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In 2021, there was a sudden shift in how school board meetings around the country were conducted: Routine meetings turned heated, with angry community members often accusing educators of teaching their kids about critical race theory without their knowledge. That led to a firestorm of anti-CRT bans, intense focus on school board elections and partisan divides within local communities on education.

A new peer-reviewed study by researchers at Michigan State University and the University at Albany provides some insight into how the anti-CRT movement took hold — and the lasting consequences for how communities view their teachers and schools.

“We’ve seen debates about curriculum before but nothing that was so nationalized and spread like this,” said Ariell Bertrand, a doctoral student at MSU and one of the study’s authors.

The study examined the narratives that policymakers were using to justify CRT bans in the first 29 states that proposed them, she said. Based on the “narrative policy framework,” which scholars use to determine how policymakers and lobbyists use narrative storytelling to influence legislation, the researchers identified 11 key anti-CRT “narrative plots” being circulated.

According to the study, conservative think tanks such as the Manhattan Institute and Heritage Foundation and the group Moms for Liberty drafted specific narratives that brought CRT into the mainstream. The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who is considered a key architect of the anti-CRT movement, tweeted his intention in 2021 to redefine CRT “to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”

The study found that the narratives created by these groups — the most common being that CRT indoctrinates children in school to feel guilty about their race — quickly took hold, Bertrand said. According to the study, since 2021, 44 states have introduced more than 140 anti-CRT laws or bans related to concepts allegedly being taught in K-12.

“We found that these narratives were having this downstream effect on people’s likelihood to even trust their local schools anymore.”

Ariell Bertrand, a doctoral student at MSU and one of the study’s authors

In addition, a survey the researchers conducted of Michigan adults in fall 2021 found that individuals who reported hearing any of the anti-CRT narratives were less likely to trust their local teachers to teach any subject fairly. People who had heard all 11 narrative plots were 59 percent more likely to support a CRT ban than individuals who had not been exposed to the ban-CRT narratives.

In surveys, Americans typically express strong support for their local teachers and schools even if they don’t hold favorable views about the nation’s public schools as a whole, Bertrand noted. But this survey challenges that pattern, showing that the anti-CRT narratives began to unravel support even for the schools and teachers people knew best, she said. The survey also found that adults who’d been exposed to the anti-CRT narratives didn’t trust teachers to discuss race or racism or choose materials to supplement curricula, and overall were less likely to support instruction on fairness and equity, she said.

“In the United States we have these really strong macro-level beliefs about public education, such as this belief that education is this cornerstone to our democracy,” Bertrand said. “We found that these narratives were having this downstream effect on people’s likelihood to even trust their local schools anymore.”

The findings also point to partisan and racial divides. Republicans and white adults were more likely to embrace CRT narratives. For example, while a Democrat who had heard all the CRT plots had a 44 percent probability of supporting a CRT ban, someone who identified as Republican had an 88 percent probability. White individuals who’d heard all the CRT plots had a 73 percent chance of supporting a CRT ban, compared to 46 percent for Black individuals.

Now, as attention shifts from anti-CRT legislation to LGBTQ student rights and banning books, Bertrand said she and colleagues believe these narratives and attacks on public education will have similar repercussions. “For generations to come these narratives could undermine people’s support for public education and funding and things like that,” she said.

The CRT study is part of a broader research project led by coauthor Rebecca Jacobsen, professor of education policy at MSU, that looks at how school board meetings have changed since 2019 as a result of anti-CRT, anti-LGBTQ+ and other national narratives.

The researchers are finding that even in places where school board candidates weren’t necessarily running on these issues, school boards made changes to how meetings are run — for example, by limiting open comment periods, adding timers counting down how long speakers may talk, and enhancing security. While these changes are a way to control heated meetings, Jacobsen said they have the long-term effect of altering how the public interacts with its schools.

“This was really an up-close-and-personal opportunity to shape politics, especially around an issue that’s so important to many people: education and the future of their children,” she said of school board meetings. “What was a well-intentioned response has potentially further distanced people and only maybe fueled some of these claims, like ‘Look, our schools are not about you or your children. Look, these people are not listening.’”

Today, the people showing up to meetings include not just parents and families who have legitimate concerns and complaints about how they want their children to be taught, she said, but community members and outsiders who are sharing misinformation about what is happening in schools. While public education is far from perfect, she said, most Americans have shared a universal commitment to supporting education.

But as partisan divides deepen around the issue, she said, “I really think that that’s beginning to wane.”

This story about CRT was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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OWENTON, Ky. — During a school-wide club fair in this northern Kentucky town, a school administrator stood watch as students signed up for a group for LGBTQ+ students and their allies.

After the club sign-up sheet had been posted, students wrote derogatory terms and mockingly signed up classmates, according to one of the club’s founders. The group eventually went to the administrator, who agreed to help.

Simply being able to post the sign-up sheet in school was a victory of sorts. For two years, the club, known as PRISM (People Respecting Individuality and Sexuality Meeting), gathered in the town’s public library, because its dozen members couldn’t find a faculty adviser to sponsor it. In fall 2022, after two teachers finally signed on, the group received permission to start the club on campus.

Much of that happened because of one parent, Rachelle Ketron. Ketron’s daughter Meryl Ketron, who was trans and an outspoken member of the LGBTQ+ community in her small town, had talked about wanting to start a Gay-Straight Alliance when she got to high school. But in April 2020, during her freshman year, Meryl died by suicide after facing years of harassment over her identity. 

Following Meryl’s death, Ketron decided to continue her daughter’s advocacy. She gathered Meryl’s friends and talked about what it might mean to start a Gay-Straight Alliance, a student-run group that could serve as a safe space for queer youth on campus. After trying, and failing, to get the school to sign off on the idea, the group decided to gather monthly at the public library, where its members discussed mental health, sex education and experiences of being queer in rural areas. Ketron, a coordinator of development at a community mental health center just across the border in Indiana, also founded doit4Meryl, a nonprofit that advocates for mental health education and suicide prevention, specifically for LGBTQ+ youth in rural communities like hers.

Around the country, LGBTQ+ students and the campus groups founded to support them have become a growing target in the culture wars. In 2023 alone, 542 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced by state legislatures or in Congress, according to an LGBTQ-legislation tracker, with many of them focused on young people. Supporters of the bills say schools inappropriately expose students to discussions about gender identity and sexuality, and parents deserve greater control over what their kids are taught. Critics say the laws are endangering already vulnerable students. 

Kentucky’s law, passed in March, is one of the nation’s most sweeping anti-LGBTQ+ laws, prohibiting school districts from compelling teachers to address trans students by their pronouns and banning transgender students from using school bathrooms or changing rooms that match their gender identity. The law also limits instruction on and discussion of human sexuality and gender identity in schools. A separate section of the law bans gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth in the state.

“What started out as really a bill focused on pronouns and bathroom use morphed into this very broad anti-LGBTQIA+ piece of legislation that outlawed discussions of gender and sexuality, through all grades, and all subject matters,” said Jason Glass, the former Kentucky commissioner of education. Glass left the state in September to take a job in higher education in Michigan after his support for LGBTQ+ students drew fire from Republican politicians in Kentucky, including some who called for his ouster.

Related: In the wake of ‘Don’t Say Gay,’ LGBTQ students won’t be silenced 

Because the law’s language is sometimes ambiguous, it’s up to individual districts to interpret it, Glass said. Some have adopted more restrictive policies that advocates say risk forcing GSAs, also known as Gender and Sexuality Alliances or Gay-Straight Alliances, to change their names or shut down, and led to book bans and the cancellation of lessons over concerns that they discuss gender or sexuality. Others have interpreted the law more liberally and continue to offer services and accommodations to transgender or nonbinary students, if parents approve.

Across the country, the number of GSAs is at a 20-year low, according to GLSEN, an LGBTQ+ education advocacy nonprofit. GLSEN researchers say there may be two somewhat contradictory forces at work. Fewer students may feel the need for such clubs, thanks to school curricula and textbooks that have become more inclusive of LGBTQ+ individuals and thanks to an increase in the number of school policies that explicitly prohibit anti-gay bullying. Conversely, the recent surge in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, as well as the halt to extracurricular activities during the pandemic, may also be fueling the drop, the researchers said.

Willie Carver, a former high school teacher and Kentucky’s Teacher of the Year in 2022, left teaching this year because of threats he faced as an openly gay man. Laws like the one in Kentucky legitimize and legalize harassment against LGBTQ+ kids, he said, and may even encourage it. “We’ve ripped all of the school support away from the students, so they’re consistently miserable and hopeless,” he said.

Owenton is a picturesque farming community with rolling green hills and winding roads located halfway between Cincinnati and Louisville. Its population of about 1,682 is predominantly white and politically conservative: The surrounding county has voted overwhelmingly Republican in every presidential election since 2000.

