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Why It’s Hard to Control What Gets Taught in Public Schools

Politicians on both the left and the right have sought to change or limit what teachers can do inside classrooms. Teachers often ignore them.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed to push a “patriotic” curriculum. Credit... Joseph Rushmore for The New York Times

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By Dana Goldstein

• Dec. 20, 2024

Oklahoma and Texas are among more than 20 states that have passed laws since 2021 seeking to control how race, gender and American history are discussed in schools.

But in a climate of extraordinary political scrutiny on the curriculum, many teachers say those efforts have little influence on how they run their classrooms.

“I do business as usual,” said Derek Collins, a middle and high school social studies teacher in Roff, Okla.

And in El Paso, Daniel Gallegos said that he was “not at all” scared to hold wide-ranging discussions of racism with his 11th graders, despite his state’s attempt to restrict lessons about the topic.

On subjects like evolution and the causes of the Civil War, there has long been debate over what should be taught. Over the last four years, however, there has been a nationwide burst of political activity seeking to transform the curriculum in public schools.

Most recently, Oklahoma and Texas have encouraged schools to imbue biblical themes into lessons, and Louisiana legislators tried to require schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Those states and 15 others, all Republican-leaning, have passed laws seeking to restrict how racism and gender can be discussed.

At the same time, a cluster of more liberal states, including California, Minnesota, Oregon and Vermont, have moved in the opposite direction, weaving the activist discipline of ethnic studies into social studies, and embracing concepts from the left, like structural racism and settler colonialism.

But the experiences of Mr. Collins and Mr. Gallegos show how difficult it can be for politicians to control public school curriculums. The American education system is “ radically decentralized ” in the words of one historian. Local schools and even individual teachers are often left to work independently, choosing their own curriculum materials and writing their own lesson plans — a structure that could restrain President Donald J. Trump in his second term.

Mr. Trump has vowed to push a “patriotic” curriculum, while withholding federal funding from schools that embrace left-leaning ideas on race and gender. Both the right and the left have accused the other side of imposing its beliefs on the nation’s children, and social studies educators have felt more pressure to conform than teachers of other subjects, according to surveys.

Despite book bans and other forms of pressure from policymakers and politically engaged parents, there are signs that many teachers are able to ignore — or subtly complicate — mandates to address race, gender and U.S. history in proscribed ways. Only a quarter of teachers have reported that restrictive laws influenced their choice of curriculum materials or instructional practices, according to RAND .

“I’ve never heard of an instance yet of someone actually not teaching something they had taught in the past,” said Tim Bailey, director of curriculum development at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, a nonpartisan group that provides free curriculum materials and training to tens of thousands of teachers.

The Least Controlled Subject

Lawmakers from both parties have put American history and civics lessons under a political microscope. But these subjects can be more difficult than others to control.

That is because for years, policymakers seeking to improve academic achievement ignored social studies. Over the past two decades, federal and state standardized testing mandates pushed schools to focus primarily on math and reading.

That meant there was less time and money for social studies education. It also meant more autonomy for teachers of the subject.

In a recent survey conducted by the American Historical Association, two-thirds of social studies teachers said their districts gave them either no curriculum guidelines to work with or only a rough outline of the topics they had to cover.

Derek Collins, the Oklahoma teacher, said his district issues him a textbook for his American history and government classes. But he has opted to build his curriculum instead around a thick binder of primary source documents he compiled himself. This year, he said, he has especially enjoyed teaching the Federalist Papers, discussing with students the differences between a republic and a democracy.

Oklahoma’s state superintendent, Ryan Walters, drew attention by directing all public schools to teach the Bible, and by asking teachers to show students a video of him praying for Mr. Trump.

But Mr. Collins, a Republican, did not show the video. He said his tiny, rural school district had not rushed to carry out Mr. Walters’s priorities, noting that he and some of his colleagues, despite being committed Christians, had questioned how the mandate to teach the Bible was supposed to work.

“Are we qualified to teach the Bible?” he asked.

Throughout Oklahoma, principals and superintendents have also expressed hesitation about incorporating biblical teachings into public education, despite Mr. Walters’s prodding.

