Title: Lawmakers Push to Ban '1619 Project' From Schools
Headings: Lawmakers Push to Ban ‘1619 Project’ From Schools
Lawmakers Push to Ban ‘1619 Project’ From Schools
Social studies groups push back
History education should invite debate, not stifle it
Calls on lawmakers to focus on the pandemic
Sarah Schwartz

Content: Iowa public schools are what gave me my start in journalism in high school, where I took the Black studies course that taught me the year 1619,” she wrote. “That a bill now exists seeking to censor my 1619 work from other Iowa public school students is shocking & sad … Attempting to control what teachers can teach in the name of patriotism is seeking indoctrination not education. Education should open our minds, not close them. The children of my home state deserve better than that.” Arkansas state Representative Mark Lowery, Iowa state Representative Skyler Wheeler, and Mississippi Senator Angela Burks Hill, who introduced the bills seeking to ban teaching the curriculum, did not respond to requests for comment. Stefanie Wager, the president of the National Council for the Social Studies, said that she sees “a little bit of irony in the bills.” While Republican lawmakers usually champion the right to free speech, they’re now attempting to quell dissenting voices in the classroom, she said. Wager has heard frustration from members in state councils that lawmakers are choosing to intervene on this one resource, when materials selection is “normally a non-issue” in these states. The Iowa Council for the Social Studies mentioned this in a statement to Education Week, writing that the proposed legislation would “take away local control and dictate what can and cannot be taught in Iowa,” which would be “inconsistent” with the ICSS’ values. Cleopatra Warren, a high school economics and history teacher at Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy in Atlanta, who is also a teacher fellow with the Pulitzer Center, said the proposed legislation felt like an attempt to “other” Black children—"reminiscent of slave codes, Black codes, and Jim Crow laws which forbade Blacks from reading, writing, or learning about their history,” she said.