Ketron moved here from Cincinnati in 2014 with her then-husband, seeking to live on a farm within driving distance of large cities. Shortly after the move, she recalled, a city official visited the property to give Ketron a rundown of expectations in the community — and a warning.

“It was basically ‘You better watch what you do and don’t get on the bad side of people because one person might be the only person that does that job in this whole county.’ Do you understand what I mean?’ ‘Yup,’” Ketron recalled saying, “‘I understand what you mean.’”

A few years later, she met her now-wife, Marsha Newell, and the two began raising their blended family of eight children on the farm. They also started fostering LGBTQ+ kids. Ketron said her family is one the few in the county to accept queer kids. Their children were often met with hostility, Ketron said; other students made fun of them for having two moms and told them that Ketron and her wife were sinners who were “going to hell.”

Ketron said the couple thought about moving, but beyond the financial and logistical obstacles, she worried about abandoning LGBTQ+ young people in the town. “Just because I’m uncomfortable or this is a foreign place for a queer kid to be doesn’t mean there aren’t queer kids born here every day,” she said.

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies

After Meryl came out to family and friends in fifth grade, the bullying at school intensified, Ketron and Gwenn, Meryl’s younger sister, recalled. Few adults in Meryl’s schools took action to stop it, they said. When Meryl complained, school staff didn’t take her seriously and told her to “toughen up and move on,” Ketron said. (In an email, the high school’s new principal, Renee Boots, wrote that administrators did not receive reports of bullying from Meryl. Ketron said by the time Meryl reached high school, she’d given up on reporting such incidents.)

That said, as she got older, Meryl became more outspoken. As a ninth grader, in 2019, she clashed with students who wanted to fly the Confederate flag at school; Meryl and her friends wanted to fly a rainbow flag. The school decided to ban both flags, Ketron said. After that, Meryl brought small rainbow flags and placed them around campus. (According to Boots, students were wearing various flags as “capes” and were advised not to do so as it was against school dress code.)

Ketron said she generally supported her daughter’s advocacy, but sometimes wished she’d take a less combative approach. “You might need to dial it back a little bit,” Ketron recalled telling Meryl once, when her daughter was in eighth grade.

Ketron recalled seeing Meryl’s disappointment; she said it was the only time she felt that she let her daughter down.

For years, the most effective wedge issue between conservatives and progressives was marriage equality. But when the Supreme Court in 2015 recognized the legal right of same-sex couples to marry, opponents of gay rights pivoted to focus on trans individuals, particularly trans youth. After early success with legislation banning trans kids from playing sports, conservative legislators began to expand their efforts to other school policies pertaining to LGBTQ+ youth.

The ripple effects of these laws on young people are becoming more apparent, said Michael Rady, senior education programs manager for GLSEN. Forty-one percent of LGBTQ youth have seriously considered suicide in the past year, according to a 2023 survey by The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ+ suicide prevention nonprofit. Nearly 2 in 3 LGBTQ+ youth said that learning about potential legislation banning discussions of LGBTQ+ people in schools negatively affected their mental health.

Konrad Bresin, an assistant professor in the department of psychology and brain sciences at the University of Louisville whose research focuses on LGBTQ+ mental health, said that for LGBTQ+ individuals just seeing advertising that promotes legislation against them has negative effects. “Even if something doesn’t pass, but there’s a big public debate about it, that is kind of increasing the day-to-day stress that people are experiencing,” he said.

Bresin said that student participation in GSAs can help blunt the effect of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment, since the clubs provide students a sense of belonging.

Supporters of Kentucky’s new law argue that the legislation creates necessary guardrails to protect students. Martin Cothran, spokesperson for The Family Foundation, the Kentucky-based conservative policy organization that advocated for the legislation, said the law is designed to keep students from being exposed to “gender ideology.”

Cothran said that nothing in the law impedes student speech, nor does it entirely prohibit traditional sex education. “It just says that you can’t indoctrinate,” he said. “Schools are for learning, not indoctrination.”

Related: College wars on campus start to affect students’ choices of college

When the law, known as SB 150, went into effect last spring, Glass, the former education commissioner, said school districts were forced to scramble to update their curricula to comply with the bill’s restrictions. In some cases, that meant removing any information on sexuality or sexual maturation from elementary school health curricula, and also revising health, psychology and certain A.P. courses in middle school and high school, he said.

Some families have sued. In September, four Lexington families with trans or nonbinary kids filed a lawsuit against the Fayette County Board of Education and the state’s Republican attorney general, Daniel Cameron, alleging that SB 150’s education provisions violate students’ educational, privacy and free speech rights under state and federal law. The families say that since the law passed, their kids have been intentionally misgendered or outed, barred access to bathrooms that match their gender identity and had their privacy disregarded when school staff accessed their birth certificates in order to enforce the law’s provisions.

School districts that don’t comply fully with the law could face discipline from the state’s attorney general, said Chris Hartman, executive director of the Fairness Campaign, a Kentucky-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group.

“Teachers who before this were willing to speak out and advocate are, as a general rule, unwilling to speak publicly about what’s happening.”

Willie Carver, Kentucky Teacher of the Year, 2022

Meanwhile, LGBTQ+ and student rights advocates fear that GSAs in the state will close or change their names because of the law. Teachers from across the state have also shared stories about their schools removing pride flags and safe space stickers, banning educators from using trans students’ pronouns and names, and removing access to bathrooms for trans kids, according to Carver, the former Teacher of the Year, who is collecting that information as part of his work with the nonprofit Campaign for Our Shared Future. The law’s broad language has not only affected teaching about gender and sexuality, he said: Educators have complained of schools banning references to the Holocaust in image or film, removing books with LGBTQ+ characters, and nixing discussion of scenes in Shakespeare’s plays because of images that may depict nudity, sex or language that talks about sexuality and gender.

Educators and school staff are fearful, said Carver. “It’s nearly impossible to know what’s happening because the law gets to be interpreted at the local level. So, the district itself gets to decide what the law’s interpretation will look like,” he said. “And teachers who before this were willing to speak out and advocate are, as a general rule, unwilling to speak publicly about what’s happening.”

For supporters of the law, that may be the point. GLSEN’s Rady said the bills are often written in intentionally vague ways to intimidate educators and school district leaders into removing any content that might land them in trouble. This year, his group is focused on providing educators, students and families information about their rights to free speech and expression in schools, including their right to run GSAs, Rady said.

In March 2020, when the pandemic hit and schools went remote, Meryl, then a high school freshman, posted a video diary on social media. In it, she strums her ukulele, and shares a message to her friends. “Some of you guys don’t have social media, some of you guys don’t like being at home,” Meryl said in the video. “I won’t get to see you guys for a whole month which is awful because you guys make me have a 10 times better life, you guys make mountains feel like literally bumps and steep cliffs just feel like a little bit of walking down the stairs.”

The video ends with her saying she’ll see her peers in school on April 30, when schools were scheduled to reopen. On the morning of April 18, Meryl died.

Ketron, Meryl’s mother, had thought remote school would be a relief for her daughter after years of bullying in school buildings. But it was difficult to be separated from her friends, she said, and Meryl also knew some of them were struggling in homes where they did not feel accepted.

“Suicide is never one thing,” Ketron said. “A lot of times people talk about death by a thousand paper cuts. As sad as it sounds, for me to have that come out of my mouth, I feel like that really speaks to Meryl’s life. She had wonderful things, but it was just like thousands of paper cuts.”

For months after Meryl’s death, Ketron would read text messages on Meryl’s phone from her friends sharing stories about how she’d stood up for them in school and in the community. Ketron said she made a promise to herself — and to Meryl — that she was going to be loud like her daughter and “make it better.” In the spring of 2020, she started doit4Meryl.

“I don’t ever want this to happen again, ever, to anyone,” she said. “I never want someone to be in that place and pieces of it that got them there was hate and ignorance from another human being.”

In 2021, the anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-critical race theory book bans movement reached the Owenton community after a teacher in the district taught “The 57 Bus,” a nonfiction book that features a vocabulary guide explaining gender identities and characters who are LGBTQ+.

The book created an uproar in the town, with parents calling for its removal and for the educator to be disciplined. After that, Ketron said the few teachers who had seemed open to sponsoring the GSA no longer felt comfortable.

Related: Teachers, deputized to fight the culture wars, are often reluctant to serve

In mid-2021, Ketron decided to start the club herself, at the public library. Each month, a dozen or so kids gathered in one of the building’s study rooms, talking about what it means to be queer in rural Kentucky, and what they hoped to accomplish through their GSA. Some of them were Meryl’s friends, others were new to Ketron.

