Most Black Teens Want Schools to Teach Slavery’s Legacy

This post was originally published on Word In Black By: Aziah Siid Banning books written by Black authors, issuing permission slips to hear a book by a Black author, blocking the AP African American Studies curriculum — those are just some of the ways anti-Blackness has been showed up recently in the nation’s public schools. Now, a new report from the Pew Research Center reveals what teens, parents, and educators think about how race is handled on K-12 campuses, as well as two other hot-button issues: sexual orientation and gender identity. For the report, Pew’s researchers analyzed responses to three recent surveys. The first was an online survey taken last fall by 2,531 K-12 public school teachers. A second survey last fall collected responses from teens ages 13 to 17, and a third surveyed parents in 2022, “One thing we found in this study is that, while race and LGBTQ issues are often lumped together in discussions about the so-called culture wars in K-12 education, teachers, teens, and the public see these topics differently,” Luona Lin, a research associate at Pew tells Word In Black. But at a time when presidential candidate Nikki Haley has drawn criticism for stating the...