma and life in children’s illustrations for years, painting Tamir Rice, Elijah McClain and others killed by police. 

His second book, , explored the internalized hatred young Black children develop from racism and microaggressions. 

Through , which he describes as “art as therapy”, he tries to help himself and viewers heal “the broken bones of society.”&�Բ�����;

“For them to say, we have a book about the transatlantic slave trade and slavery, and all of these very heavy things that we as Black people in America, we think about it all the time … I felt like that’s one of the biggest broken bones in America,” he said.

“…Remember that these weren’t slaves that were taken, these were brilliant people, and they did some amazing things … They knew how to design and build cities, they built this country, and that’s why they were stolen, because they were brilliant and good at what they do. We just want to remind people of that, and also how much they fought and resisted and got their freedom back.”

“And [for] the young folks who are not Black, there’s no shame in anything we’re saying. We want people to grow up having an accurate understanding of what happened in this country. I feel like it’s really not until we address all of these things openly and honestly that we’re gonna really grow and move forward as a nation.”
—Nikkolas Smith

Smith blurred linear understandings of time by using symbols across generations, to help young readers understand that “[ancestors’] vision of the future, their wildest dreams are now embodied in us — [we’re] having to take that mantle and move forward.”&�Բ�����;

And in faces, Smith balanced the world of feelings bound up in the Black experience: from shame, when the protagonist cannot make a family tree beyond three generations, to pride, after her grandmother recounts the rich history of tribes pre-enslavement. Her hair, in Bantu knots, and clothing give reference to past generations.

Ultimately, Smith hopes his work can help the next generation of Black youth have a sense of pride. Over the next few months, he’ll paint scenes of Ruby Bridges, the first young person to integrate a Southern school in 1960. And next year, he’ll collaborate with celebrated author Timeka Fryer Brown on a picture book about the Confederate flag. 

He expects both will end up on some banned lists.   

“All we can do is keep putting the truth out there,” Smith said, “and it’ll get into the right hands.”

All paintings are illustrated by Nikkolas Smith for Born on the Water, a publication of Kokila, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers. 

The 12-minute history lesson, which landed in mid-February, traces the decades-long legal leadup to the case, as well as the “unforeseen consequences” that played out afterward, series host Clint Smith on Twitter.

“Brown v. Board was an historic and incredibly important court case that reshaped the landscape of American society, but sometimes it’s presented as a singular good without people sitting with its more unsavory consequences,” said Smith, who is the author of New York Times bestseller .

“As always, we have to hold and grapple with both.”

The video is the 33rd in what will be a on Black American history launched by Crash Course in April 2021. The episodes cover topics ranging from the and the to and of African Americans from the rural South to the industrial North. Each is narrated by Smith and are eight to 15 minutes in length. Crash Course has some 13 million YouTube subscribers and most of the Black history episodes have racked up hundreds of thousands of views. 

“I am learning so much from these videos on the African American fight for civil rights and I’ve taught it for years! So worth the watch!” history and politics teacher Swerupa wrote in a Twitter sharing the Brown episode.

Experts say the lesson captures a level of historical complexity that frequently evades teachings on the topic.

“That video got at all of the important elements of [Brown], but also presented the story in the nuance that I think it deserves and often is not given,” said Keffrelyn Brown, co-founder of the Center for Innovation in Race, Teaching, and Curriculum at the University of Texas.

“We often just say, ‘Here’s Brown, and then society changed after ’54 …. You do not [frequently see it taught] that there were multiple cases, there were multiple actors, multiple plaintiffs,” added Anthony Brown, the Center’s other co-founder.

As the Crash Course lesson explains, the NAACP played “the long game” in order to win the Brown case, laying the legal foundation for their victory over the preceding two decades. In 1930, they issued the 200-page challenging the doctrine of “separate but equal.” In the 1940s, they won some smaller legal victories against segregation in higher education. And then in 1952, the NAACP brought separate cases challenging K-12 segregation in South Carolina, Virginia, Kansas, Delaware and Washington, D.C. that in 1953 were combined into Brown.

But after the historic victory, some efforts to desegregate schools triggered harmful consequences for Black families.

“Some school districts completely closed schools rather than integrate Black children,” explained Smith. 

The video references Prince Edward County, Virginia, for example, where in 1959, lawmakers shut down all public school classrooms for five years rather than educate Black and white children together.

As lawmakers across the country have moved to restrict what opponents have deemed to be divisive teachings on race and gender, with legislation introduced in 37 states and passed in 14, according to , the University of Texas Center’s co-founders agree that materials such as the Crash Course video may be useful for teachers looking to cover this episode in history accurately and without bias.

“I don’t think I found anything in it divisive or controversial,” said Anthony Brown. “The archives will speak for themselves. The histories will speak for themselves. And then it will provide opportunities for learning for students that I think this video did well.”&�Բ�����;

His 8-year-old daughter would be able to watch and understand the content, he believes.

Carol Swain, on the other hand, believes the clip is “well done,” but appropriate only for high school students, not those who are younger.

The former Vanderbilt University professor, who is Black and has emerged as an outspoken critic of teachings on structural racism, takes issue with the video’s ending, which relays that school segregation today remains as severe as it was in the late 1960s.

“The implication is that it’s because of white people,” she told �鶹��Ʒ. “There are many reasons that segregation persists today, including socioeconomic factors.”

Through the 1960s and into the ‘70s, schools made progress toward racial integration, particularly in the American South. But much of those gains have since eroded, leaving the country’s schools highly segregated today.

The scholar, who co-chaired former President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission, argues that K-12 lessons should strike a more positive tone, for example by highlighting the multiracial collaborations that won gains for Black Americans through the Civil Rights Movement. Lessons on entrenched racism she argues are less productive for students of all races.

“It saps you of hope if you learn the system is rigged against you,” said Swain. 

April Peters-Hawkins, who is an associate professor at the University of Houston and has studied the ripple effects of Brown, strongly disagrees. It’s important for students to learn the accurate history of Jim Crow even when ugly, she argues, because those events have implications for today.

For example, after Brown, thousands of highly qualified Black teachers were dismissed because white parents would not accept the idea of their children being taught by Black instructors. Academic research documents to students of all races, but especially Black students, from having a Black teacher. The U.S. continues to have a persistent racial gap in its teacher force. About 79 percent of teachers nationwide are white compared to only 47 percent of public school students.

“We’ve never recovered from that [loss of Black educators] as a society,” Peters-Hawkins told �鶹��Ʒ.

She regrets that many states are clamping down on lessons on race rather than addressing those issues head-on. 

“We continue to get more and more restrictive about what can be taught,” she said. Pushing away from tough topics, she believes, means “we’re actually becoming more ignorant.”

For those who worry over the comfort of white students learning about past and present racism, she poses a separate consideration.

“Think about how uncomfortable it is to live in this country in 2022 and be a Black American,” said Peters-Hawkins. “That’s uncomfortable every day.”

Two hearings were held on Rep. Will Wade’s , which he says will not allow students to be taught about race through a lens that makes them feel guilty or pits one student against another because of their ethnicity. The bill outlines a process in which parents can take an appeal as high as the state school board if they feel their child is being taught lessons on race that are inappropriate.

The laundry list of divisive concepts that would be prohibited includes race stereotyping or scapegoating, making individuals feel uncomfortable or ashamed based on their race and or implying any group is inherently superior or inferior based on its race.

