Attacks from the left and the right could lead educators to shy away from curricula with substantive ... [+]
Elementary curricula that build kids’ academic knowledge are under attack not only from the right but also the left. The result could be the continued loss of many students’ true potential.
We’ve heard a lot about right-wing efforts to ban teaching that opponents say promotes “divisive concepts,” such as that students “should feel” guilt or discomfort on account of their race—concepts often grouped under the label “Critical Race Theory.” These initiatives have had a chilling effect on instruction, exacerbated by inaccurate reports that “anti-CRT laws” prohibit any instruction that might make students feel guilty or uncomfortable.
In Tennessee, which recently enacted such a law, a parent group called Moms for Liberty has objected to 31 texts in Wit & Wisdom, a K-8 literacy curriculum approved by the state and adopted by a number of school districts. Many of the challenged books appear in a second-grade unit on the civil rights movement.
One is an autobiography by Ruby Bridges, who as a six-year-old in 1960 integrated a formerly all-white school in New Orleans. Despite the book’s overall message of racial harmony, Moms for Liberty charged that it fostered racial hatred and made white students feel bad about themselves. The local school board found the challenges were largely without merit, but the group has now sued in state court in an effort to have the curriculum banned.
At the same time, some educators on the left have denounced Wit & Wisdom—and some other knowledge-building literacy curricula—for being too favorable to whites. After the Boston public school system adopted Wit & Wisdom in 2020, a group of educators protested that it was “severely lacking in cultural relevance” for Black and brown students.
After reviewing 174 texts in the curriculum, they found that only 22% were written by people of color and only 9.2% “included Black voices.” Units such as “Here Come the Redcoats,” they charged, “perpetuate harmful dominant narratives of history while excluding marginalized voices and exacerbating systematic injustices.” Boston’s school system stopped requiring Wit & Wisdom and eventually adopted a different literacy curriculum—one that includes no historical topics below fourth grade.
Faculty at schools of education have raised similar complaints. One academic article analyzing Wit & Wisdom is titled “Overwhelming Whiteness.” Like the Boston teachers, the authors tallied the percentage of texts in the curriculum by or about Black and brown individuals and found it sorely lacking—even though, according to their own calculations, in eighth grade 51% of the books written by identifiable authors are about Black or brown people.
When texts do center on Black individuals, the authors charge, those figures are “mythologized and heroized.” They fault the civil rights unit for focusing on people like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—and Ruby Bridges—who overcame injustice, rather than “examining systemic agents of oppression or asking questions about racial inequities today.”
A Return to the Dysfunctional Status Quo?
Aside from eliminating Ruby Bridges’ autobiography, it’s hard to imagine anything Moms for Liberty and the authors of “Overwhelming Whiteness” would agree on. Of course, in a country as large and politically polarized as the United States, it’s unrealistic to expect all of us to embrace the same curriculum—and we don’t have to. But when education officials are fearful of attacks from both the left and right, they’re likely to shy away from specifying any content, especially if it has to do with fraught aspects of history.
That would be an unfortunate return to the status quo that content-rich curricula like Wit & Wisdom are trying to disrupt. For decades, the elementary curriculum has focused narrowly on math and reading—and time on the latter is largely spent practicing supposed comprehension skills like “making inferences,” using books on random topics. Social studies has been marginalized or eliminated, especially where test scores are low. When it is taught, historical topics are generally taboo below fourth or fifth grade—and not just because they’re controversial. There’s a longstanding belief, unsupported by evidence, that young children won’t be interested in or able to understand history.
But reading comprehension largely depends on the kind of academic knowledge and vocabulary built through immersion in topics like those relating to history. Children from more highly educated families are better able to acquire that kind of knowledge at home. If other kids don’t acquire it at school, they fall farther behind every year.
That’s what has been happening for decades. But an increasing number of schools across the country—including most in Tennessee—are now switching to one of the half-dozen or so new curricula that, like Wit & Wisdom, build academic knowledge starting in kindergarten, holding out the promise of a fairer education system.
I imagine most Americans, whatever their political orientation, wouldn’t want to perpetuate a system that fails the majority of students. But that’s what political agitation around curriculum is threatening to do. To date, the threat has been much greater from the right than the left. But the authors of “Overwhelming Whiteness” urge their readers to “pose public questions” at school board meetings and emulate the Boston teachers who got the district to drop Wit & Wisdom.
