Currently, three-quarters of school-age students in the U.S. need more education on issues such as race, racism, history, sex, and gender, or are unable to receive such classes, according to the brief. Being educated under state-level measures that significantly restrict or completely prohibit them. Post-reviews thousands of state laws, governor's orders, and State Board of Education policies. This restrictive law alone affects nearly half of Americans between the ages of 5 and 19.
Since 2017, 38 states have adopted 114 such laws, regulations and orders, according to the newspaper. The majority of policies are restrictive in nature, with 66 percent restricting or prohibiting classes and discussions about society's most sensitive topics, and 34 percent requiring or expanding them. As an example, a 2023 Kentucky law bans classes on human sexuality through fifth grade and bans all instruction that “explores gender identity.” Meanwhile, a 2021 Rhode Island law requires all students to study “African heritage and history” by the time they graduate from high school.
The Post included in its analysis only measures that could directly impact student learning. So 100 of the laws in the Post's database apply only to K-12 campuses, where states have far more power to shape curriculum. At public higher education institutions, courts have held that the First Amendment protects professors' right to teach what they want, but instead the law restricts programs such as student and faculty training and receptions. The target is
The division is markedly partisan. According to the paper, the majority of regulatory laws and policies (nearly 90 percent) were enacted in states that voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Meanwhile, states that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 have enacted nearly 80 percent of expansive laws and policies.
The proliferation of laws regulating school curriculum is unprecedented in U.S. history in volume and scope, said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies education history and policy. While controversy and debate over classroom instruction is nothing new, Zimmerman said the state has never intervened so aggressively. Decide on local school rules. School districts have traditionally had wide discretion to shape classes.
He said it was still an open question whether all the legislation would translate into curriculum changes, and he expected some schools and teachers might reject changes to the education law. . Still, a nationally representative survey released this year by the Rand Corporation found that 65% of K-12 teachers reported limiting instruction on “political and social issues.” .
“What the law shows us is that we have tremendous differences in how we imagine America,” Zimmerman said. “State legislatures are now using the power of the law to engrave some views and block others. That's why we're deeply divided in America.”
In reality, these divisions mean that what children learn about, for example, the role slavery played in the founding of our country, or the possibility that a person might identify as non-binary, may be different from living in a red state. This means that it may change depending on whether you live in a blue state or a blue state.
Lawmakers promoting restrictive education laws say they offer a corrective to what they call the recent left-wing takeover of education. Over the past decade or so, teachers and professors alike have encouraged students to embrace liberal perspectives on topics ranging from police brutality to whether gender is binary or a spectrum. He claims he started forcing her.
Representative John Regan (R) of Tennessee has announced that his state would restrict or ban instruction and training that addresses race, bias, sexual orientation, and gender identity on both K-12 and college campuses. He said he sponsored or co-sponsored several laws in the United States. The laws he helped pass do not restrict education.
“It limits indoctrination,” Ragan said. He said that under state law, “the information presented is factually accurate and worth knowing.”
By contrast, proponents of enlargement laws argue that they promote conditions in which students from all backgrounds can reflect themselves in the classroom. Sen. Marco Rias (D) of Washington state said this will make it easier for all students to learn and succeed while teaching their peers to tolerate each other's differences.
Lias is the author of the law the state passed last month, which states that it “represents people of different racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, people with different learning needs, and people with disabilities. [and] LGBTQ people. He was inspired to propose the bill by hearing from educators who wanted to create more welcoming classrooms and by memories of his own experiences as a gay student in the 1980s and 1990s. Ta. Back then, LGBTQ role models were not taught or accepted, he said. school.
“When schools are broadly inclusive of all identities brought into the classroom, everyone can thrive and do better,” Rias said.
To build its database of education laws, the Post analyzed more than 2,200 bills, policies, gubernatorial directives and State Board of Education regulations introduced since 2017. The Post uses state legislative databases, education law tracking tools maintained by nonpartisan nonprofit groups across the country, and the websites of various advocacy groups that monitor curriculum laws.
How did the curriculum policy become established?