In the bill, schools are required to launch an investigation within three days after a parent lodges a complaint, and if the parent isn’t satisfied with the result, the parent can appeal to the local and state school boards.

“The Protect Students First Act will ensure that each and every student in Georgia is treated with dignity and respect, and their education is provided for them free from any divisive ideology,” Wade said.

“This legislation also recognizes that students in Georgia classrooms must be taught all our history from the good, the bad, and the ugly,” Wade said.

A number of similar bills have been introduced in Georgia and across the country by Republicans who say they believe parents should have greater control over school curriculum. It comes after months of controversy over claims that white students will be unjustly indoctrinated by so-called critical race theory and lessons about the history of systemic racism in America.

Wade’s measure advanced through the Republican-controlled House education subcommittee at the two-hour public hearing. It is now before the full Education Committee following another hour-long hearing.

Rep. Doreen Carter, a Democrat from Lithonia, questioned the need for the legislation since racial history controversies aren’t a common occurrence and local school systems have already established procedures for parents to file complaints.

“I really still do not understand what brought us here?” Carter said. “Normally, when there is a bill we’re trying to solve or fix something?”

The bill was criticized by several people as an attempt to prevent discussions about America’s sordid history of discrimination against Black people and other minorities. At the same time, conservative religious groups commended the bill for spelling out that no student is discriminated against because of factors beyond their control.

As a parent of a Fulton County student, Marla Cureton said she is worried about how the proposed law could censor and intimidate educators, administrators, parents, and students.

“The bill sponsors believe that our skilled curriculum developers and our educational content partners need to be censored by politicians who fear teaching our students about truthful history,” she said.

Wade said the bill protects the First Amendment rights of educators.

“It’s not going to prevent a teacher from talking about critical race theory being in the news, or talk about about what happened in the holocaust,” he said. “There is nothing in this that is going to put them at risk because they are discussing when it is academically appropriate.”

Another so-called parental bill of rights fell short of votes it needed to pass a Senate committee Wednesday, Feb. 9.

Buford Republican Sen. Clint Dixon said his Senate Bill 449 enumerates a list of rights for Georgia parents, including the right to review instructional materials used in the classroom, access all records pertaining to the child and to consent in writing before a photograph, video or voice recording of the child is taken.

That last one raised concerns for Angela Palm, director of policy and legislative services for the Georgia School Boards Association.

It could unintentionally cause problems for schools that use cameras as part of their security system on buses or outside of school buildings, or it could penalize student photographers with the yearbook club or school newspaper, she said.

Dixon said he is amenable to making changes to address those concerns, and the bill, which has the support of Gov. Brian Kemp, will likely return for future consideration.

Obscenity bill moves forward

A bill by Dallas Republican Sen. Jason Anavitarte also aiming to give parents more recourse to protest their child’s public school lessons passed through two House committee hearings Wednesday and is poised for a full House vote.

The bill sets up a process for parents or guardians to petition their childrens’ principal if they believe school-provided materials are objectionable. Parents who are unsatisfied with the principal’s decision can appeal to the local board of education.

Supporters of the provision, like Tyler Hawkins, director of advocacy for conservative lobbying group Frontline Policy Action, say the bill would provide children better protection than the current system, which leaves decisions up to local officials. Hawkins said he hears from parents who say their complaints about school materials often don’t get a response.

“Their concerns have not been addressed, they’ve gone six months, 12 months, 18 months, without any resolution of this issue,” he said. “And the problem with that, especially in this circumstance, when we’re dealing with this issue, is that those materials still being available means we are we are presenting challenges because other students are viewing those materials, other students are experiencing the trauma of their innocence being robbed, in a sense, because of what this material is doing, as it continues to be available.”

Opponents characterized the measure as political theater and potentially harmful to students. They said books written from the point of view of LGBT characters or describing the hardships faced by minority characters are more likely to be banned.

Desirrae Jones, policy associate at the New Georgia Project, said trained school librarians curate appropriate materials, and parents are already free to monitor what their children read.

“Books like ‘50 Shades of Grey’ are not available in our K-12 schools anywhere in Georgia,” she said. “There are young adult novels and things that have some mature content, but this is not obscene content. These are things that we’re exposing our children to so that then when they go out into the world, they’re not shocked by the fact that there are people who do drugs, there are people who have sex, these are not foreign concepts for Georgia students.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Georgia Recorder maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John McCosh for questions: info@georgiarecorder.com. Follow Georgia Recorder on and .

It found that 49 percent of 1,200 respondents from around the country said schools have a responsibility to ensure students learn about the ongoing effects of slavery and racism in America while 41 percent believe schools should teach students about the nation’s history of slavery and racism — but not about race relations today. 

A full 10 percent said schools do not have a responsibility to teach anything about slavery or racism in the U.S., according to the sixth annual conducted by The McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State. 

​​The results were further broken down by other demographic factors: 79 percent of Black respondents and 77 percent of Democrats and Independents who lean Democratic believe students should, in fact, learn about the ongoing impacts of both slavery and racism. 

The teaching of both topics has been under intense fire with recently moving to prohibit or attempting to dramatically curtail discussion of race and race-related topics in the classroom, often targeting a concept called which explains how American racism has impacted a wide range of systems and institutions. 

Conservatives across the country have renewed their push for removing some texts — including the the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust graphic novel — that explain racial and ethnic discrimination. 

“The public is a little more divided than we thought,” said Craig Helmstetter, managing partner at American Public Media Research Lab, a St. Paul, Minnesota-based group that conducts independent, nonpartisan research and reporting. APM Research Lab reported the poll results and analysis.

The poll, released today, was conducted between Nov. 30 and Dec. 7, 2021. The data was collected online by and has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points. 

In addition to questions on race, it also addresses the degree to which people believe parents should influence their child’s education — another current flashpoint — and the teaching of evolution and sex education.

“There are an awful lot of people who think parents ought to have a substantial amount of influence even though they have no statutory or legal role in setting curriculum,” said Eric Plutzer, a political science professor at Penn State and the McCourtney Institutes’s director of polling. “That was especially pronounced among Republicans and social conservatives.”

Another group, he said, believes these decisions should be left up to people with expertise, including teachers, because of their subject matter knowledge and classroom experience, and state agencies, which have long crafted curriculum standards.

“That view was expressed by Democrats and social liberals,” Plutzer said.

The biggest gap between those who thought parents should have the most sway and those who thought teachers should be more influential was on the question of COVID safety, with 46 percent saying parents should have a great deal of influence in that area and 28 percent saying educators should.

The poll considered respondents’ gender, age, race, income and political party, among other factors. It also accounted for religion, including affiliation and frequency of worship attendance.

While 90 percent of respondents said schools should teach scientific evolution, half think it should be combined with the teaching of biblical perspectives about creation. A full 10 percent said schools should teach only biblical perspectives.

More than a quarter of those surveyed said they were born again or Evangelical Christians, and their distinctiveness from those of other faiths shows up in several ways:

Just 12 percent believed schools should teach evolution only as compared to 58 percent of other respondents. A full 66 percent of Democrats and those who lean Democratic held the position as compared to 25 percent of those who were Republican or Republican-leaning.

Helmstetter said policymakers should not discount the role of religion in America.

“Although there is a long, steady decline in the number of people attending church on a regular basis, it is still an important and significant part of people’s lives,” he said. “We should acknowledge and pay attention to it. There are some pretty big divisions across all of these questions, specifically as it relates to people being identified as born again Christians.”