In July 2022, the group held a Color Run, a 5K to bring together various advocacy groups from around the county and state to uplift people after the isolation of Covid. Later that year, they invited Carver to speak about his experiences as an openly gay man growing up in rural Kentucky. The students worked with Ketron and doit4Meryl to create a “Be Kind” campaign: They printed signs with phrases like “You’re never alone” and “Don’t give up,” along with information on mental health resources, and placed them in yards around town.

In the fall of 2022, after two teachers agreed to serve as advisors for the GSA, the school principal allowed the club on campus. While Ketron checks in with the students occasionally, the club is now student-led, she said. The past school year would have been Meryl’s senior year, and the club’s students were excited about finally being welcomed onto campus, Ketron said.

Then Kentucky’s 2023 legislative session began with the onslaught of bills targeting LGBTQ+ youth that eventually merged to become SB 150.

Around the same time, tragedy entered Ketron’s life again: She lost one of her foster children, who was trans, to suicide. The loss of her daughters prompted her to spend countless hours in the state capitol, attending committee meetings and hearings and signing up to testify against the anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ+ bills on the senate floor. She watched, devastated, as legislators quickly voted on and passed SB 150.

“All I could think about was Meryl,” she said. “They’re just starting and this world is supposed to love them through this hard part. When you’re shaping yourself and instead we’re going to tell you that we don’t want you to exist.”

In Owenton, the district follows SB 150 as per law, said Reggie Taylor, superintendent of Owen County Schools. Little has changed as a result of the legislation, he said: “It’s been business as usual.” Trans and nonbinary students have long had a separate bathroom they could use and that hasn’t changed, he said, and the district offers a tip line for students to anonymously report bullying, as well as access to school counselors.

Ketron, though, sees fallout. Fearful of bullying and other harms, she said that she and the other parents with trans kids in the school system are trying to get their children support by applying for help through Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. While 504 plans are typically for students with disabilities, they are sometimes used to help secure LGBTQ+ students services and accommodations, such as protection from bullying, mental health counseling and access to bathrooms that match their gender identity.

SB 150 has also had a chilling effect on the work of the school’s GSA, according to Ketron. During the summer, after the law went into effect, PRISM members discussed changing the club’s name and direction to focus on mental health.

Related: How do we teach Black history in polarized times?

Across the state, students and educators are grappling with what their schools will look like as the law takes hold. In March, Anna, a trans nonbinary student from Lexington, launched an Instagram account called TransKY Storytelling Project, anonymously documenting the impact of the new law on young people and teachers.

People shared examples of the ways the legislation affects them, such as making them afraid to go to school, erasing their identities and making the jobs of educators and librarians tougher. A middle school guidance counselor in rural Kentucky wrote that the new law makes it harder to connect with students and support them: “If we are the only ones students have, and we can’t provide them the care they desperately need and deserve, the future looks very bleak.”

Even in the state’s more progressive cities, the law has changed daily life in schools, Anna, the Instagram account’s curator said. The GSA at Anna’s Lexington high school used to announce club meetings and events on the loudspeakers and post flyers in school hallways, Anna said. But the group has since gone underground, to avoid bringing attention to its existence lest administrators force it to stop meeting.

“The school felt so much safer knowing that [a GSA] existed because there were students like you elsewhere. You could go in and say, ‘Hey, I’m trying out this set of pronouns. I’m trying to learn more about myself. Can you all like call me this for a couple of weeks?’” Anna said. “It just allowed for a place where students like me could go.”

But while the absence of a GSA is concerning, Anna fears most the impact of SB 150 on students in rural parts of Kentucky. GSA members from rural communities have shared that they no longer have supportive school staff to advocate for their clubs because of the climate of fear created by the law, Anna said.

That said, November’s election brought some hope for LGBTQ+ advocates: Cameron, the state attorney general who backed SB 150 and campaigned on anti-trans policies, lost his bid for the governorship to incumbent Andy Beshear, and several other candidates for office who advocated anti-trans policies were defeated too.

Back in Owenton, Ketron is working with Carver to plan a summit for Kentucky’s rural, queer youth. Ketron said she hopes the gathering will serve as a reminder for students that even though they may be isolated in their communities, there are people like them across the state.

But as of this fall, participating in a GSA is no longer an option for students at the Owenton high school. Boots, the school principal, wrote in an email that the club had changed its focus, to one geared toward addressing “social needs across a variety of settings.”

But according to Ketron, students said they were afraid to continue a club focused on LGBTQ+ issues in part because of SB 150. She offered to help students restart the club in the library, or at her house, she said, but members worried that would be too difficult because many of them have not come out to their families.

Ketron said she’s not giving up. “At its core,” she said, a GSA is “a protective factor and so very needed, especially in a rural community.”

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org for free, 24-hour services that can provide support, information and resources.

This story about LGBTQ+ students in schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter, and share your thoughts about this story at editor@hechingerreport.org. 

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In recent years, division over how social studies should be taught has plagued school districts around the country.

The irony, according to Lawrence Paska, executive director of the National Council for the Social Studies, is that in many places, the subject is “not being taught, period.”

Social studies is sometimes seen as an afterthought, left out of daily instruction, he said. But instead of strengthening social studies or helping more students engage with the subject, the focus in recent years has been on undermining or attacking it, he said.

The increasing politicization of social studies was a concern shared by many educators, education leaders, researchers and advocates at last week’s annual NCSS conference in Nashville. Sessions examined ways educators can navigate state laws that limit conversations on race and other difficult topics, as well as how they can develop the high quality materials and instruction those attending said was vital to preparing students for civic life.

About 3,500 people attended the conference, among them K-12 and higher ed educators who teach the subjects that constitute social studies — including history, civics, geography, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, law and religious studies.

Last month, NCSS updated its definition of social studies as the “study of individuals, communities, systems, and their interactions across time and place that prepares students for local, national, and global civic life.” The revised definition is meant to emphasize an inquiry-based approach, in which students start by asking questions, then learn to analyze credible sources, said Wesley Hedgepeth, NCSS president.

The group also chose to set out guidance for elementary and secondary school social studies instruction, to emphasize that education in the topic must begin in the early grades, Hedgepeth said.

The inquiry-based approach is defined within the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards, a set of decade-old, Common Core-like guidance for social studies. The approach has received pushback from conservative politicians who want to see more “patriotic” social studies curriculums, experts at the conference said.

Critics say revisions, or attempted revisions, to social studies standards by policy makers in states such as Virginia and South Dakota remove inquiry-based learning. The new standards instead emphasize “rote memorization of facts that are deemed to help children become more patriotic,” said James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association. Educators and researchers say these efforts are part of a pattern — deliberate or not — of flooding state standards and curriculums with so much content that it becomes impossible for teachers to spend the time needed to go in-depth on topics and for students to engage in critical thinking or questioning.

While it isn’t new for state legislatures and boards to step in to dictate what’s taught, what’s different now is that laws prohibit teaching certain histories rather than requiring them to be taught, according to Grossman.

While many educators at the conference seemed to want to avoid politics and focus on their instruction, they recognized that simply choosing to be a social studies teacher can be seen as taking a political side. Conservative politicians today increasingly see social studies teachers as targets, attendees said. Educators from Virginia, Texas, Tennessee and Kentucky, among other states, said fights over social studies standards or anti-critical race theory and anti-LGBTQ+ laws have been bruising. Some talked about receiving death threats and being doxxed, while others said they were increasingly fearful of losing their jobs.

In a workshop on how educators can get involved in advocacy efforts surrounding state revisions of history and social studies standards, Virginia teachers shared how they organized to fight a controversial social studies standards revision under the administration of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Sam Futrell, a middle school social studies teacher and president of the Virginia Council for the Social Studies, said educators organized their state professional organizations and local unions to push back against a draft revision that she said included several errors and omissions such as referring to Native Americans as “America’s first immigrants.”

Sessions at the conference also focused on how to strengthen and improve social studies materials and instruction. Educators from several states, including Maryland, Iowa and Kentucky, spoke about the need for curriculum and resources that don’t simply cater to big states like Florida, California and Texas. Social studies curriculum publishers from Imagine Learning, Core Knowledge and Pearson also talked about their efforts to update materials to make them relevant to kids from diverse backgrounds and to work more closely with educators in different states to meet their needs.

Some school leaders said they need high-quality resources that can help teachers who aren’t specialists in a particular subject or area of history to fill gaps in their knowledge. Others said the absence of a national approach to social studies instruction is an obstacle to ensuring that all students have a common framework for understanding the country and its history and participating in civic life.

Bruce Lesh, supervisor of elementary social studies for Carroll County Public schools in Maryland, said that while math, science and English have national frameworks for instruction, nothing equivalent exists in social studies. The C3 Framework discusses how to teach social studies, but it’s not like the Next-Gen science standards or Common Core English and math standards that lay the groundwork for what to teach and help all students gather a common set of knowledge and skills.

