In the News

. . . This article highlights resources that social studies educators can bring into their classrooms to teach climate change and connect it to the effect it has on communities, governance, population movements, and much more. . . . Another resource for teaching climate change is the Zinn Education Project, which features teaching activities, testimonials, and experiences in “From the New Deal to the Green New Deal: Stories of Crisis and Possibility.”

Though nineteen states have passed laws or imposed rules to restrict how public school teachers discuss race, racism, or other subjects deemed  “divisive” in their classrooms, many educators are pushing back on these boundaries and are using every tool at their disposal to help students understand U.S. history and social justice movements.

In fact, more than 13,000 teachers in forty-seven states are currently teaching The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,  young readers edition, an adaptation of Jeanne Theoharis’s award-winning 2013 deconstruction of the “national fable” that reduces Parks to a tired, middle-aged woman who simply took a seat on a bus and inadvertently started a movement.

In the Chinatown-International District (CID), where the Teach the Truth rally was held June 12, 2022, students, educators, and activists gathered for a walking tour of a neighborhood with frequent stops at sites of historical significance. June’s CID rally followed a March historical tour of the Central District, both involving a guide with a mic followed by a speaker wheeled through the streets. Organizers put together an information-packed 2-mile route, taking just over two hours to walk, that weaved through the CID, Pioneer Square, and down to the Marion Street Bridge before turning back towards the CID.

A new report has found that U.S. students aren’t adequately taught about the Reconstruction Era, the period from 1865 to 1877 in which white supremacists undermined efforts to reintegrate former Black slaves into the post-Civil War United States. As a result, many students remain ignorant about the period and its connection to the present-day fight for racial justice. The report, released by the Zinn Education Project, found that numerous U.S. school teachers quickly summarize, skip, or minimize lessons from the era over fears that it might upset parents angry over “indoctrination” or “critical race theory.”

Schools need to be a whole lot more honest with America’s students. If we don’t teach students about the past, we aren’t equipping them with the tools to succeed in the future. And any history of America is woefully incomplete without a thoughtful examination of post-Civil War Reconstruction.

Opponents of “critical race theory” will hear the voices of educators, parents, students, and community organizers who refuse to lie about the true history of the United States. This is the kind of grassroots action that is inspiring hundreds of people in the teach truth movement who are currently making plans to gather at historic sites in their communities from June 11-12 — sites, like the African American Civil War Memorial in Washington, D.C., and Stone Mountain Park in Georgia that reveal something about the struggle against structural racism and oppression, and symbolize the history that teachers would be required to lie about or omit if these bills become law.

Most American students graduate high school without ever learning a complete and unvarnished account of their nation’s history. Systemic racism within the educational system, the historical erasure of Black and Brown narratives, and the manipulation of curriculum standards and textbook content have long undermined even the best efforts to teach the full truth about the history and the persistent legacy of genocide and enslavement in the United States. Recent Conservative efforts to redefine and weaponize the educational approach to history dubbed “critical race theory” has made this job even harder.

Shortly after Alabama’s state board of education passed a resolution last August to ban public schools from teaching or purchasing materials that “impute fault, blame,” or cause students “to feel guilt or anguish” about the legacy of slavery or ongoing racial injustice, members of the Birmingham, Alabama, school board pushed back by passing a resolution of their own.