And while 75 percent of respondents believe sexual education for teens should include the dangers of sexually transmitted infections as well as contraception, a majority said they believe parents of school children should have “a great deal of influence” on how sex education is taught. That number includes 72 percent of Republicans, among them Independents who lean Republican, 66 percent of born again Christians and 63 percent of those age 65 or older.

Nearly half of born again Christians think sex education for teens should stop at teaching about STIs and abstinence: 37 percent of Republicans, including independents who lean Republican, held this same view.

Just 22 percent of respondents said local school boards and state departments of education should have significant influence over the teaching of sexual education, an opinion slightly more common among Black Americans and Democrats as compared to other groups.

The survey included a number of open-ended questions that allow respondents to explain their views in their own words: A 63-year-old white woman from Georgia, who does not identify as a born again Christian or Evangelical, said school boards and educators should have a great deal of influence on the teaching of sex education.

“Local teachers have a rapport with students and can build a trust with them,” said the woman, who identified herself as Republican.

Plutzer, considering the division on so many issues, said schools looking to make big decisions without including parents might be considered out of touch.

“There is already eroding respect for expert judgement in many parts of our society including education,” he said, adding a failure to include parents would only make adopting best practices more difficult. “It doesn’t mean the recommendations of those experts is wrong, but it means that if they are resisted, even a good recommendation is not going to be implemented well.” 

On Jan. 10, the school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, . The book, a graphic novel by Jewish American cartoonist Art Spiegelman depicting the grim realities of the Holocaust, expressed the absolute inhumanity of what happened in clear terms that children could understand. 

As the child of Polish-born parents who lost much of his own family to the Holocaust, Spiegelman understood the gravity of the subject matter and committed himself to one clear idea: “Never again.”

To its great shame, the school board argued the book contained objectionable language and was unsuitable for use in the classroom. Despite pleas from history teachers concerning the importance and effectiveness of the work, the conservative school board chose to diminish its own school community’s understanding of the horrors of Nazism. Ironically, it did so by taking a tactic directly employed by Nazis themselves.

In 1933, German logician Olaf Helmer was busy writing his doctoral dissertation in the mathematics building at the University of Berlin when he looked through a window and noticed a group of thugs building a bonfire, then hurling library books into the flames. He immediately knew whose books they were, but the thugs confirmed his worst fears. He heard them shouting “I condemn to the flames the work of the Jew.”

Helmer — who one of us interviewed two decades ago, when he was 94 — escaped Germany in 1934, emigrating to America to become the assistant to a logician at the University of Chicago. He worked for the Air Force and became an American citizen, and in 1968 he co-founded the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit think tank. Still, he never shook the memory of losing family in the Holocaust. He drew a straight line from books thrown into bonfires to bodies burned in ovens.

Personal interviews with others who, like Helmer, managed to escape the Nazis, revealed similar haunted memories. Survivors have trouble using words to describe a society being taken over by genocidal hatred. They often rely on understatement, accented with sarcasm, and Helmer was no different. “It was very unpleasant,” he said, “the last year there.”

As scholars who studied the period, we knew the horrors that Helmer and the others were hinting at. As adults, we could read the pain beneath their sarcasm. Children, however, struggle to recognize such cues, and as a result, struggle to understand that such evil is possible. Spiegelman’s answer to that dilemma was Maus. 

If the Tennessee school board’s ban had been an isolated incident, perhaps it might be dismissed as a localized example of overzealous language policing. Sadly, it’s merely the latest in a string of concerted censorship efforts targeting the actual history of people who suffered at the hands of white Americans and Europeans. It belongs alongside recent , which chronicles the collective sin of American slavery; the , which has nothing to do with critical race theory and everything to do with not allowing critical thinking about race in America; and .

We all saw the photographs of the January 6 insurrectionist proudly wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt. We all heard the Charlottesville protesters chanting “Jews will not replace us,” just before being called “very fine people” by the then-president. We’ve all seen the right-wing meme depicting a murdered man of color above the abhorrent caption “Black Lives Splatter.” We‘ve all seen postings by militia members calling for a race war in America, listened to Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert echo the call for “a Second Amendment solution” and watched Rep. Madison Cawthorne take out and clean his handgun during an online House Veterans Affairs Committee hearing.

Worse still, the former president has signaled his approval of the insurrection. Most recently, at a rally in Texas on Saturday, he said, “If I run and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly,” he noted. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons.” He also decried investigations into his business practices and possible election tampering — all headed by African-American prosecutors — as “. The same weekend saw , complete with Hitler salutes and signs reading “Vax the Jews,” and .

This, we fear, is what Olaf Helmer saw coming in Germany. This is the looming horror that Art Spiegelman tried to depict for children, and for us all. We cannot claim to be unable to see the warnings. They are right here.

Helmer noted that he saw right through the Nazi charade at the bonfire. Afterward, you could still find copies of the books they burned — works by Albert Einstein and other Jews — in the university library. “They were very careful,” he said, “not to burn the last copy.” The Nazis may have been evil, but they were not so stupid as to destroy their own access to knowledge. As for our homegrown nationalists here in America, we should be worried that they will.

Correction: The slogan on the January 6 insurrectionist’s sweatshirt said “Camp Auschwitz.”

Steven Gimbel is professor of philosophy and affiliate of the Jewish studies program at Gettysburg College. Gwydion Suilebhan is executive director of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and project director of the New Play Exchange for the National New Play Network. 

In 2019, the Arizona mother of two sent her older daughter off to kindergarten in Scottsdale, Ariz.’s Cave Creek Unified School District.

But after Mac Ban saw the district’s tepid response to the pandemic, she started home-schooling her at taxpayer expense. Arizona’s publicly funded now underwrites her kids’ education. 

Similar scholarship accounts could soon do the same for millions of other students nationwide as a new raft of proposed laws makes its way through state legislative sessions this month, buoyed by parent anger at district policies. 

Mac Ban balked at homeschooling at first, envisioning herself isolated and sitting at home with her kids for most of the week. But the more she learned, the more attractive it seemed. After she disenrolled her daughter from a district school and applied for the ESA, the child began learning lessons from the “classical Christian” . Her total bill comes to about $200 per month. 

School choice advocates see hope in stories like these. As the omicron variant continues to wreak havoc on schools’ normal procedures and parents lose patience with lockdowns, quarantines, and mask and vaccine mandates — as well as curricula that some view as politically charged — advocates hope that more parents like Mac Ban will insist that taxpayers help pay for their kids’ educations outside of neighborhood public schools. 

School choice has always relied on a fragile left-right coalition, mostly between Black and Latino activists and centrist-to-conservative legislators pushing to rebalance the power structure of public schooling. That coalition has weakened over the past few years. But scholars such as Paul Peterson, who directs Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, now see an opening. 

“A couple of years ago, there was a feeling in the country that opposition to school choice was on the rise,” he told attendees at a at Harvard. “Some of the coalition and backing for school choice was eroding and the movement, perhaps, was breaking down. But in light of the pandemic, there is a contrary feeling emerging in the country today: We are finding the passage of new school choice legislation in states across the country, new tax credit programs, new education savings accounts programs, expanded charter school programs. There’s a lot of interest in opening up to parents opportunities that haven’t existed in the past.” 