In those other disciplines, said Lesh, “There was an effort to take the inequity out of what was taught to students.”

This story about social studies was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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Immediately following the Saturday, Oct. 7, attack on Israeli communities by Hamas and Israel’s resulting declaration of war, teachers began reaching out to the San Diego County Office of Education seeking guidance on how to address the war on Monday morning with their students.

Julie Goldman, the office’s director of equity curriculum and instruction, and her team spent that weekend compiling a detailed guide for educators and parents on how to discuss the events happening overseas. The guide, released Oct. 9, contains resources on how to have civil discourse on contested issues; historical information and current news on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; material on discussing war and violence in age-appropriate ways, and information on combating antisemitism and Islamophobia in schools.

Goldman said the office, which serves the county’s 42 school districts, 129 charter schools and five community college districts, has many Palestinian American, Israeli American, Jewish and Muslim students.

“We want to make sure that every child feels seen and heard and loved and valued in our classrooms,” Goldman said. “None of us can learn if we don’t feel safe, and so it’s really about creating those safe spaces for dialogue.”

The work Goldman’s office did to provide these educational guides is exactly how education leaders should respond to important social issues, according to Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Their job is to help students understand the world, to help them wrestle with a world which is complex and sometimes overwhelming,” said Hess.

Related link: How do we teach Black history in polarized times? Here’s what it looks like in 3 cities

Hess and Jal Mehta, a professor of education at Harvard University, routinely debate big issues in education, often from opposing viewpoints, on their blog, “Straight Talk with Rick and Jal.” The goal, according to the two, is to offer educators a model for promoting constructive dialogue among students, where two people may disagree but can still learn from one another.

Mehta said teachers and principals may be tempted to stay out of teaching about the Israel-Hamas war because it’s so politicized. But even younger students are aware of what’s happening in the world – in particular Jewish and Palestinian students who may be deeply affected by the events.

“What schools can do is broaden students’ understanding and help them see kind of the multiple truths that are there in this situation,” Mehta said.

These conversations can be conducted in age-appropriate ways beginning in first grade, Hess added. While elementary students may be too young to understand the emotional, historical and moral debates surrounding Israel and Palestine, he said, they can build a basic understanding of the region’s geography, the history of how and why Israel was created, and why Palestinians feel like they have been “trapped in ghettos.”

“None of us can learn if we don’t feel safe, and so it’s really about creating those safe spaces for dialogue.”

Julie Goldman, San Diego County Office of Education’s director of equity curriculum and instruction

It’s okay for teachers to acknowledge with students that they aren’t experts on the topic, Mehta added. “In terms of this conflict, I wouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” he said. Educators can share that they are learning alongside their students, he said.

Goldman said teachers trust her office’s resource guides because of the process that goes into to creating them. Starting in 2020, the office began putting together educator guides out of “a real and immediate need” to address political events, school shootings, hate crimes and various heritage months, as topics within the classroom, she said. Her staff reaches out to community groups and others for their input.

Goldman said a resource guide that includes vetted primary sources from different perspectives can give students and educators a way into difficult discussions without shutting anyone out. The guide on the Israel-Palestine conflict includes links to lessons and curricula from the education nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves and the Judaism-focused Institute for Curriculum Services, as well as sources from the Anti-Defamation League and AllSides, a company designed to combat media bias.

“We will have had this meaningful scholarly discussion that’s based in history and primary sources,” she said.

While the Israel-Palestine conflict has always been a difficult subject for educators, the recent adoption of policies in some states that limit conversations on topics such as race has added to teachers’ fears about discussing such contested issues, said Deborah Menkart, co-director of the Zinn Education Project, a collaboration between progressive nonprofits Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

“Their job is to help students understand the world, to help them wrestle with a world which is complex and sometimes overwhelming.”

Rick Hess, director of education policy studies, American Enterprise Institute

The Zinn Education Project recently released a list of resources and lesson plans for educators that include both Palestinian and Israeli voices, but Menkart said the focus is on providing perspectives often left out of mainstream media or textbooks. Many of the resources on their list include Palestinian and Arab authors and lessons from nonprofits such as Teach Palestine.

That has led to some criticism of her group’s list of resources, acknowledged Mimi Eisen, program manager at the Zinn Education Project. But she said it’s important that educators both share resources that aren’t one-sided and uplift the voices of those who’ve been “oppressed and stifled.” 

Classroom discussions, especially in middle school, should explain the differences between Judaism and Zionism, and Palestinian people and groups like Hamas, she said. 

Eisen said she has heard from teachers who said that even if they aren’t able to dedicate full class periods to talk about what’s happening in Gaza, they leave time at the start or end of each class to ask students to share how they are feeling, what they are hearing and learning about the issue, and to allow some discussion that’s student-led.

In San Diego, Goldman said teachers have found the resource guide to be helpful for starting conversations on Israel and Palestine.

“The main point is, are we preparing teachers not to step away but to find these age-appropriate ways to have meaningful conversations,” Goldman said. “The essence is how am I creating an inclusive space, so that all of my children feel seen and valued and they know that they can bring all parts of their languages and cultures to the classroom.”

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After an elder passed away recently in their community, the students at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School in Dzántik’i Héeni, the Tlingit name for Juneau, Alaska, got to work creating a special gift.

Using skills they’d learned in their computer science lessons, the students designed a traditional button blanket on a laser cutting machine. “They found a meaningful way to apply all of that skill and knowledge that they have learned and in such a way that it was authentic,” said Luke Fortier, the school librarian and math teacher.

Fortier’s school participates in a program operated by the American Indian Science and Engineering Society to expand access to computer science and science, technology engineering and math, or STEM, among Native American, Alaska Native and Pacific Islander students. The program trains educators at K-12 schools whose students include Native children on different ways they can introduce young people to programming, robotics and coding.

But computer science lessons like the ones at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School are relatively rare. Despite calls from major employers and education leaders to expand K-12 computer science instruction in response to the workforce’s increasing reliance on digital technology, access to the subject remains low — particularly for Native American students. 

Only 67 percent of Native American students attend a school that offers a computer science course, the lowest percentage of any demographic group, according to a new study from the nonprofit Code.org. A recent report from the Kapor Foundation and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, or AISES, takes a deep look at why Native students’ access to computer and technology courses in K-12 is so low, and examines the consequences.

Director of “seeding innovation” at the Kapor Foundation and report coauthor Frieda McAlear, who is Native Alaskan of the Inupiaq tribe, said the study “forefronts the context of the violence of centuries of colonization and its continuing impacts on Native people and tribal communities as the driver of disparities in Native representation in tech and computing.” 

Schools serving higher proportions of Native students are more likely to be small institutions that lack space, funding and teachers trained in computer science, according to the report. In addition, many Native students attend schools that may lack the hardware, software and high-speed internet needed for these classes.

Even when the instruction is available, courses often lack cultural relevance that would allow Native students to authentically engage with the material, the report says.

Given the history of settler colonialism and the use of Native boarding schools that sought to erase Native identity, making sure that students’ tribal knowledge and traditions are celebrated and integrated into the curriculum will allow students to succeed, the report’s authors say.

“For Native young people and Native professionals to be excluded systematically from the computing and tech ecosystem, it really means that they don’t have access both to the wealth generation possibilities of tech careers, but also access to creating technology tools and applications that can support the continual thriving and growth of cultural and language revitalization in our tribal communities,” McAlear said.

“For Native young people and Native professionals to be excluded systematically from the computing and tech ecosystem, it really means that they don’t have access both to the wealth generation possibilities of tech careers, but also access to creating technology tools and applications that can support the continual thriving and growth of cultural and language revitalization in our tribal communities.”

Frieda McAlear, director of “seeding innovation” at the Kapor Foundation and report coauthor

The situation isn’t much better at the post-secondary level, according to report co-author and director of research and career support for AISES, Tiffany Smith, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a descendant of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Since 2020, Native student enrollment in computer science courses has declined at most two-year and four-year institutions, she said, even as more students overall have received degrees in the subject. Part of the reason is that Native students don’t necessarily see a place for themselves and their culture in tech classes and spaces at predominantly white institutions, Smith said.

But the relatively few Native students who do graduate with these degrees are making significant contributions to their communities, according to Smith. She noted that graduates are using their computer science knowledge and emerging technologies to help revitalize Native languages and alleviate other issues tribal nation communities face, including climate change, biases in data collection and poverty. 

Because tribal nations are at the forefront of job growth and development in their communities, they “should be considered critical partners in the future of the technology sector,” the report’s authors write.

The report calls for more investment in training Native educators to teach computer science and related fields, and integrating Indigenous culture, traditions and languages into those classes.