In a statement to The New York Times, Mr. Walters said noncompliant school officials would be removed from their jobs. Ignoring his policies could become more difficult in the future. His administration has released new social studies learning standards that encompass biblical principles and stories, in addition to other changes. The state legislature will have the opportunity to accept or reject them.

Texas has restricted how racism can be discussed in the classroom: only as a “deviation” from core American principles, not as an expression of them. But Mr. Gallegos, the El Paso 11th-grade U.S. history teacher, said he did not feel limited in his discussions of racism. In fact, he has leaned into the topic.

He noted that many of the historical events that most interest his students — slavery, land transfers between Mexico and the United States, the farmworkers’ movement — are related to racial and ethnic discrimination.

He teaches his students about the political conflict around the topic.

“It is something I address with my students on a daily basis,” he said. “Our governor says teaching racism will make students dislike America or become less patriotic. I tell them that patriotism and learning about facts are not necessarily mutually exclusive. You can be patriotic and still understand how the past affects the present.”

Nearly all of Mr. Gallegos’s students are Hispanic, and he acknowledged that in some whiter, more suburban parts of Texas, there may be more pressure on educators.

Mr. Bailey of Gilder Lehrman acknowledged that his group had tweaked some of its language to comply with restrictive state laws. For example, the group sometimes uses terminology like “civic experience” instead of “civic action” to describe projects like writing a persuasive letter to an elected official; conservatives have argued that civic action projects allow left-leaning teachers to push their own political views.

Another strategy to avoid the country’s divisive politics is to teach using primary source documents like the Constitution, Mr. Bailey said, so that students are grounded in historical moments, instead of in contemporary debates about the meanings of those events.

In Liberal States, New Ideas in the Classroom

Like the political right, the left has worked for decades to reshape the social studies curriculum.

California has some of the most liberal social studies learning standards in the nation, with teachers encouraged to address the history of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, the legacy of redlining in real estate and the rise of economic inequality. The state has also mandated ethnic studies courses at the high school level, a controversial move even in a heavily Democratic state.

There has been a heated debate over how ethnic studies teachers should handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The California Department of Education has advised ethnic studies teachers to avoid the topic, but some of them have openly rejected that advice.

Indeed, individual teachers — not laws and regulations — are often the most powerful drivers of curricular change.

In South Burlington, Vt., Christie Nold, a high school social studies teacher, said she was bringing ethnic studies concepts into her classroom well before the state embraced the discipline.

In her Holocaust studies class this year, she taught about the Nazi Party’s destruction of a sex research center in Berlin that served gay and transgender individuals. She and her students then discussed the evolution of transgender rights, touching on Tennessee’s recent ban on gender-affirming care for minors.

In her liberal community, Ms. Nold said she usually felt supported by administrators, colleagues and parents. She said her goal was not to push one viewpoint, but to support teenagers “grappling with complex topics.”

“That’s what a lot of folks are looking for,” she said. “How do we engage in a time of polarization?”

The Florida Exception

Efforts to control the curriculum may fail against the will of a resistant teacher in many states. But not in Florida.

Under Gov. Ron DeSantis — perhaps the nation’s most aggressive practitioner of curriculum control — restrictive laws married to tough bureaucratic consequences have had a big effect on both teachers and students, said Crystal Etienne, a middle school civics teacher.

Last year, Mr. DeSantis’s administration required schools to use new learning standards that focus on “the influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition” on the American founding.

Because Florida gives a standardized test in civics, and her own annual evaluation was based on her students’ performance, Ms. Etienne immediately changed how she delivered lessons.

“I don’t have a choice but to teach it, even though I’m not qualified to teach biblical content,” she said. “If the students can’t answer the questions, that reflects on me.”

In addition, under Mr. DeSantis, new regulations require every book in every classroom to be logged, screened for banned content and listed in an online database. Schools can be sued and teachers can lose their licenses if they violate some of the restrictions.

Ms. Etienne said she and many colleagues stopped maintaining classroom libraries because lending books to students was “not worth the hassle.”

In part because of these pressures, she has opted to step away from classroom teaching and is now serving as an advocate with United Teachers of Dade, her local union.

Dana Goldstein covers education and families for The Times.  More about Dana Goldstein

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