While culture war issues like critical race theory could upend that coalition once again, the mood at Harvard was one of optimism. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who now chairs the nonprofit reform group , pointed to recent legislative successes in Missouri, West Virginia and Kentucky. “The legislatures are on fire right now for these kinds of things, so it’s all good. And I don’t see it going away. I really don’t.”&�Բ�����;

Choice advocates got an unexpected boost in November when Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in increasingly purple Virginia, beating establishment Democrat Terry McAuliffe by . Youngkin pulled off the surprisingly solid victory in part by tapping into parents’ anger about public education, giving a voice to thousands who felt schools haven’t risen to the challenge of basic education during the pandemic. McAuliffe, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton, didn’t help his case during the campaign when, discussing over anti-racist education, said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”&�Բ�����;

Derrell Bradford, president of the education advocacy group , told attendees at the Harvard conference that McAuliffe’s mistake was displaying “just a complete and utter tone-deafness” to parents’ experiences. “After a year-and-a-half, almost two years, of incredibly disrupted institutional experience that was visited on almost every family in the country, you probably shouldn’t say something like ‘Parents don’t matter.’ You can make it a school choice lesson, but there’s a lesson there about treating people poorly who’ve been treated poorly.”

Republican strategists such as Christopher Rufo, who last year the raucous campaign to fight critical race theory, now talks of families’  public schools that don’t sync with their beliefs. 

As the omicron variant dominates and infection rates , vaccine requirements for even the youngest children could anger parents further. And while many parents have fought for a return to , others are clamoring for remote options amid the recent surge: Recent polls find that about six in 10 parents of school-aged children favor virtual learning.

For the past year or more, parents have been voting with their feet: Public schools have shed millions of students, recent data show. In New York City, the nation’s largest system, 50,000 fewer students attended last fall than two years earlier, The New York Times — a 4.5 percent decline. 

Chicago Public Schools in October had lost about 10,000 students over the past school year, a 3 percent drop. Overall enrollment was students over two years. 

Across California, the nation’s most populous state, educators are awaiting updated figures, but estimated enrollment has dropped since 2018-19 by about nearly 184,000 students, or about 3 percent, CalMatters earlier this month.

A Tyton Partners issued in July found that since the beginning of the pandemic, an estimated 17.5 percent of children have switched schools at least once, 75 percent more than in average years. And nearly 80 percent of parents said they’d be “more active in shaping their child’s education” in the future. 

At the Harvard conference, Bradford said school closures during the pandemic in 2020 suddenly brought the system’s failures into “high and broad relief” for 60 million families — especially families of color and low-income families.

“If you are a Black kid in New York City, you were the least important person in America for the last two years,” he said. “And if you were a teacher in that system, you were the most important person in America during that time. And we made it very clear and explicit that that was the case. We have a system that is built upon that foundation, with those priorities. And it couldn’t get the majority of kids reading proficiently before the pandemic.”

Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, said she actually expected “a far higher percentage of families” to opt out of their neighborhood schools, given fears about COVID and “the volatile debates about safety protocols” over the past two years. 

That a mass exodus didn’t happen, she added, “says to me that families are valuing public schools and what a good public school is for: academics, of course, but [also] as centers of communities, where kids eat healthy meals, access health care, and find social and emotional supports.”

For her part, Weingarten has pushed to “have a different conversation” about school choice, one focused on what has worked in private settings during the pandemic — but that also treats public schools less as a commodity that families can buy than as a public good.

“We’re experiencing a crisis in our democracy in which our public schools have a really important role,” she said. “Why not try to figure out how to make this year, regardless of where we are, a year of recovery and revival for our kids and not have a year of winners and losers?”

As 2022 progresses, that seems unlikely.

EdChoice’s director of national research, Michael McShane, that since the beginning of 2021, more than a dozen states have created or expanded school choice programs. The group now says enacted seven new choice programs and expanded 21 existing ones. Robert Enlow, the group’s CEO, called 2021 “without a doubt” for school choice since EdChoice has been tracking it. 

In an interview, McShane said that until recently he was expecting upcoming state legislative sessions in 2022 to be “pretty quiet” on topics like school choice. “I think now that there is going to be a lot going on.”&�Բ�����;

Part of the reason may be the billions in COVID relief funds that school districts have received to keep them afloat, he said: “In politics, things happen easier when there’s a bunch of money sloshing around.”

On the one hand, the money softens the blow of all of the student departures — but it also makes it harder for school districts to complain to state lawmakers about the effects of often small choice programs that draw students out of the public system. “This program that’s spending $25 million across the entire state, how can you possibly have a problem with it when you just got $2 billion from the feds?” he said.

As legislative sessions begin in several states, choice is on lawmakers’ minds. In Kentucky last week, lawmakers an expanded school choice bill that would give families tuition assistance for private education.

In Missouri, lawmakers last year approved a tax credit to fund a private-school tuition education savings account, and lawmakers are now pushing to the program before it even takes effect. They’ve proposed lifting a $25 million funding cap and dropping requirements that families who participate live in a city with at least 30,000 residents.

Youngkin, just a few days into his term in Virginia, backed a GOP-led effort in the narrowly divided state legislature that would the number of charter schools from fewer than 10 to about 200. The bill would allow the state Board of Education to create regional charter school “divisions” with the power to approve new charter schools, despite opposition from localities. 

Higher graduation rates … or winning the culture war?

Concerns about parents’ role in their kids’ education played a “huge role” in Youngkin’s Virginia election victory, McShane said, but more broadly, parents “want to be back to normal now. And the fact that things aren’t back to normal is leading to a lot of discontent.”

Whether from rolling quarantines, mask or vaccine mandates, he said, “I think all of this stuff is just going to continue to roil schools, and you’re going to have people that just want out — they don’t want their school’s vaccine policy to be set by 51 percent of their neighbors. They’re going to want to have the option to go to a school where it’s decided at the school level.”&�Բ�����;

Whether the current push for school choice plays out in both blue and red states, however, remains an open question. 

Most of the recent legislation has prevailed in reliably Republican-controlled legislatures, even if a few of the with the endorsement of a Democratic governors, as in West Virginia — or despite a governor’s veto, as in Kentucky.

In reliably blue Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who was elected in 2018, campaigned on a promise to slash funding for a . But once he was elected, “he actually signed a bill to strengthen it modestly,” said Greg Richmond, a longtime school choice advocate who now leads the Archdiocese of Chicago Catholic Schools.

“It seems to be one these classic cases where it’s easy to say anything when you’re running for office, but when you get into office, you find out voters have an interest in the program you want to eliminate — you start to change your mind about it a little bit,” he said. “So he backed off.”&�Բ�����;

But these days, Richmond said, even private Catholic school parents are talking about exercising their right to leave schools over concerns about so-called critical race theory or enforcing mask and vaccine mandates — the latter two are required by an executive order signed by Pritzker, and also apply to private school students. 

“Some people got very mad and wrote to me: ‘We should be fighting this [mandate]. This is tyranny. This is against God — this is Satan. If you don’t change it, I’m going to pull my kids out of your school and send them to public schools,’” Richmond recalled. “I was like, ‘What? That makes no sense.’”

But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that these parents “were paying tuition in order to avoid that stuff.”

The trend toward ideological reasons for opting out is worrying for the larger school choice community, said Richmond, who from 2005 to 2019 was CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. He was also the founding chairman of the Illinois State Charter School Commission.

A decade ago, he said, “you could get bipartisan support for statements like, ‘Parents ought to be able to choose from a range of options that best meet the needs of their kids.’ Now conservatives aren’t saying stuff like that anymore. It’s like, ‘We’ve got to do this to save America from the Satanic clutch of CRT.’”