A 4-year-old program run jointly by the Kapor Foundation and AISES, for example, partners with school districts and Native-serving schools to develop tribe-specific culturally relevant computer science curriculum. That instruction doesn’t only happen in computer science class, said McAlear. The program’s staff work with schools to develop project-based, culturally relevant computer science lessons that are woven into other classes including science, language and history.

In Fortier’s district, students in science classes were recently tasked with using robots to code the life cycle of a salmon. Through that activity they gained knowledge of their local tribal economies while being introduced to new tech, he said.

Before the pandemic, Fortier’s school had eliminated some computer science and technology courses due to budget cuts. But with federal Covid relief funding, along with grants from Sealaska Heritage Institute, a nonprofit arm of a regional Native corporation, and programmatic support from AISES, the school was able to restore some of that instruction.*

Fortier said he believes these courses are essential for his students — not necessarily because they’ll have to learn all the latest cutting-edge technology for their future careers, but so they can use contemporary methods to share Native practices, knowledge and skills with the wider community.

“We can learn a lot from the elders in the traditional knowledge,” he said. “But our kids need to apply it in a new, modern, meaningful way. They need to be able to communicate to and within the world.”

*Correction: This sentence has been updated with the correct version of Sealaska Heritage Institute’s name.

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While the reading and math “wars” have gotten a lot of attention in education in recent years, writing instruction has not received that same focus. That is, until the release of ChatGPT last year.

There isn’t really an agreed-upon approach to teaching writing, according to Sarah Levine, an assistant professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education. But now that ChatGPT is here to stay, experts like Levine are trying to figure how to teach writing to K-12 students in an age of AI.

“The question that teachers are having to ask themselves is, what’s writing for?” she said.

ChatGPT can produce a perfectly serviceable writing “product,” she said. But writing isn’t a product per se — it’s a tool for thinking, for organizing ideas, she said.

“ChatGPT and other text-based tools can’t think for us,” she said. “There’s still things to learn when it comes to writing because writing is a form of figuring out what you think.”

Earlier this year, Levine and her team conducted a pilot study at a high school in San Francisco. Students in an English class were given access to ChatGPT to see how they engaged with the tool.

Some were given prompts that asked them to create an argument based on directions, such as, “Some people say we should have a new mascot at our school. Some people say we should keep our old mascot. What do you think?” Other prompts were more creative, such as asking students to write an outline for a movie script about a new superhero based at their school.

Levine and her team found that students looked to ChatGPT, primarily, for help in two categories: Ideas or inspiration to get started on the prompt questions (for example, “What kind of mascots do other schools have?”) and guidance on the writing process (“How do you write a good ghost story?”).

“What the kids are now getting from this AI is what expert writers already have: a big bank of examples that they can draw from when they’re creating,” Levine said. Using ChatGPT as a sounding board for specific questions like these can help students learn to be stronger writers, she added.

Related: How college educators are using AI in the classroom

While the study is ongoing, the early findings revealed something surprising: Kids weren’t excited about ChatGPT’s writing. “They thought it was ‘too perfect.’ Or ‘like a robot,’” Levine said. “One team that was writing said, ‘We asked ChatGPT to edit our work, and it took out all of our jokes so we put them back.’”

Levine said that, to her, that was the big takeaway of the pilot. She’s heard teachers say they struggle to help students find their voice in writing. When students could contrast their own writing to ChatGPT’s more generic version, Levine said, they were able to “understand what their own voice is and what it does.”

Mark Warschauer, a professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, has spent years studying how technology can change writing instruction and the nature of writing itself. When ChatGPT was released, he decided to tailor some of his research to study ways generative AI could help students and teachers, particularly English language learners and bilingual learners.

Like Levine, Warschauer, director of the university’s Digital Learning Lab, said he believes ChatGPT can help students who struggle with writing to organize their ideas, and edit and revise their writing. Essentially, it could be used as an early feedback tool to supplement the work of a teacher, he said.

As part of a project on the effectiveness of ChatGPT as a tool for giving students feedback on their writing, his team at the Digital Learning Lab placed student essays that had already been evaluated by teachers into ChatGPT and asked the AI to provide its own feedback. Then experts blindly graded both the human and AI feedback. While the experts found the human feedback was a little better overall, the AI feedback was good enough to provide value in the classroom. It could help guide students as they progressed on an assignment, allowing teachers to spend more time with students who need extra support, Warschauer said.

Warschauer’s team has also partnered with UC Irvine’s school of engineering to create an intelligent writing coach, to be called PapyrusAI. The tool, which the teams plan to release next year, would be tailored to help middle school and high school students improve their writing through intensive coaching, he said.

In addition, he said, the tool is being designed to provide a safe and protected way to use AI, to address parents’ and educators’ concerns about student data and privacy on ChatGPT, which stores students’ data.

Stanford’s Levine also sees value in using ChatGPT to coach students on writing. 

“A lot of teachers feel intimidated when it comes to teaching writing, because they themselves don’t necessarily feel like they’re the best writers,” Levine said. ChatGPT can help teachers fill in gaps in writing instruction by working as students’ debate partner or coach she said.

ChatGPT could also help teachers more quickly analyze trends in student writing, identifying areas of success or struggle. If students “don’t understand how to connect one idea to another,” Levine said, Chat GPT could provide this feedback instead of teachers having to write, “Try connecting these ideas using a transition,” on every paper. Teachers could then devote more time to developing lessons that focus on that skill.  

“Writing should be and is a human experience,” Levine said. Teachers can retain that experience, even when using AI. If they help students learn how to use the new tool effectively — much as they now use spellcheck or Grammarly — students will understand that ChatGPT is “more or less a giant autocomplete machine, as opposed to a place that has facts,” she said.

“If we think that clarifying your own thinking is something worth doing, then we need to teach writing,” Levine said. “In other words, writing is a way of learning. It’s not just a way of showing your learning.”

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On May 31, a school board meeting in Hernando County, Florida, made national news when more than 600 hundred people showed up and the meeting lasted until 2:30 a.m. The county had moved the meeting to the high school auditorium to accommodate a large crowd. Fearing violence, it had installed metal detectors and called in police, sheriff’s deputies and a SWAT team.

Kathleen Gates, a retired teacher who had taught for many years at Brooksville Elementary School in the Hernando County School District, described preparing for that school board meeting as if she were going into battle.

Before she left her house that evening, she printed out her will and put it on the table, along with a letter to her family. “I really did not expect to make it home,” she said during a recent conference on teaching difficult topics in the current partisan political environment, particularly in Florida.

The controversy in the rural county just north of Tampa started when a newly elected school board member, backed by the conservative Moms for Liberty group, reported a fifth-grade teacher for showing “Strange World,” a Disney movie with a gay character, in class. While the district had already closed its investigation into the teacher, the school board meeting that spring evening would decide the fate of Superintendent John Stratton, whom Moms for Liberty wanted removed.

While the meeting was heated on both sides, a majority of students, educators and parents who spoke voiced support for Stratton and the school district. Eventually, and unexpectedly, the school board voted to keep him on as superintendent.

“A rural red county in Florida stood up to Moms for Liberty and said ‘no,’” Gates recounted.

Gates was one of four Florida educators to share their recent experiences teaching in the state at the “Freedom to Teach: Confronting Complex Themes in Contested Spaces” conference, hosted by Flagler College in St. Augustine.

Originally designed as an academic conference to share research, the event brought together Florida K-12 and college teachers and students, national journalists and professionals from libraries and museums whose work focuses on history and civics. They discussed how Florida’s political climate, including recent state laws that limit school discussions of race, gender and sexuality, has affected teaching and learning on the ground.

Brandt Robinson, a history teacher from Dunedin High School in Florida, described how, during the 2021-22 school year, a student in his African-American history class dropped out three days in. Robinson later found out that the student’s mother had enrolled him in the class to get a copy of the course syllabus. She filed an appeal with the school board seeking to remove the textbooks in Robinson’s class, accusing him of teaching the concept of critical race theory and saying his course was aligned with The New York Times’ 1619 Project, both of which are now banned by the state’s board of education.

While her appeal was rejected, Robinson said, the parent filed a formal records request for all his class materials and course documents. She then went before the school board accusing Robinson of indoctrinating students with Marxist ideas, he said.

Robinson noted that these events took place even before Florida’s recent laws went into effect. He said incidents like this arose in part because of a white racial backlash in response to the mass protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Robinson, who is also the union representative for the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, said it’s fallen to the state’s educators to be the “the kindest, most decent, but the most fierce and most credible people in the room” at school board meetings and other public events.

One of Robinson’s fellow panelists at the conference, Hayley McCulloch, a U.S. history teacher from Lee County, said many of the day-to-day obstacles teachers face in her district can be linked to what she called the conservative “assault on public education.” Among the challenges facing the district – one of the last places in the country to integrate public schools – is a shortage of nearly 200 teachers that has forced students to miss a lot of learning time.

