Amid Attacks From Right, Racial Justice Curricula Gain Momentum in Blue States

Stephan: 

This is the Great Schism seen from the Blue side. The trend disputing a woman’s right to control her own body, the trend about banning books, the trend about castrating fact-based education, and a host of other trends big and small have become the cutting edges in the schism. The result of these trends, I predict will be that the social outcome data will irrefutably prove that Republican governance is always inferior, always degrades wellbeing compared to the same relevant social outcome data from Blue states.

Patrice Frasier teaches Advanced Placement African American Studies, for the first time ever, at Baltimore Polytechnic on September 28, 2022 in Baltimore, Maryland.
Credit: Michael Robinson Chavez / The Washington Post / Getty

“The far right and MAGA adherents are stoking fear and diminishing our students’ freedom to learn and our teachers’ freedom to teach,” says Becky Pringle, the president of the 3 million-member National Education Association (NEA). But Pringle emphasizes that these right-wing attacks are just one part of what is happening in the field of education.

Teachers, administrators and students, she says, are working hard in many parts of the United States to ensure that history, literature and social studies classes engage in meaningful ways with histories of racism, genocide and slavery, while also creating space for studying and celebrating the work of people of color in the U.S.

In fact, even as educators in Florida battle extreme attacks from Gov. Ron DeSantis, educators in more progressive places are doing exciting work to reshape policy and bring an anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic perspective into public school classrooms […]

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