The new rhetoric, he said, is “not in pursuit of higher graduation rates and test scores,” he said. It’s “choice in pursuit of winning the culture war.”

That risks alienating politically moderate or left-leaning teachers and parents who would otherwise support choice. If the only politicians who support school choice also happen to be hard-right culture warriors, “,” or Trump supporters, “that might be an Achilles heel of all this,” he said.

‘Every kid is unique’

Mac Ban, the Phoenix mother, said part of her decision to homeschool actually revolved around what she saw as a social justice sensibility creeping into the district — she has heard examples of math word problems that included references to white subjects stealing from Black subjects. Mac Ban said such ideas are “not appropriate for an elementary school student.”

Young children, she said, “need to learn the basics. They need to learn the fundamental things, and they need to learn to think on their own, to think critically, not be told that they are an oppressor.”

Mac Ban, a first-generation American — her family came to the U.S. from Communist-controlled Poland in the 1970s — said she was able to qualify for Arizona’s ESA because her younger daughter had an individualized education plan due to a diagnosed speech delay. Simply being in the same family qualified her older sister, the kindergartner, for ESA funds as well.

Her initial concern that she and her kids would be isolated quickly passed when they joined the Highlands Latin community. “By homeschooling, I don’t mean that I’m just sitting here with my daughters every day and we don’t see anyone …We do all kinds of group lessons, activities. I’m never home. We’re always out and about, doing different things,” she said.

Mac Ban likes having the ability to choose what lessons and subjects her daughter — now a second-grader — pursues.

“Every kid is unique, and the parents know what’s best for their child, ultimately,” she said.

“We’re not extinct,” the young student ventured, nervous about contradicting the lesson, but feeling she had to speak up. “I’m a Narragansett.”

No response came from her teacher or classmates, recalls the Chariho Regional School District alum, who graduated in 1986.

“It just didn’t matter,” she told �鶹��Ʒ. “You were insignificant.”

Now, decades later, Baker has two children in the same school system who have navigated similar experiences of hurt and invisibility. Sometimes, the racism has been overt, like when a classmate muttered the N-word at her daughter in middle school. But more often, it comes in the form of quiet erasure and inaccurate tropes.

“In history class, it’s mostly the history of the colonizers,” said her daughter Nittaunis Baker, 19, who graduated from Chariho High School in spring 2021 and now attends the University of Rhode Island. 

“We didn’t really talk about Native people that much,” she told �鶹��Ʒ.

Even now, as the topic of how to teach U.S. history in schools is receiving an unprecedented level of public attention, Indigenous parents say the debates still largely exclude lessons on Native people. 

“It’s [been] very Black/white centric,” said Samantha Cullen-Fry, a member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe who has two young children in the West Warwick School District. She agrees that highlighting the Black experience is important, especially in wake of the police murder of George Floyd. But efforts to diversify K-12 curricula are incomplete, she says, if they fail to accurately teach about Native people. 

When English colonists first came to New England in the 17th century, the Narragansett people had been living in the region for some 30,000 years — making the vast majority of North American history, chronologically speaking, Indigenous history. In the following centuries, Native people have continued to live in the region.

“There is no United States history, there is no Rhode Island history, without Indigenous history,” the West Warwick mother told �鶹��Ʒ.

Across the country, fights over critical race theory have elevated conversations over social studies curricula to the central stage in many . CRT is not an ideology, but rather a scholarly framework that views racism and inequality as ingrained in law and society. Still, in Oklahoma, a bill to restrict its teaching led to the removal of classic books such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Raisin in the Sun from reading lists, according to a recent ACLU lawsuit. In Texas, the crackdown prompted a school administrator to . 

The Ocean State has emerged as a hotbed for the controversy. Over the summer, a South Kingstown mother made national headlines for filing more than investigating if the district taught terms like “systemic racism,” “white privilege” or the “1619 Project.” Education writer Erika Sanzi, a former Rhode Island teacher and school board member, has become and other curricular changes her group, Parents Defending Education, see as divisive.

And although Rhode Island was not one of the to enact laws restricting teaching on race and gender, a bill to do so was introduced by state legislators in spring 2021, though it failed to pass.

Its author, Rep. Patricia Morgan, did not respond to questions from �鶹��Ʒ asking whether topics such as the , which took place just miles outside the Chariho school system’s present day boundaries, would be among the “” that the bill sought to ban. In the event, 1,000 English colonial soldiers, joined by about 150 Pequot and Mohegan soldiers, attacked and burned a Narragansett stronghold, killing hundreds, including women and children. In late October, the Rhode Island Historical Society transferred the 5-acre South Kingstown site back to the Narragansett Indian Tribe, nearly three and half centuries after the deadly event.

In Chariho schools, where more than 9 in 10 students are white, alumni of the district who are Indigenous and graduated in recent decades have recounted experiences of being by their counselors. In nearby Narragansett Regional School District, Cullen-Fry had to spend a post-grad year doing unnecessary pre-college work, she said, because her counselor did not send in her paperwork, assuming she couldn’t afford higher education. The experience, she learned later at a high school reunion, was shared by numerous peers of color.

Chariho Assistant Superintendent Michael Comella said he was not aware of Indigenous students having had issues with the district’s college counselors in the past, but mentioned that the school system is working with local Narragansett leaders to improve school policy and providing professional development sessions on equity and inclusion for teachers. He said teachers typically cover the Great Swamp Massacre in fifth grade during lessons on King Philip’s War. 

“The district remains committed to ensur[ing] that we account for all important information and history as it relates to our tribal community,” he wrote in an email to �鶹��Ʒ.

Though there is much more work to do, the elder Baker appreciates that the Chariho district has made some efforts to better serve its Native students. The high school has a on staff and, recently, has begun engaging in conversations with Indigenous parents about further improvements.

“This isn’t about bashing the Chariho school district,” she said. “This is about recognizing that there are issues that have affected past and present generations of Indigenous students who have attended this school system and they need to be addressed on behalf of present and future generations.”

Chariho has formed an that has been meeting since the fall of 2020 in pursuit of more equitable school policies, practices and curricula. Some residents, such as the Bakers, say that the changes are sorely needed, but others staunchly oppose them.

“I do not support, at this point, the anti-racism task force,” audience member Jim Sullivan said during public comment at a Nov. 9 . “I am concerned about their bringing racism into the Chariho system.”

“We are not domestic terrorists,” he added, referencing escalating tensions nationwide at board meetings that recently prompted the National School Boards Association to send a letter to the White House requesting increased support and security.

The pushback does not phase endawnis Spears, who recently joined the Chariho School Committee after a member’s resignation. Spears, who does not capitalize her first name, is a member of the Navajo Nation, with ties also to the Chocktaw, Chickasaw and Ojibwe people. Diverse perspectives, she believes, are necessary to the development of all children.

“I want to ensure that teachers have everything they need to prepare their students — all of their students — to be able to navigate citizenship in the United States,” she told �鶹��Ʒ. “That includes Indigenous histories.”

“The lack of nuance around Indigenous histories also is a form of erasure,” she added. “It continues the process of erasing Native people from this landscape.”

Statewide, Lorén Spears, executive director of the Tomaquag Museum for Indigenous history, culture and arts in Exeter, Rhode Island and related to endawnis Spears by marriage, believes officials must work to better represent the state’s Native students.