“We’re being attacked as professionals and intellectuals,” she said, adding that changes to the state’s curriculum and standards on history and civics education have removed any freedom teachers have in the classroom to shape how and what they can teach.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has argued that the education laws are necessary to give parents more control over their children’s learning. He has said of the state law limiting discussions of gender that parents “should be protected from schools using classroom instruction to sexualize their kids as young as 5 years old.” In signing the law curbing discussions of race, DeSantis said, “There is no place for indoctrination or discrimination in Florida.”

Sara Pierce, an assistant principal at Hollywood Hills High School in one of Florida’s more progressive counties, Broward, said that it falls on school administrators to make sure their teachers feel safe in their classrooms.

Teachers “need to have creative freedom and to able to design their curriculum and feel confident in their skill sets,” she said. Even in a blue county such as Broward, she said it has been tough to navigate the state’s new laws.

“If we take care of the teachers, then the teachers are free to then turn around and do their job, which is to take care of the children,” she said.

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While data science isn’t a new subject, there’s been growing interest recently in helping students — in both K-12 and higher ed — gain data science skills.

One reason is the shifting job market, said Zarek Drozda, director of Data Science 4 Everyone, a national initiative based at the University of Chicago. “The top skills in demand today are data analysis, data interpretation, being able to communicate about data,” Drozda said. “It’s hard to find a career or a sector of the economy where data skills are not important.”

With the rise of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT that rely on data sets, students also need to understand how to use AI in a responsible way, he added.

The adoption of data science education hasn’t been without controversy. In 2020, some of California’s public universities allowed applicants to skip Algebra II and substitute data science. The universities walked back the effort this year after experts argued that students were taking less challenging coursework that limited their post-secondary opportunities.

No state is currently getting rid of algebra courses in favor of data science, Drozda said. Rather, some are introducing the subject as an additional option for students. In the last three years, 17 states have added some sort of data science education course to their K-12 offerings, Drozda said.

“There are opportunities to make the barrier to entry low, but the benefit high so that students are able to see the existing school subjects in a context that is relevant to their daily life.”

Zarek Drozda, director of Data Science 4 Everyone, a national initiative based at the University of Chicago

In higher ed, data science is often housed in a particular school or limited to one field of study, such as a mathematics or computer engineering. But North Carolina State University is taking a different approach to teaching the subject, said Rachel Levy, executive director of the school’s new Data Science Academy. N.C. State launched the academy two years ago to introduce the use of the subject across disciplines, from biology and art to English and history.

To help all 10 of its colleges introduce courses incorporating data science, available to students at different levels, the university adopted the All-campus Data science through Accessible Project-based Teaching and learning model, or ADAPT. Examples of interdisciplinary classes available to students in any college include “Introduction to Data Visualization,” “Introduction to R/Python for Data Science” and “R for Biological Research.” The classes are project-based, and history or English major might choose to focus their class project on applying the use of data science to a topic within their major. Students are also encouraged to apply the skills they learn in these classes to other non-data science courses as well.

The university’s College of Education is also using the ADAPT model to prepare future K-12 teachers for the classroom. Using federal grants, N.C. State researchers are studying the model and its impact on teaching and learning. Meanwhile, the Data Science Academy is collaborating with the state’s Department of Public Instruction, hoping to roll out data science education in schools across the state, according to Levy.

Taryn Shelton, the academy’s K-12 data science coordinator, said the goal isn’t to add yet another thing to teachers’ plates, but to help them use data to enrich their lesson plans and expose students to data science skills early on. Her team is working with school districts outside of the tech and research-heavy Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle area, as well as with more rural and underserved districts, to help educators build data science concepts into their curriculum. ‘Shelton’s team also hosts events like mini hackathons where high schoolers can work with data.

“There are lots and lots of ways across the disciplines that teachers can bring in data,” said Levy, the academy’s director. Social studies teachers can help students explore data about people, places, events and cultures, she said, while English teachers might have their students identify and count words or phrases that help create a particular mood in a piece of writing.

If educators introduce data science in authentic ways that connect to students’ interests, Levy said, their comfort with the topic will grow. “People of all ages can engage data in ways that are useful and meaningful and challenging,” she said.

The challenge right now, said Data Science 4 Everyone’s Drozda, is that most students don’t encounter data science until they take AP Statistics or Intro to Data Science toward the end of high school, if they encounter it at all. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Drozda and Levy envision data science being integrated into the elementary and middle school curriculum, with teachers using data sets in biology units about ecosystems, or to analyze economic booms and busts in social studies.

“It’ll be really important for students to build a comfort and familiarity with the data science way of thinking, as well as the computational and technology tools,” said Drozda. “There are opportunities to make the barrier to entry low, but the benefit high so that students are able to see the existing school subjects in a context that is relevant to their daily life.”

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In March, the Minneapolis Public Schools district was the target of a large ransomware attack that resulted in thousands of confidential documents — student mental health records, sexual assault incidents, suspensions and truancy reports, child abuse allegations, special education plans — dumped online.

Last year, a similar data breach of the Los Angeles school district led to thousands of students’ psychological records uploaded to the dark web. In 2020, Baltimore County Public Schools was hit with a cyberattack that disrupted the district’s remote learning programs, froze its operations and cost the school system nearly $10 million. On Sept. 1, Pennsylvania’s Chambersburg Area School District was the latest school district to be hit with a cyberattack.

Cyberattacks have become a growing threat to school districts across the country in recent years, with cybercrime gangs viewing school systems as soft targets because of their lack of cybersecurity infrastructure. While many school districts are starting to take steps to secure that infrastructure, there’s still a long way to go, according to experts.

“Students normally shouldn’t have to worry about their privacy and their safety when they’re going around the internet in a school-approved manner,” said Jake Chanenson, a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and one of the authors of a study released earlier this year on the privacy and security challenges facing K-12 education. But because schools don’t have enough staff with the expertise to properly vet safety risks associated with educational technology, he said, the increased use of that tech is putting students at risk.

School districts that have been hit say they are taking new safety precautions. After a phishing attack in 2019, the Atlanta Public Schools district hired a private firm to conduct security assessments of its networks to find blind spots and weaknesses, according to Olufemi “Femi” Aina, the district’s executive director of information technology. The district has also backed up sensitive school data offsite, invested in insurance that covers cybersecurity liability and added security procedures like multi-factor authentication on school devices, he said. In addition, the district is providing cybersecurity education to employees and students. School faculty and staff participate in mock phishing drills and are sent to cybersecurity training. Students are being taught to set up multifactor authentication and choose complicated passwords.

“If you can prevent your employees or make them more aware, so that they do not click on those harmful emails, or respond to those types of messages, it can be just as effective, if not more, than a lot of different systems that we have,” Aina said.

Days or weeks of missed school and lost instructional time for students can result when sensitive student or employee information, such as social security numbers, student health records and disability diagnoses, is compromised due to a ransomware attack or data breach, he said.

Related: ‘Don’t rush to spend on edtech’

The federal government is starting to step in. During a recent Department of Education cybersecurity summit cohosted by first lady Jill Biden, Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, the agency announced several new initiatives and released guidance for school districts on how to tackle cyber threats and what to do if they are hit by an attack.

The education department plans to develop a special council made up of federal, state, local, tribal and territorial governments to coordinate policy and communication between government and the education sector to strengthen school district’s cyber defenses, according to Kristina Ishmael, deputy director of the Office of Educational Technology. She called it a “first step” in the department’s strategy to protect schools and districts from cybersecurity threats and help them respond to attacks.

Meanwhile, Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel has proposed a pilot cybersecurity program, which would run separately, but in tandem, with the FCC’s E-Rate program, which was created in the early 1990s as a way to provide affordable internet for schools and libraries. The three-year pilot would provide $200 million to schools and libraries eligible for the E-Rate program to use toward hiring cybersecurity experts and beefing up school network security.  

Groups such as the Consortium of School Networking, or CoSN, a K-12 tech education advocacy group, have long been calling on the FCC to update the E-Rate program to include more cybersecurity protections, said CoSN’s CEO Keith Krueger. “We’ve been saying this is a five-alarm fire for the last two years,” he said.

“None of that really solves the problem that only about one in three school districts has a full-time equivalent person dedicated to cybersecurity.”

Keith Krueger, CEO, Consortium of School Networking, or CoSN

Krueger said he doesn’t believe a three-year pilot is needed to determine the demand for this funding; a coalition of education organizations that includes his group is calling for the pilot to be limited to one year and for the FCC to make cybersecurity funding permanent at the pilot’s conclusion. He added that while the federal government’s announcement of resources for school districts is helpful, much more funding to support cybersecurity infrastructure is needed.

