Jan Resseger looks at the history of government attempts to suppress the teaching of honest history. Reposted with permission.
When I read Dee Brown’s 1970 book, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I learned that treaties, abrogated treaties, and U.S. Army battles with the American Indian nations of the northern plains of the American West began after 1862, the year Congress passed the Homestead Act. This mere fact helped me, someone who grew up in northern Montana, put together all sorts of things that I hadn’t thought much about. I immediately understood the meaning of the term “settler colonialism,” which I certainly had not studied in middle and high school in the early 1960s. Learning this history didn’t make me feel frightened or ashamed; instead it helped me put together a whole lot of things about American history that I had never fully grasped.
This is the sort of history that was banned earlier this year in the state where I live now, Ohio, with the passage of Ohio Senate Bill 1. Honest exploration of American history is also the target of the Trump administration’s effort to insert its ideological bias into history and social studies teaching across K-12 public schools and the nation’s colleges and universities.
I first became aware of the war on honest teaching about the history of slavery and racism in June of 2021 when the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey and Laura Meckler profiled the nation’s preeminent culture war provocateur, Christopher Rufo, who appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to attack “critical race theory” and subsequently tweeted a description of his strategy to poison the term: “We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category… The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.”
Last April, the U.S. Department of Education threatened to slash K-12 public school districts’ Title I funding, unless their local school superintendents and their states sign an agreement to end all programming and policy that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion. President Trump’s Department of Education has alleged that investing education dollars into such programs discriminates against students who were not historically marginalized. For example, the Trump administration followed up by denying funding for the Chicago Public Schools due to their Black Student Success Plan.
The NY Times‘ Dana Goldstein reports that Trump administration pressure has had a chilling effect on school curricula as educators and publishers of curricula struggle to understand what they can teach without imperiling federal funding: “In the Trump era, history and civics education are under a microscope. Several major curriculum publishers have withdrawn products from the market, while others have found that teachers are shying away from lessons that were once uncontroversial, on topics as basic as constitutional limits on executive power… As recently as last year, many social studies teachers reported success in withstanding political pressure. Now there is growing evidence that the landscape is shifting. In a September poll, more than half of the teachers who responded said that political pressure had caused them to modify their curriculums or classroom discussions, a sharp increase from March.”
Goldstein covers Brown University’s decision, as it negotiated with the Trump administration to reach a settlement to protect federal research dollars, to end the distribution of a 30-year-old “Choices” high school history curriculum. She describes the Anti-Defamation League’s decision to discontinue the distribution of lesson plans about sexism against women, transgender identity, sexist tropes in video games, violence against Black men, Frederick Douglass, and voting rights. She also reports on a 28 percent decline in page views of free, online materials posted by iCivics, an organization “founded by Sandra Day O’Connor to provide free, nonpartisan curriculum materials.”
Goldstein adds that California Governor Gavin Newsom, leader of a Democratic-led state, retreated recently by signing a budget that defunds an ethnic studies program he had previously led the state to require for all high school students. However, redder states like Ohio have been willing to go even farther than the federal government in trying to control the teaching of history. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, for example, signed Ohio Senate Bill 1 on March 28 of this year. In last Sunday’s Columbus Dispatch, Sheridan Hendrix explores the wave of confusion and fear across the state as faculty have tried to understand the law’s vaguely defined requirements:
“The law, among other things, bans diversity, equity and inclusion programs on public college campuses, bans faculty strikes, limits the power of tenure among university educators and prevents higher education institutions from taking positions on ‘controversial beliefs or policies’… SB1 officially went into effect in late June… One piece of the law that has been particularly confusing for some faculty and students is the banning of institutional positions on controversial topics. SB1 defines a ‘controversial belief or policy’ as ‘any belief or policy that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.’ … It also requires that universities ‘will not encourage, discourage, require, or forbid students, faculty, or administrators to endorse, assent to, or publicly express a given ideology, political stance or view, or a social policy, nor will the institution require students to do any of those things to obtain an undergraduate or postgraduate degree’ … Faculty members at multiple public universities statewide told The Dispatch that the speed by which SB1 was implemented has led to over-compliance…. (B)etween the law’s ambiguity, continued attacks on higher education at the federal level, examples of shared governance being diminished in states like Texas and Florida, there is an unease among many faculty and staff members statewide.”
An earlier version of Ohio Senate Bill 1 was introduced several years ago, and the law passed this year following years of protests. In his personal blog, Oberlin College professor emeritus, Steven Volk addressed an earlier 2023 version of the bill: “By forbidding students from engaging in an honest study of the complex past, they won’t make that past—and its ongoing impact—magically disappear. By denying that our educational system is shaped by inequity, they won’t prevent marginalization from impacting student lives… And by placing faculty under the hawkish supervision of administrators, trustees, and private citizens, they are certainly not going to enable Ohio to hire the best faculty and attract the most curious and committed students.”
At the federal level, efforts to protest Trump’s attack on “woke” programming in colleges and K-12 public schools are ongoing. Last February, Seattle high school teacher Jesse Hagopian explained the federal law that prohibits the federal government from prescribing K-12 public school curricula: “Title 20, Section 1232a of the United States Code (20 U.S.C. § 1232a) explicitly prohibits the federal government from directing or controlling school curricula — a provision that directly contradicts Trump’s attempt to ban discussions of equity, making his executive order not only authoritarian but also unlawful — stating: ‘No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system…’ ”
In mid-September, in the Federal Register, the U.S. Department of Education proposed a formal rule to define patriotic education “for use in currently authorized discretionary grant programs or programs that may be authorized in the future.” Just last week, the Education Law Center submitted a formal comment to Education Secretary Linda McMahon to protest the Department of Education’s proposed rule:
“As advocates for public school students for over 50 years, we submit this public comment… to explain how this priority erodes public education—one of the most important common goods underpinning our democracy. By promoting a vague and ideologically motivated vision of ‘patriotic’ education, the U.S. Department of Education… would violate federal law prohibiting interference with local control over curricula and chill accurate and inclusive instruction… By seeking to impose a particular and biased narrative of history—which ignores or distorts complex and often troubling realities of American and world history, such as state-imposed enslavement, genocide, and discrimination—this priority would violate federal law and the principle of local control in education.”