“I think it’s been very teacher-by-teacher, the improvement, rather than the system of education improving,” she said on a of the Boston Globe’s Rhode Island Report podcast. “I would like to see, you know, the Department of Education really take an active role in ensuring that the history is inclusive and includes Native people.”

State social studies standards do not stipulate that schools teach specific aspects of Native history or culture, said the Rhode Island Department of Education, instead leaving those decisions up to districts.

“If materials [that districts] use presently from a publisher do not adequately address Indigenous representation, [the state education department] would strongly encourage school leaders to develop materials they can use to meet the standards,” Communications Director Victor Morente wrote in an email to �鶹��Ʒ.

Accurately representing Native Rhode Islanders means addressing certain truths that may be difficult, said the younger Baker. But covering those facts in schools, rather than mythologized narratives of harmony between colonists and Native people, doesn’t mean placing blame on any students, she said.

“The establishment of this country was pretty much the murder of a lot of Indigenous people, including my ancestors,” she said. “I don’t think that [white] kids should feel ashamed because it’s not really them. It’s their ancestors.”

It’s only shameful when students shy away from those histories, she believes. “If they refuse to acknowledge that that happened, then you kind of become complicit in not recognizing the struggles that [Indigenous] people went through.”

In school, the only time she remembers a lesson on Indigenous people was a brief mention in fifth grade around Thanksgiving. She doesn’t recall any lessons on the Great Swamp Massacre. Additionally, in high school, outside of class, she had a teacher who held a reading group focused on Native sciences, which discussed a book written by a member of the Potawatomi Nation. She enjoyed the experience, and wishes there could be official courses devoted to such topics. 

“Even having a class just on the history of Indigenous peoples, like how they have classes on ancient Greek and Roman things, that would be really cool,” said the college freshman, who is studying marine biology. She receives free tuition at URI thanks to her status as a member of the Narragansett Indian Tribe.

Teachers can cater Indigenous history and culture to learners of any age, said Cullen-Fry, who works as an educator at the Tomaquag Museum. For example, many classes visit the museum in November, Native American Heritage Month. She corrects the youngsters’ misconceptions about Thanksgiving, teaching them that it’s traditional in many Indigenous cultures to celebrate 13 Thanksgivings, one for each of the year’s moon cycles.

States such as Oregon have moved in recent years to require that schools teach , and to bring tribal educators .

But until such shifts, large and small, are incorporated into Rhode Island schools, the Baker family will celebrate progress on a more personal level.

When Nittaunis walked across the graduation stage in May 2021, she was adorned with tribal jewelry and ornamentation, passed down from her ancestors. Her mother, after so many of her own personal experiences of feeling that her Indigenous identity was erased by the world around her, wanted people to know: Another Indigenous child just graduated from Chariho High School.

The proud message was simple.

“Society doesn’t think that we’re here,” the elder Baker said. “We are here.”

James Whitfield chose to resign from his position as principal of Colleyville Heritage High School and the school board unanimously accepted on Monday. His resignation won’t be official until Aug. 15, 2023. As part of a settlement between Whitfield and the district, he will remain on paid administrative leave until then.

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“I’m ready to turn that next page,” Whitfield told The Texas Tribune on Wednesday.

The agreement seemingly puts an end to Whitfield’s arduous battle with the school district that date backs to July 26, when he was by Stetson Clark, a former candidate for the district’s school board.

Clark said Whitfield was “encouraging the disruption and destruction of our district” because Whitfield, the high school’s first Black principal, wrote a letter to the community during the summer of 2020 detailing how hurt he was over the deaths of three Black Americans: George Floyd in Minnesota, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia.

In the ensuing days, Whitfield found himself at the center of the debate over how race is taught in Texas schools. He received a disciplinary letter from the district a few weeks later and was placed on administrative leave soon after that.

Colleyville is a majority-white city with only 1% of residents identifying as Black or African American, according to census data. The median household income tops $150,000.

Going forward, Whitfield believes his work in education isn’t done. Over the next year, he wants to work closely with educators and students, especially helping teachers who are fearful that what happened to him will happen to them.

“I know that there’s just so many people under these attacks and that’s my greatest fear because this profession means so much to me,” he said.

Whitfield added that he has no regrets over what has transpired over the last couple of months, he’s happy that he stood up for what he believed in and he hopes that’s what people can learn from his situation.

, or CRT, is an academic discipline usually taught at the university level. The theory’s central idea is that racism is not something restricted to individuals, but that bias is something embedded in policies and legal systems.

Opposition to critical race theory has become a rallying cry for Texas Republican leaders, who claim it’s indoctrinating students and teaching white students that they are racist. Lt. Gov. has called it a “ridiculous leftist narrative.” Gov. has called for it to be abolished in Texas schools.

Lawmakers eventually passed , which restricts how teachers can discuss current events, encourage civic engagement and teach about America’s history of racism. And during the second special session, lawmakers successfully passed , a more restrictive version of the House bill that will .

Among other things, SB 3 bans schools from making political activism part of a course and says teachers may not be compelled to talk about a “widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.”

Now, GOP lawmakers have turned their attention to what books children have access to in schools.

Earlier this week, , along with the Texas State Library and Archives Commission and the State Board of Education, to develop statewide standards preventing “obscene content in Texas public schools.”

State Rep. , who is running for state attorney general, recently launched an inquiry into the types of books students can access in Texas schools, which included an 850-book list. The titles in the list range from children’s books and anti-bullying tips to novels that discuss racism and sexuality.

This article originally appeared in

The cases arrive as schools have become a culture war flashpoint in a nation divided over its pandemic response and reckonings with racism past and present.

Classroom coronavirus safety measures such as masking requirements and teacher vaccine mandates have , and in some cases, even violence — with reports of .

Meanwhile, local school boards have become the of superheated debates over the perceived encroachment of critical race theory into U.S. curricula, spurring conservative takeovers that have led to the departure of .

Tensions have escalated so high that the National School Board Association urged the Biden administration to protect school leaders who faced “an immediate threat” from what they called “domestic terrorism.” The group on Friday for the letter’s strong language, but their initial message was enough to prompt the U.S. Department of Justice to mobilize the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to combat the spike in harassment.

With the politics of school policymaking red hot, here are three key upcoming education cases to watch:

1 ACLU sues Oklahoma over its CRT teaching ban, arguing the law restricts educators’ and students’ free speech

On Oct. 19, a group of educators and civil rights groups — backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Oklahoma — challenging an ​​Oklahoma rule that restricts public school teachings on race and gender issues.

The organizations allege that violates students’ and teachers’ right to free speech, tamping down on classroom discussions of race and gender for political motives. The suit also argues that the state has committed a 14th Amendment violation, because the legislation is so vague that it places teachers’ jobs in jeopardy if they misunderstand its clauses.

The Oklahoma law, which took effect in May, prohibits classroom activities that would make a student feel “by virtue of his or her race or sex, (he or she) bears responsibility for actions committed in the past.” Observers described the rule as an “.”

Though the bill text does not expressly mention critical race theory, the state legislature quickly took up and passed the law while a wave of similar legislation swept through Republican-held statehouses nationwide, some of which did explicitly prohibit CRT.

Critical race theory is not an ideology, experts have previously told �鶹��Ʒ, but a scholarly framework that views racism and inequality as ingrained in law and society. However, right-wing politicians and pundits frequently use the phrase as a catch-all term for any classroom content dealing with race.