“None of that really solves the problem that only about one in three school districts has a full-time equivalent person dedicated to cybersecurity,” he said. While they wait for additional funding, he said school districts need to get creative in their methods for attracting the cybersecurity professionals their districts need, he said. Such approaches could include partnering with local community colleges, vocational or technical schools to provide internships for students in cybersecurity programs.

Marshini Chetty, associate professor at the University of Chicago and one of the lead researchers of the study on privacy and security risks to K-12 education, recommends that school districts develop a cybersecurity plan or checklist that outlines who to call in case of an attack and how to inform students and faculty. Her co-author on the study, PhD candidate Chanenson, said districts should dedicate a professional development day to cybersecurity and best practices for staff as part of back-to-school planning.

Atlanta’s Aina said school districts aren’t usually able to pay top dollar for cybersecurity professionals. Given the growing threats to school systems, Aina said district leaders need to give school technology leaders access to more funding so they can keep protections for the sensitive data in their schools up-to-date.  

“Most people don’t remember cybersecurity until there’s an incident and then it becomes the buzzword,” he said. “But cybersecurity is all about being ready, being proactive and building those layers around your critical assets to keep you safe before the incident happens.”

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One day this spring, Victoria Trice’s high school students in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, peered through virtual reality headsets as part of a lesson on Afrofuturism. 

In Philadelphia, Sharahn Santana encouraged her tenth graders to reflect on what might have happened if Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling upholding racial segregation, had been decided differently.  

In Norfolk, Virginia, the juniors and seniors enrolled in an African American history class taught by Ed Allison were working on their capstone projects, using nearby Fort Monroe, the site where the first enslaved Africans landed in 1619, as a jumping off point to explore their family history.   

These teachers all have one thing in common: their devotion to deeply exploring the history of Black people in America — a topic that has often been downplayed, or simply left out of, general history lessons.  
 
Such classes are under a microscope after the political skirmish set off when Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida rejected portions of an African American studies course piloted by the College Board, saying that the Advanced Placement class teaches concepts specifically forbidden by the state’s ban on teaching “critical race theory” and “divisive concepts.” At least five other states are examining the course to see if it is contrary to similar state laws. In July, DeSantis’s administration again stirred criticism when it released new state standards for Black history that critics say are incomplete and downplay the harms of slavery and racism. For example, the standards direct that students be taught that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”  

“When we think about the history curriculum, white people have been told that they’re the most historically important people in the world. So when they’re not centered in that narrative, or their ideas are not centered, then they tend to say this is not of educational value.”

LaGarrett King, founder and director of the Center for K–12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University of Buffalo 

The controversies have had subtle reverberations for the classrooms in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Virginia too. In Philadelphia and Norfolk, it has strengthened educators’ resolve to teach comprehensively about the subject and added to their sense of urgency. But in Kentucky, Trice, the only educator in the state to teach the pilot A.P. course targeted by Gov. DeSantis, has grown increasingly skeptical that the class will spread to other Kentucky schools, even as her politically liberal district doubles down on a commitment to African American history it made as part of a curriculum revamp in 2018.  

It’s important that school districts not shy away from offering Black history courses despite the recent attacks on the subject, says LaGarrett King, founder and director of the Center for K–12 Black History and Racial Literacy Education at the University of Buffalo. He adds that it’s not surprising that Black history classes make some people uncomfortable. 

“When we think about the history curriculum, white people have been told that they’re the most historically important people in the world. So when they’re not centered in that narrative, or their ideas are not centered, then they tend to say this is not of educational value,” said King. 

Related: Why students are ignorant about the Civil Rights Movement  

Adults who learned U.S. history through a particular lens may have a hard time comprehending that history classes are taught differently, or contain different perspectives, than when they were young, he said.  

King, who created a framework to teach Black history at the K-12 level that’s being used in Trice’s district, said the core of a good Black history course goes beyond surface-level instruction on slavery and Civil Rights to explore concepts of institutional racism and anti-Blackness. It gives students the knowledge and skills to draw connections to present-day events such as the Black Lives Matter movement and the police killings of George Floyd, Michael Brown and other Black Americans, he said. And it eschews what he calls “hero worship” — overly simplistic portrayals of Civil Rights leaders and others — for more critical, complex thinking and narratives. 

Different states, school systems and individual schools have taken wildly different approaches to incorporating Black history, with some making its study a graduation requirement and others deprioritizing it and relying on textbooks that haven’t been updated for years. This year, The Hechinger Report spent time in three different high school classrooms where teachers have prioritized Black history in this contentious political climate, to learn how African American history studies has changed over the years and what it might look like for students to receive a substantive, nuanced education on the topic.  

LOUISVILLE 

Just blocks from where hundreds of protestors gathered near the Ohio River waterfront after the death of Breonna Taylor in 2020 sits Central High School.  

The school is steeped in history: It was the first African American public school in Kentucky, and counts boxer Muhammad Ali among its alumni. Because of its history, it’s not surprising that Central High was the only school in the state selected by the College Board to pilot its new A.P. African American Studies course. Seventy percent of the school’s students are Black or African American, and a little over six percent are of Hispanic descent. 

There are just 25 students enrolled in the course at Central High, offered in two sections and taught by Trice, who once walked the halls of Central High herself, taking part in the school’s quiz bowl Black history team as a student in the mid-2000s. On the Wednesday following the A.P. exam, Trice promised her students that the lesson would be on a lighter note — “no more annotations,” she told the class.  

Before Trice introduced the topic of Afrofuturism, she asked her students to think about the dreams they have for the future. Then she asked them, “Where do you think we will be collectively as a Black community? Everybody included, whether your people have been here 300 years, or they’ve been here for three.” 

The students, all of whom are Black, grew serious. There were a few “hmmms” and murmurs as they pondered the question. 

Trices explained that Afrofuturism, one of the course’s final topics, is about “centering Black folks,” their identities and stories, in ways that blend the past and future. She cited the film Black Panther as one example, combining images of various African cultures with advanced technology. She then showed her students the music video for an early 1990’s song “Prototype,” by AfroFuturism Hip-Hop duo OutKast. 

Next she handed out VR headsets and asked her students to grab their cellphones and head to her Google classroom, where she had posted three different experiences that showcase Afrofuturism: an Afrofuturism art museum, a short VR film and a musical performance. Later, students were asked to create a piece of afro-futuristic art, using a photo of themselves, that reflected their past and their hopes for the future. 

“At the crux of Black Futures is this concept of dreaming and how can we turn those dreams into realities. And that’s a beautiful concept,” King said.  

Related: States were adding lessons about Native American history. Then came the anti-CRT movement 

Trice’s students have spent the better part of the year immersed in learning about early African societies, the great West African empires, the transatlantic slave trade, Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Movement and more contemporary topics, such as reparations and Black Lives Matter.  

They’re also acutely aware that they are the only students in Kentucky taking a course that has become controversial nationally. “I’m not surprised,” said Jeremiah Taylor, a junior. He said while there’s still a lot of hostility toward Black history, being in this class gives them the opportunity “to do a deep dive into Black history,” which he says he wouldn’t get in another history class. 

According to Trice, last year the course attracted a limited number of students — all Black and Latino — because the College Board didn’t offer college credit during its pilot year of African American studies. While she’s glad that next year’s course has attracted more interest, the close-knit nature of her class has allowed for open discussions, she said.  

“We’ve been able to kind of create an environment where the kids feel safe to say what their opinion is. It’s not always the same, but we’ve been able to have some really good discussions just in general about racism, about issues of otherism, issues of financial differences,” Trice said. “We talked about the economic impact of slavery to go from being money to trying to catch up with everyone else, who was given that opportunity of reaching this ‘American dream,’ and having 300-400 years of being someone else’s money.” 

“We’ve been able to kind of create an environment where the kids feel safe to say what their opinion is.

Victoria Trice, who teaches the pilot A.P. African American history course in Jefferson Public Schools, Kentucky 

Those kinds of discussions also require a supportive school culture and administration, she said. Many of the students’ families are unlikely to complain about the history curriculum, Trice said, in part because of Central High School’s demographics. 

Given the political environment right now, she’s skeptical that other schools in the state will pick up the course once it becomes available in the fall of 2024.  

Trice said without support from school administrators, teachers may be scared or unprepared to teach the course for fear of parent and community backlash. “I don’t know how you really cherry-pick what you’d like to cover in an A.P. class. You can’t skip the slavery unit, or you can’t think to skip Harriet Jacobs’s primary source of her narratives of a slave girl, where she’s talking about being sexually harassed by slaveholder,” she said. “Those are tough topics; teachers may not want to cover the possibility of sexual assault, the history of that when it comes to Black women during enslavement.”   

Maeva Pozoko, a junior in the class, said everyone should have the option to take a comprehensive Black history course in high school. 

“It’s important to know how it happened, what is the effect of that because we still live with the effects of what happened,” she said.  

