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New Jersey Teachers Take Lead in Diversifying Curriculum [1]

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Date: 2022-07-20  

New Jersey is a leader in the push for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in schools.

In Pleasantville, New Jersey teachers take the lead in developing diversity, equity, and inclusion guidelines and play a major role in selecting textbooks that meet state and district guidelines. They recently successfully challenged the adoption of social studies book published by McGraw Hill.

According to Tamar LaSure-Owens, a first-grade teacher at Leeds Avenue Elementary School and director of the Pleasantville district’s Amistad, Holocaust and Latino heritage curriculum project, known as AMHOTINO, the textbooks did not appropriately address the history of marginalized groups in the United States. LaSure-Owens demanded to know “Why are we buying books that just don’t meet our standards?” The Pleasantville School District’s Education Association President questioned how the textbooks were selected and why the district’s AMHOTINO coordinator was not consulted as part of the selection process. LaSure-Owens, who works with the state’s Amistad Commission to incorporate more Black history into New Jersey classrooms, was especially concerned about the possible use of euphemisms when describing historical atrocities. In December 2021, she received the NJEA’s Urban Education Activist Award.

McGraw Hill, whose website claims the company is committed to “diversity, equity & inclusion,” did not to address the decision by the Pleasantville school board. This is not the first time McGraw Hill textbooks have been challenged for failure to adequately convey the history of the United States. In 2015, the company apologized and withdrew a world geography textbook used in Texas schools that described enslaved Africans as “workers” and “immigrants.”

Members of the New Jersey Education Association had already met with McGraw Hill representatives in 2020 to discuss concerns about the company’s textbooks. NJEA members pinpointed material they considered inaccurate or incomplete, particularly sections on Native American history and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The New Jersey Legislature mandated teaching about the World War II era European Holocaust and other genocides in 1994. In 2002 it added African American history standards and formed the Amistad Commission to develop curriculum material. In 2019, the New Jersey legislature passed a law requiring schools to teach about the history of the LGBTQ+ community and persons with disabilities. In September 2021, Governor Phil Murphy signed an Executive Order creating the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging and in January 2022, the Governor signed a bill requiring schools to teach about the history of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in grades K-12. There is a New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education website with teaching guides and classroom material and extensive material for teaching African American history is available on the website of the New Jersey State Library. The Pleasantville district website also has a range of material supporting teaching about African, African American, and Latino heritages and histories including antiracist children’s books. The New Jersey School Boards Association website, in conjunction with Make Us Visible New Jersey and the NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, offers material and a video for including the history and heritage of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders into the K-12 curriculum.

In January 2020, a pilot program developed by Make It Better For Youth, a Monmouth County consortium for LGBTQ+ youth, was implemented in a dozen New Jersey school districts. Fifty districts had applied to participate. Topics include the treatment of gays in Nazi Germany were people were sent concentration camps and forced to wear pink triangles. Other lessons address individual identity, the choice of personal pronouns, and the experience of people forced to undergo conversion therapy. While LGBTQ+ education mandates and sex-education standards have been challenged by some conservative groups and elected officials as encroaching on the role of parents in teaching their children about values and morals, the National Education Association awarded the NJEA a grant to launch a consortium partnering universities, museums, historical commissions and advocacy groups to train teachers to make classrooms more inclusive.

A brief review of publicly accessible material from McGraw Hill’s online supplemental student e-book for its middle school American history textbook shows some striking peculiarities. While the election of Barack Obama as President in 2008 is described as “one of the most historic events in United States history,” the passage does not explain why or include that President Obama is African American. The section on the election of Donald Trump in 2016 notes that his Democratic Party opponent, Hillary Clinton, had a majority of the popular vote, but concludes that he was elected because “many people responded to his aggressive personality and his critical view of Washington D.C. . . . and believed he would bring a fresh point of view to government.” None of the issues in the campaign are introduced to students or the possibility that Donald Trump’s election represented a white backlash and hostility to Hillary Clinton as a woman. That Clinton was the first woman nominated for President by a major political party was not mentioned.

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