As a result of the law’s approval, according to the ACLU, school districts in the state have told teachers to avoid using terms such as “diversity” and “white privilege” in their classrooms, and have removed To Kill a Mockingbird, Raisin in the Sun and other seminal books from reading lists.

Because a total of , the Oklahoma lawsuit could prove the first of many challenges to curricular prohibitions, legal experts say, providing a bellwether for future cases.

2 Parent claims discrimination against the unvaccinated as Los Angeles mandates COVID-19 shots for eligible students

On Oct. 8, the Los Angeles Unified School District was for its requirement that students eligible to receive coronavirus shots be vaccinated in order to attend school in person.

The parent, who was not named in the suit, alleged that COVID immunizations are too new to be mandated for young people, and that the district’s policy discriminates against unvaccinated children by denying them the right to an equal education.

Students ages 12 and up in the nation’s second-largest district must be fully immunized by Dec. 19, according to LAUSD policy. Those who fail to comply will need to enroll in an online schooling alternative called independent study to remain in the school system.

Just down the coast in San Diego, a parallel lawsuit with near-identical language and prepared by the same law firm was also against the 121,000-student district, which requires students 16 and up to receive shots by Dec. 20.

Other California school systems and Culver City, as well as Hoboken, New Jersey, have also instituted COVID vaccine mandates for eligible students, and Washington, D.C. is . In early October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that coronavirus vaccines will be required for all eligible students in the state, though the rule will .

The twin cases will provide a litmus test for whether student vaccine mandates, which legal experts have told �鶹��Ʒ may be vulnerable to lawsuits, hold up in court — all while shots for even younger children, ages 5 to 11, are on the verge of authorization.

3 Texas top court halts San Antonio teacher coronavirus vaccine mandate, case moves to Fourth Court of Appeals 

Hours before a teacher COVID vaccine mandate was set to take effect in San Antonio, the Texas Supreme Court issued an opinion Oct. 14 that the district’s policy, delivering a brief win to Gov. Greg Abbott, who has in the state via executive order.

A more final ruling on the state’s request for an injunction against the mandate will soon come from the Fourth Court of Appeals in San Antonio. The Texas Supreme Court , in the words of its authors, was issued only to “preserve the status quo” until the appeals court settles the matter.

School districts across the country have enacted coronavirus vaccine requirements for school staff, including over one-third of the nation’s 500 largest school systems, but San Antonio Independent School District is the only Texas district so far to attempt such a policy in opposition to Abbott’s ban.

What the appeals court decides regarding San Antonio’s rule may prove an arbiter of whether blue cities in hyper-red states will be allowed to follow through on implementing their chosen COVID safety measures amid opposition from state lawmakers.

On Oct. 19, a group of educators and civil rights groups backed by the ACLU sued the state of Oklahoma over , alleging that the law violates students’ and teachers’ right to free speech by tamping down on classroom discussions of race and gender. 

“There is a pretty good chance that students can show their First Amendment rights have been violated,” Frank LoMonte, director of the University of Florida’s Brechner Center for Freedom of Information, told �鶹��Ʒ.

The Oklahoma law, which took effect in May, prohibits teaching that anyone is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” or that students should feel “by virtue of his or her race or sex, (he or she) bears responsibility for actions committed in the past.” Observers described the rule as an “.”&�Բ�����;

Though the bill text does not expressly mention critical race theory, the state legislature quickly took up and passed the law while a wave of similar legislation swept through Republican-held statehouses nationwide, some of which did explicitly prohibit CRT. 

Critical race theory is not an ideology, but a lens of thinking that considers how political institutions may perpetuate structural inequities, experts previously explained to �鶹��Ʒ.

As a result of the law’s approval, according to the ACLU, school districts in the state have told teachers to avoid using terms such as “diversity” and “white privilege” in their classrooms, and have removed To Kill a Mockingbird, Raisin in the Sun and other seminal books from reading lists.

When schools restrict academic content, it can amount to a First Amendment violation if the court concludes that the censorship was politically motivated, said LoMonte, referencing a 1982 Supreme Court precedent in a case over . The ruling established students’ right to receive information, he explained, but also gives school boards some latitude in choosing to pull books.

“If the complaint is right, that classic books like To Kill a Mockingbird are being removed from the curriculum for no reason other than political ideology,” said the legal expert, “then that is a First Amendment injury to the students.”&�Բ�����;

Bill sponsor Oklahoma Rep. Kevin West, however, does not believe that H.B. 1775 contributes to classroom censorship.

“The law ensures that all history is taught in schools without shaming the children of today into blaming themselves for problems of the past, as radical leftists would prefer,” he wrote in an email to �鶹��Ʒ. “The legal complaint is full of half-truths, and in some cases blatant lies.”

West did not specify which of the case’s arguments he considered inaccurate, and did not respond to questions asking whether he had intended for the bill to result in book bannings.

Plaintiff Regan Killacky, a public school teacher in Edmond, a city on the northern edge of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, said he was instructed to steer clear of certain concepts and phrases in his curriculum, and is no longer allowed to engage his students in educational conversations on race and gender.

“H.B. 1775 limits my ability to teach an inclusive and complete history within the walls of my classroom, ultimately restricting the exact type of learning environment all young people deserve — one free from censorship or discrimination,” said Killacky.

Discussions on race in Oklahoma schools are especially important, advocates say, because of incidents of racial violence in the state’s past, including the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. In a larger effort to grapple with “hard history,” Tulsa Public Schools began teaching that episode more comprehensively last spring, weeks after H.B. 1775 was signed into law.

In addition to free speech claims, the ACLU lawsuit also argues that the state has committed a 14th Amendment violation because of the vagueness of the legislation. Innocent misunderstandings, says the legal team, can place teachers’ jobs in jeopardy. 

“H.B. 1775 is so poorly drafted — in places it is literally indecipherable — that districts and teachers have no way of knowing what concepts and ideas are prohibited,” said Emerson Sykes, staff attorney with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

including Oklahoma have enacted laws to restrict teaching on race and gender, according to a tracker from Education Week, many using near-identical wordings.

With similar legislation in force across the country, LoMonte doubts the case against the Sooner State will be the last of its kind.

“I’m sure more lawsuits are coming,” he said. 

The most popular, award-winning children’s books tend to shade their Black, Asian and Hispanic characters with lighter skin tones than stories recognized for identity-based awards, new research finds.

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The discovery comes on the heels of a half decade of advocacy to diversify the historically white and male-centric kids’ literature genre, leading to . But now, a recently published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute raises questions about what, exactly, that representation looks like.

“There may be more characters that are classified as, for example, being Black, but they’re being depicted with lighter skin,” explained ​​co-author Anjali Adukia, assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

Adukia and her team used artificial intelligence to analyze patterns in the images and text of 1,130 children’s books totaling more than 160,000 pages — far more data than manual methods could possibly crunch. Their code identified characters’ faces, assigned race, age and gender classifications, and calculated a weighted average for their skin tone.

The researchers found that, among books that won the or awards, which comprise the lion’s share of purchases and library check-outs, the average shade for characters belonging to each racial category was lighter than those characters in books that won identity-based awards for race, gender, sexuality or ability representation such as the for African-American kids’ literature or the for LGBTQ books.

The color analysis also revealed that, across all collections, children were persistently depicted with lighter skin than their adult counterparts. The messages sent by those portrayals worry Adukia.