Pozoko said while the backlash to the course felt at times “like a slap in the face,” the experience has made her want to continue learning about the subject. She is signed up to take another Black history course in the fall, she said.  

PHILADELPHIA 

Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson was on the screen at the front of the classroom, laying out the judge’s then-losing argument that segregating people by race in rail coaches was unconstitutional.  

Standing before her students, Santana, their history teacher, wanted to know: What did it mean that the 1896 Plessy case had offered a chance for America “to move up the timeline for racial reform,” as public interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson put it? How would our lives be different today?  

The tenth graders in Santana’s class lobbed answers. 

“Things would be better because it would have fast-forwarded rights for Black people,” said one student.  

“We would have more respect,” said another.    

“There wouldn’t be a large racial wealth gap,” said a third.  

In every high school in Philadelphia, there’s an African American history class like this one. That’s because, in 2005, Philadelphia began requiring that students take African American history to graduate, the first big city to do so. In this school system, in a politically liberal city in a swing state where more than half of students are Black and nearly a quarter are Hispanic, there’s been little of the pushback or controversy over African American history that has roiled other school districts and states.  

“In kindergarten and middle school, we only ever talked about Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King.”

Haajah Robinson, student, Parkway Northwest High School for Peace and Justice, Philadelphia 

“We have a duty to expose our children to multiple ideas and perspectives and allow them to wrestle with ideas and be part of the larger dialogue,” said Ismael Jimenez, a former classroom teacher who now serves as the director of social studies in the district’s Office of Curriculum and Instruction. Black history, he said, “is arguably just a counternarrative to the larger mainstream story which we’ve been indoctrinated with.”  

That said, the district has had its struggles with the mandatory course. It’s difficult to find enough teachers with the subject-area knowledge to teach it, and over the years, many of the teachers who’d initially received professional development in the subject had left, Jimenez said.  

In 2021, when he joined the district’s central office, the Philadelphia school system committed to investing in training for teachers and revamping the curriculum to include more primary sources, among other changes. The district also began holding workshops on Black studies for all educators, featuring speakers such as scholars Hasan Jeffries and Bettina Love. 

Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies 

Santana has been teaching the course at Philadelphia’s Parkway Northwest High School for Peace and Social Justice since 2019. Unlike many of the teachers who teach the course, she has a background in the topic, having taken African American history classes as an undergraduate history major at Fisk University. And, also unlike most teachers of the African American history course in Philadelphia, she’s Black, which she said helps some students at her majority-Black school feel more comfortable opening up.   

Until now, the students said, the African American history they’d been taught in school tended to be superficial.  

“In kindergarten and middle school, we only ever talked about Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King,” said Haajah Robinson, 15, speaking during an interview in the school library. “But Ms. Santana goes deep.” She had her students read David Walker’s Appeal, Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, stories from the abolitionist paper The Liberator and more.    

“It’s important that you know what I’m giving you is facts. I know Black history is challenged a lot and looked at as a controversial thing,” she said. “I don’t want you guys to think, ‘Oh, Ms. Santana is pro-Black. She’s just saying that.’ ”  

She added, “I want you all to know what our people went through because you guys have a torch to carry. … When you leave my class, I want you to feel proud.”  

By contrast, Santana, 43, said that as a K-12 student, “I learned about Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Thoreau, and just slaves. No names. Blacks were just slaves. And Lincoln freed you,” she said. “It never sat well with me, and it was the catalyst to want to research more and was why I went to study history in the first place.” 

“I want you all to know what our people went through because you guys have a torch to carry. … When you leave my class, I want you to feel proud.”

Sharahn Santana, who teaches African American history in Philadelphia public schools 

To Santana’s students, the recent controversy around teaching about racism was confounding. The idea that white children — who make up about 13 percent of students in this district — shouldn’t be exposed to conversations about America’s racist past lest it make them feel uncomfortable or guilty felt counterproductive.  

“A lot of these bad things happened, but it happened. This is really what went down,” said Zaniyah Roundree, 15. “You might have to sit there and feel bad for a little bit in order to come up with a solution about how we can improve our society based off the things that happened in the past.”  

Jimenez said the current controversies over African American history have deepened the Philadelphia district’s commitment to prioritize the subject. Topics that have drawn the most ire from conservatives, such as Black Lives Matter and intersectionality, aren’t part of required instruction, he said, but they are included in the course’s suggested learning experiences.  

For her part, Santana said she doesn’t flinch from exploring connections between historical events and contemporary realities such as housing and school segregation. But she also doesn’t tend to cover very recent topics such as Black Lives Matter. Her class begins around 2000 BC with lessons about ancient African kingdoms and extends through the Civil Rights era.  

“I try not to get too political,” she said. “I try to stick to the accomplishments, the work, the experience, the laws, the changes that were made, the watershed moments, and I let the kids make their own decisions.”  

NORFOLK 

Newspaper clippings and student assignments cover the walls of Ed Allison’s classroom at Granby High School in Norfolk, Virginia — a testament to the years that he has spent at the school teaching history, including an African American history elective that he helped create. 

In 2008, a dark-haired Barack Obama, then a Democratic candidate for president, visited his class to tell students to set high expectations for themselves. Other articles commemorate the work he and his students did in 2021 with the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO, which has worked to memorialize and shed light on the slave trade. About 12 miles away from the school is Fort Monroe, once known as Point Comfort, where the first documented enslaved Africans landed in 1619. Some of his students presented at a U.N.-sponsored Global Student Conference on Point Comfort’s history. 

To Allison, it is all much to be proud of — and all just a part of teaching a complete story of the United States, past and present.   

“We teach factual stuff that has been documented in history,” Allison said. “Is it a tough history? Yes. But is it critical for people to understand the history? Yes.” 

While African American history classes have faced recent controversy, in Norfolk, the electives have been in place for years. In 2019, then-Gov. Ralph Northam convened a panel that helped develop a Virginia African American history elective that is offered statewide and is one of the classes that Allison teaches. This coming school year, he’ll be teaching the A.P. African American history course. 

In Virginia, one of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s first acts after he was sworn in was signing an order banning the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts,” which his administration said “instruct students to only view life through the lens of race and presumes that some students are consciously or unconsciously racist, sexist, or oppressive, and that other students are victims.” Allison said the order has not yet affected his course, which was developed by teachers within the state. However, Virginia is among the states that says it is “reviewing” the advanced placement Black studies course that will be offered nationally. At least three districts in addition to Norfolk say they plan to offer the advanced placement course in the 2023-24 school year.   

Related: Inside the Christian legal campaign to get prayer back in public schools 

Virginia’s African American history elective spends time on enslavement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, race relations and other “heavy” topics. But there are also sections on music, art, entrepreneurship and other achievements, Allison said.   

Like many students, Alexander Bradshaw took field trips to Fort Monroe when he was a younger student. The historical site is a popular field trip destination, but it was only during Bradshaw’s time in Allison’s class that the significance of the location was clear to the 17-year-old junior. He is now digging into his own family tree — genetic testing shows the family has roots in modern-day Congo and Benin, he said.  

Bradshaw, like the other students, said he’s aware of the controversy around the course. But the class “helps you feel more comfortable in yourself — you feel confident knowing where you came from and the history behind it. I feel like everybody should be able to know that.”

“Often I go home and I always have something to tell. I’m telling my family what I’ve learned. I just feel like that’s a very crucial part for us.”

Carrington Smith, high school student, Norfolk, Virginia 

Carrington Smith, also a 17-year-old junior, ended up in the course by accident — “to be honest, when I first got my schedule, I didn’t know what it was,” she said. A guidance counselor had made the schedule. 

But now she appreciates the course, especially the section on Black artists. 

“I just feel like a lot of people should know about this class,” Smith said. “Often I go home and I always have something to tell. I’m telling my family what I’ve learned. I just feel like that’s a very crucial part for us.” 

Katrina Acheson, an 18-year-old senior, enrolled in the African American history course because she needed a history credit. As a white student, she started off feeling that she might be “intruding — that I was taking away space from other people and that I wasn’t supposed to be here because I’m white.” 

“We teach factual stuff that has been documented in history. Is it a tough history? Yes. But is it critical for people understand the history? Yes.”

Ed Allison, African American history teacher, Norfolk, Virginia 

During the year-long course, that feeling went away for her, she said. “I’ve been really welcomed. It is emotional to everyone in the room, but I think it’s very important that it is taught. Being uncomfortable is an emotion that everyone experiences.” 

Allison said he hopes “like-minded people” will embrace, as his students have, this broader view of the American story. 

“Just let me teach history. That’s all. That’s it,” Allison said. “And what they decide to do with it …  you’re making it political. You’re saying ‘critical race theory,’ you’re saying ‘woke’ — that’s  them. And I think fair-minded people have to understand that’s not what it is.” 

This story about Black history in schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. 

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