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: 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. Preventing teachers from using the curriculum promotes a singular narrative that centers whiteness, she said. Michelle Bacon Curry, a high school English teacher in the Iowa City area who has used the curriculum in African American literature and contemporary literature classes, said that a ban on the materials would only cause her to double down on her instructional goals. She’s taught some of the lessons to ground students in the history and themes of poems they’ve read in class. “It would make me feel that I had more of a responsibility and more of a commitment to making sure that I was doing the fundamental job of an educator,” Curry said: making sure that her students have access to curriculum that encourages them to think for themselves.