“There’s … this notion of equating youth or childhood with innocence,” she told �鶹��Ʒ. “But if innocence is equated with lightness or whiteness, what’s that implicit bias that gets baked into people’s minds?”

In many cases, said the professor, that pattern extends to adult characters that authors want to depict as moral or upstanding. Some books, for example, dilute Martin Luther King Jr.’s chocolate complexion to a light brown or beige, she said.

“We live in … a world that still sends the message that to be closer to white is to somehow be at an advantage,” Sharon G. Flake, author of the award-winning book , told �鶹��Ʒ. “The whole notion that you are seen as … more valuable, more beautiful if you are lighter.”

The stories children read, said Flake, shape how kids come to understand the world and their place within it. Giving birth to an African-American daughter with a darker complexion inspired her to write a book featuring a dark-skinned Black girl as the protagonist to remind her child that she’s brilliant and beautiful.

“If you’re always left out of the story, then you start to think that you’re not important,” said Flake. But the power of books to reframe those societal messages, she added, is “huge.”

“When you’re able to read a book that actually does represent you, … you feel seen,” Edith Campbell, librarian at Indiana State University, told �鶹��Ʒ. “You connect with it in a different way.”

But despite trend-setting titles, authored by Flake and many others, the children’s literature genre still has “a really wide gap in [racial, color and gender] representation,” said Adukia.

The dataset her team analyzed includes every children’s book published in the past century that won one of 19 different awards. Even from 2010 to 2019, their figures show, Caldecott and Newbery winners saw upticks in the share of characters whose skin color fell into the lightest tone group. They also saw a modest increase in the proportion of characters in the darkest skin tone — though the share remains less than in books winning identity-based awards — and a reduction in the percentage of medium shades.

In 2018, , while Black, Asian, Hispanic and Indigenous people led 10 percent, 7 percent, 5 percent and 1 percent of titles, respectively, according to numbers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Center.

“There are more books written with animal characters than there are with children of color,” said Campbell, remarking on the 27 percent share of stories with non-human protagonists in 2018.

The librarian, who launched the to boost diverse summer reading options, said she would give the recent progress to increase racial, gender and ability representation in the genre a D+/C-.

“There’s so much work to do,” she said, pointing to a string of new rules in red states and districts across the country ostensibly meant to limit critical race theory that the teaching of books written by Black, Indigenous, Hispanic and Asian authors.

In addition to racial and skin-tone patterns, the UChicago and Columbia Teachers College research team also identified concerning trends in the portrayal of female characters in kids books. Girls and women, their data showed, were more likely to be represented in images than text. Out of all the award categories, those dedicated to representing female voices were the only group to have more words gendered as female than male, the researchers found, and that proportion amounted to only a slight majority.

“There may be symbolic inclusion in pictures without substantive inclusion in the actual story,” said Adukia. “It is really striking, this illustration that women should be ‘seen but not heard.’”

“I don’t think that [the imbalance between female representation in images versus text] is something that people necessarily are doing on purpose,” added co-author Emileigh Harrison, a Ph.D student at the University of Chicago. “But making this finding more visible might help those who are writing future books or publishers … think about it more carefully.”

If those in the industry can turn the worrisome patterns in racial, skin color and gender representation around, the potential impact can be enormous, Flake believes.

“Books work a lot of magic and they do a lot of healing,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The eugenics program was still active at that time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical race theory bans — which typically prohibit K-12 teachers from discussing certain race- and gender-related topics — could prove more potent. In part, that’s because of penalties and fines lawmakers have attached to them. But it’s also because of weak support for civics and social studies instruction.

The text in these bills — passed in  and counting — doesn’t overtly forbid teaching about slavery, segregation, race- and gender-based pay gaps,or other aspects of U.S. history. However,  suggests that this language is not the only factor impacting teachers’ decisions about what to teach and how to teach it. Far from it.

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For example, in mathematics and English language arts, what to teach is the focus of a huge amount of teacher professional development and standardized instructional materials. Students are regularly assessed in those subjects, and we have found a growing alignment between what state mathematics and English language arts standards prescribe and the content in teachers’ professional development and materials.

But it’s a different story for social studies, the subject area in which issues of racism and sexism in America’s past and present are most likely to arise. And yet many educators get no training in how to teach vital civic attitudes such as knowledge of U.S. history and governance, engagement in democratic processes, respect for freedom and justice, tolerance and open-mindedness. In our , about half of elementary school teachers (who typically teach all subjects) and one-third of secondary school social studies teachers reported receiving no such training — not in their teacher preparation program or through their school’s professional development.

More than half of teachers we surveyed also reported a need for better civics instructional materials from their districts or schools. Lastly, and perhaps most concerningly, 74 percent of the elementary teachers and 40 percent of the secondary teachers cited “pressure to cover other content, such as reading and mathematics” as an obstacle to supporting students’ civic development.

This year, teachers will face even more pressure to focus on mathematics and reading, given widening achievement disparities that have been in those subjects over the course of the pandemic. To that, add the potential blowback to teaching anything related to race or gender and inadequate guidance on teaching civics. Avoiding any lessons on the experiences of women or people of color will be the path of least resistance in many schools. There certainly are no incentives or messages to direct teachers otherwise.

Teaching about the complex issues related to racism and sexism was rare to begin with. In , our national survey of teachers found that only 9 percent of elementary teachers — and a little less than one-third of middle and high school teachers — reported “drivers of inequality (on the basis of race, gender, class, immigration status, etc.)” as a major emphasis in their classroom instruction. Furthermore, roughly 1 in 5 teachers reported that their district or school leaders had directed them to limit discussions about political and social issues in class.

In Texas, where a recently passed bill also proscribes student participation in political advocacy, one school district canceled its Youth and Government course elective. Even legislators who authored the bill indicated this was a “misapplication.” This example underscores the likely removal of any social studies instruction that risks running afoul of new prohibitions. Even in many states without critical race theory bans, have dealt with from parents or others.

How can school systems, teachers and parents avoid purging their school’s curriculum of anything related to historical and modern-day experiences with racial or gender inequality? First, school leaders and educators should know what, specifically, is stated in their state bills. Despite all the challenges that COVID-19 has raised, school systems should set aside time for discussions that unpack the text of legislation and talk about its implications. By understanding what is in the bills, schools can assure parents that they are addressing equity-related topics without violating the law.

Relatedly, schools should not shy away from providing educators with examples of curriculum materials and lessons that address these issues, including ample professional learning. If at all possible, school systems in states where these bills passed should consider collaborating to establish common guidelines for addressing important race- and gender-related historical events and topics in K-12 classrooms. A united, thoughtful and reflective statement from multiple school districts about their commitment to addressing these topics could quell parent concerns and provide much-needed guidance to educators on what to teach.

In states where these bills have passed or are being considered, departments of education should support schools by opening lines of communication on these issues. State-provided workshops with guidance for teaching about equity, race and gender could reduce the burden on school staff for doing this work all on their own. In addition, a hotline for educators to call to get quick feedback about providing particular courses or textbooks would be a useful resource.

Finally, policymakers and parents should keep in mind that open, respectful discussions about topics that some might construe as controversial are regarded by  as an essential ingredient to supporting students’ civic development. Discussing racism and sexism in a safe environment is crucial for students to become active, knowledgeable citizens in our democracy.

Julia Kaufman and Alice Huguet are K-12 education policy researchers at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation. Julia Kaufman also co-directs the RAND American Educator Panels.