Some blue states began enacting expansive education laws in the late 2010s. According to the paper, from 2017 to 2020, 10 states passed laws or regulations requiring schools to teach about the history of underrepresented groups such as Black Americans, Pacific Islanders and LGBTQ Americans.
Jennifer Berkshire, an education research lecturer at Yale University, said state and school leaders consulted more than a dozen studies published from the 1990s to 2017 that found that children They found that when students saw people like themselves included in the curriculum, their grades, attendance, and graduation rates increased.
“They thought, 'Our curriculum isn't representative enough,'” Berkshire said. “The argument was that we needed to do things differently if we were to achieve the goal of full rights and civic participation for children.”
Fourteen of these laws, or 36%, were rushed into effect in 2021, a year after the police killing of George Floyd sparked mass demonstrations and a national reckoning over racial injustice. At the time, activists, teachers, parents, and high school students across the country were demanding that schools teach more black history and feature more black writers.
Of the wide range of laws and policies analyzed by the Post, the majority (69 percent) require or expand education on race and racial issues, particularly black history and ethnic studies. About a quarter have added or enhanced education on both LGBTQ and racial issues. Only 8% focus exclusively on LGBTQ lives and topics.
But an onslaught of restrictive laws in red states also began in 2021, often prompted by parental concerns about the curriculum.
School closures during the coronavirus pandemic first stoked fears as some mothers and fathers, who had been able to glimpse unprecedented lessons in the era of laptop schooling, feared that their children would not be able to learn. Because you realize that you don't like what you're doing or don't trust it.
Soon, some parents began complaining that the classes were too skewed toward left-wing views and focused too much on irrelevant discussions of race, gender, and sexuality. This is the kind of lament that conservative commentators and politicians have taken up. National groups like Moms for Liberty have formed to call for and combat left-leaning education in public schools.
Their concerns quickly became law. In 2021, 26 restrictive education laws and policies were passed in mostly red states. The following year, 19 such laws and policies were added, and the year after that, 25 more.
“If parents are upset about what they're seeing, they should go to school board meetings,” said Robert Pondiscio, a senior education fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. , will take up the issue with members of Congress.” “And the legislators will do what they're supposed to do: pass laws.”
How restrictions and expansions work
Forty-seven percent of multiple restriction laws target both race and gender education. About a third impact only education about gender identity and sexuality, and 21 percent impact only education about race.
Almost 40% of these laws work by giving permission to parents. It stipulates that there should be greater control over the curriculum and the ability to review, object to, or delete course content and opt out of instruction. Schools have long allowed parents to be informally involved in education. However, many new laws give greater weight to and require parental input.
Additionally, approximately 40% of laws prohibit teaching a long list of vague concepts related to race, sex, or gender in schools.
These delegitimized concepts typically include the notion that certain merits, values, beliefs, status, and privileges are tied to race or gender. Or the theory that students should feel ashamed or guilty because of their race, gender, or racial past. One such law passed in Georgia in 2022 states that “individuals cannot be held personally responsible for acts committed in the past by other individuals of the same race solely because of their race.” It is prohibited to teach that “you have to bear the burden.”
At the university level, among the measures passed in recent years are that higher education institutions hold “mandatory gender or sexual diversity training or counseling,” as well as “all forms of racially indicative orientations and requirements.” There is a 2021 Oklahoma law that prohibits doing so. Or sex stereotyping. ”
By contrast, California's 2023 bill would require state community college faculty to adopt “teaching, learning, and professional practices” that reflect “antiracist principles.”
Some experts predicted that politically divergent leadership would lead to further division in society.
“When kids are taught a completely different story about what America is, it's going to be difficult for adults to talk to each other,” said Rachel Rosenberg, an assistant professor of education at Hartwick College.
But Pondiscio said there has always been a tension in American society between the public interest in education and the interest of parents in determining the values that are passed on to their children. He said the conflict has changed from acute to chronic and is currently in the acute phase. “But I don't think it's inappropriate. I think it's a natural part of democratic governance and oversight,” Pondiscio said.
He added: “One man's 'chilling effect' is another man's proper vigilance.”