I doubt that most parents or teachers would have political objections to Wit & Wisdom—which, based on my review of a number of its texts, conversations with teachers familiar with it, and observations of classes where it was being used—presents topics in an even-handed and thoughtful manner. Even the lead author of “Overwhelming Whiteness,” Amanda Rigell, found in her dissertation that teachers who used the curriculum actually liked it.
What Teachers Think
The first part of Rigell’s dissertation (she was kind enough to send me a slide deck that summarized it) criticizes Wit & Wisdom not just for its alleged lack of cultural relevance but also for being “scripted.” The argument, long put forward by many ed school faculty, is that teachers shouldn’t have to follow a prescribed curriculum because they need autonomy to serve the individual needs of their students. But the second part of the dissertation, which quotes teachers Rigell interviewed, tells a different story.
The curriculum, said one teacher, “creates that structure that kids crave and thrive in from grade level to grade level and day to day in my classroom.” Another remarked that she’d initially doubted her sixth-graders could handle the curriculum’s “in-depth questions,” but she was “just blown away by their thoughts.” A third said the curriculum changed her expectations and “made me realize that [the kids] are capable of harder things.”
Teachers even praised the curriculum’s scriptedness. One noted that many students in the district were transient, “so there is a lot of value in that if they leave [school X] and come to [school Y], they’re going to have the exact same curriculum.” Wit & Wisdom also worked well during remote learning, she said: “My kids that I had learning over Zoom did great.” A novice teacher remarked that she wouldn’t have been able to create lessons that “would hit those depths of knowledge if I didn’t have some type of guide”—in other words, a “script.”
The only negative comment came from a teacher who struggled to cover everything in the curriculum because it would have taken seven and a half hours a week, and she only had her students for seven.
Let’s Not Underestimate Kids
Both right-wing and left-wing critics of content-rich curricula underestimate what children can handle—not just intellectually but emotionally. White kids generally aren’t traumatized by learning about racism. One Tennessee parent who is a white Republican scoffed at the claims put forward by Moms for Liberty. Her second-grader, who was taught Wit & Wisdom’s civil rights unit, “didn’t feel one ounce of white guilt about it. She just felt sad that that happened.”
And while Black and brown students should see themselves represented in the curriculum and feel that their culture and history are respected, they’re unlikely to suffer irreparable harm if most texts are by or about white people. As Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises has said, those students need to acquire knowledge of both mainstream culture and their own, so they can feel they belong in whatever room they walk into. Educators who feel a curriculum doesn’t adequately cover the contributions of Black and brown communities can supplement it, as Baltimore has, rather than junking it.
In addition, stressing systemic racism over the achievements of individuals can backfire. Students of color may conclude the odds are inevitably stacked against them—like one Black child who, according to his mother, abandoned his dream of becoming a lawyer.
It's also commonly assumed by many on the left that a basic reason for racial test-score gaps is that Black and brown kids don’t see people who look like them in the curriculum. While it’s true that students of color are disproportionately represented among students who score low on tests, it’s also true that if you look at absolute numbers, there are thousands of white children who fall into that category—in some areas, many more than children who are Black or brown. Seeing oneself in the curriculum is clearly not enough to ensure academic success.
Fundamentally, teachers, parents, and policymakers of all political persuasions need to put the needs of students before their own ideologies. Especially when it comes to history or civics, I suspect most Americans would say that teachers should present versions of events that are generally agreed upon and introduce conflicting perspectives as matters for debate—even at lower grade levels, in an age-appropriate way. It’s not that hard. I’ve seen it done.
If we don’t do that, not only our children but our democracy as a whole will suffer. Our failure to build children’s knowledge of history and geography beginning in the early grades leaves many with large gaps that can prevent them from understanding current events and exercising their rights responsibly. We have high school students who don’t know what state they live in and sixth-graders who think the Declaration of Independence was signed in the 20th century.
It’s not that kids can’t learn these things. It’s that our education system has failed them—and may well continue to do so if educators are left to fear that teaching anything substantive will put a target on their backs.
