How the 1619 Project is Being Used in the Classroom and Why it Matters

There is little doubt that the efforts on the part of Republican lawmakers to control how certain aspects of American history are taught has had an impact on teachers. I’ve read a number of recent interviews with teachers over the past few weeks that have appeared in newspapers and magazines. They feel as if they are being vilified by lawmakers and certain segments of the public. Many have expressed that they are less willing to engage students around some of the toughest questions related to the history of slavery, legalized discrimination, and white supremacy.

The underlining question of what is currently being taught and what resources are being utilized at the k-12 level re: this specific history has not been adequately addressed. Republicans have cast a shadow on the current state of history education, but we really have no sense as to whether it tells us anything about how this history is currently being taught.

We desperately need a formal study.

The 1619 Project, for example, has been explicitly banned from the classroom in a number of states. I could write an entire post about why I think it has been singled out, but we still have no clear sense of how many school districts have adopted it; the number of individual teachers that have adopted it and; for those that have adopted it, how it is currently being used. We need hard data on this.

Part of what I find problematic about this specific ban is that it assumes that teachers who use the 1619 Project are ideologues and that their primary motivation is to push a political agenda. These bans also fail to address whether it is permissible for teachers to use the work of a historian who appeared in either the magazine or book version of the 1619 Project. Is Tiya Miles’s scholarship on Native Americans and slavery to be banned or Kevin Kruse’s work on how highways reinforced racial lines in the mid-twentieth century off the table simply because they appear in its pages?

I suspect that most politicians who support banning the 1619 Project from classrooms are doing so because they can’t see beyond the project’s founder and editor, Nikole Hannah-Jones. She is the perfect scapegoat, but that’s another story altogether.

We need a study that helps school boards, state legislators, parent groups, and the general public better understand how history teachers go about doing their work. We also need a study that empowers history teachers so that they can stand up for themselves and respond to accusations and the kind of vilification that we’ve seen from elected officials. Most people no nothing about teacher training or what goes on in the many professional development opportunities that are offered throughout the year.

History teachers don’t suddenly appear in the classroom out of nowhere. Their training differs widely depending on where they studied. Their classes on pedagogy and the number of history classes they are required to take also varies widely.

I would love to see a study that looks carefully at the curriculum requirements for a certain school district and the ways in which history teachers actually go about putting together lesson plans that include primary and secondary sources to satisfy those requirements. It might be helpful to do a comparative study of a select few districts.

Here is what I think we will find in such a study. The vast majority of history teachers across the country find it challenging enough just to cover the required topics in a given year without worrying about outside resources like the 1619 Project. They stick to pretty standard resources that are available in their schools. History teachers (primarily at the high school level) who offer advance classes or have the opportunity to pull in a wider range of primary and secondary sources like the 1619 Project are doing so responsibly.

In other words, they are using excerpts from the 1619 Project alongside other resources. The presence of excerpts from magazine or book in class does not, in any way, signal a fundamental shift from or rejection of state curricular standards. Teachers may be using it to focus in on a specific historical topic or to help students understand perspective and how historians construct their interpretations. The materials are being used to meet their state standards or in an AP class that of the College Board.

Of course, we may find exceptions to this, but even in those cases I suspect that the public will learn that the vast majority of these teachers are not engaged in some nefarious experiment in the brainwashing of their children.

This admittedly is pure speculation based on my roughly 20 years working with teachers across the country.

Let’s find out the truth. Our teachers and students deserve it.