CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — “Remember, your listeners are from Mars,” teacher Susan Greenwood told one of her fifth graders at Brownsville Elementary one day earlier this year. “They know nothing about slavery, they know nothing about the Civil War.” 

Greenwood was circulating the classroom, giving pointed feedback on students’ writing for an assignment in her Virginia Studies class. The goal was to develop arguments to answer the core question in this unit on the Civil War: Was violence justified to resist slavery? 

The students had been tasked with writing a position statement, three pieces of evidence for it and a conclusion — and then turning those arguments into a podcast. Not just any evidence would do: They sifted through original documents — an 1837 flier for a meeting of abolitionists, testimonies of enslaved people, a transcript of abolitionist John Brown’s address to a court after his attack on Harper’s Ferry. 

The class is part of a curriculum that Virginia’s Albemarle County school district developed after a deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, the county seat. That August 2017 tragedy helped spur district educators to consider new ways of teaching social studies that require students to think critically and understand key events from a range of perspectives, including those whose voices are often omitted from standard accounts. 

In early 2019, the district adopted an anti-racism policy that required a top-to-bottom review of district practices. Two years later, it unveiled a social studies curriculum designed to expand what’s covered, including how those harmed by unjust laws and policies fought back and often built thriving communities. 

Nationally, the backlash to anti-racist policies and lesson plans like Albemarle’s has been fierce in recent years. Since 2020, Republican lawmakers have tried to restrict discussion of racism, gender and more in K-12 schools, and at least 18 states passed laws forbidding schools from teaching critical race theory, an academic theory that has become a conservative catch-all for discussions about systemic racism and inequality. 

In Virginia, Republican Glenn Youngkin rode to victory in the 2021 gubernatorial race as part of that movement, and he signed an executive order forbidding the state’s education department from promoting the teaching of “inherently divisive” ideas. 

Albemarle has twice been a focus of that backlash. In 2021, several parents sued over a curriculum piloted by one school they said was ideological. Local and state courts found in the district’s favor, but the case appears to have put the district on the Trump administration’s radar. In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive order demanding that schools end “radical indoctrination” or lose federal funding. A fact sheet accompanying the order that circulated online named Albemarle County schools and referred to one of the families who filed the 2021 lawsuit. 

The order, along with a Department of Education letter demanding an end to race-conscious practices in schools and other actions, are part of a sweeping effort by the administration to redefine discrimination and reverse efforts to embrace historical perspectives beyond those of the white majority. Educators and historians worry those actions will lead to widespread self-censorship on the part of teachers who may fear blowback even about historical topics as fundamental as slavery and Jim Crow. 

“If students aren’t allowed to grapple with the more complex moments in American history, they’re going to have an incomplete view of the U.S. historical narrative,” said Jessica Ellison, executive director at the National Council for History Education. 

Albemarle County’s rolling, forested hills in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains are dotted with the mostly well-off suburbs of Charlottesville, including occasional brick mansions and grand estates. About 75 percent of the district’s students are white and 9 percent are Black, while the median household income, nearly $100,000, is above both the state and national average. 

The 2017 rally, after which Trump proclaimed there were “very fine people on both sides,” prompted school board members, district officials and students to grapple with the district’s challenges with both personal and institutional racism. In the 2019-20 school year, Black students represented just 4 percent of those identified as gifted, 4 percent of those earning a more rigorous advanced studies diploma and ​​21 percent of district suspensions, though they made up 11 percent of the student body.

The district set up an anti-racism steering committee of administrators, school principals and others that got help from a team of students. It also partnered with staff of nearby Montpelier, James Madison’s home, to win a grant that would fund a rewrite of the social studies curriculum. 

Starting in fall 2019, teachers from Albemarle and other districts participated in a year of professional learning about Charlottesville’s past, including its history of racial discrimination and resistance. They met with local historians and experts on Black and Indigenous history, heard from a University of Virginia child psychology expert on race and identity development, toured Confederate monuments and more. Portions of the new curricula were introduced in Albemarle classrooms beginning in 2021. 

The district wanted to be transparent with parents and the community about what was coming, said social studies coordinator Neeley Minton. After units for elementary school were written in summer 2022, Minton presented them to a group representing parents, students, educators and community members called Forward Albemarle. Later she and others held presentations for district parent-teacher organization presidents, parents and community members. Principals presented unit content to parents at family nights. 

District officials refer to the curriculum’s approach as “whole truth history.” A unit on the American Revolution has students read both the Declaration of Independence and a letter from Seneca tribal chiefs describing how victory in the Revolutionary War let the American government seize their land. 

That emphasis on multiple perspectives builds on general requirements in Virginia’s 2015 social studies standards. The state mandates, for example, that fifth graders learn about both the state’s post-Civil War economic growth and its practice of racial segregation. (The latest update to those standards, which goes into effect this fall, was the subject of a years-long battle.)

Even the youngest students are asked questions designed to make them think through all sides of historical and political debates. In a kindergarten unit on citizenship, the question is, “Does fairness mean everyone gets the same things?” Students look at primary sources to answer and think through those questions.

At Journey Middle School one day in February, seventh graders were in the middle of a history unit on the Harlem Renaissance. The question here was, “How can art be used as a tool for resistance?” 

The students studied art that had been taped to the walls: images of the Great Migration, a Langston Hughes poem, a photo of sharecroppers in the field and more. They wrote short answers on worksheets about what they saw. Who’s the artist? What’s their work trying to show? 

The worksheets were a way to get them started on an essay. “When you tell a bunch of seventh graders to write an essay, they’re just going to put their heads down, and say ‘I can’t,’” said teacher Valerie Lewis. Having them combine short answers into paragraphs and those into an essay builds their confidence, she said.  

Classes that focus not only on oppression but resistance and resilience force students to see those harmed in a new way, consistent with the anti-racism policy. “A lot of our approach is helping students see the assets of communities that have been historically marginalized,” said Minton. “That’s why we focus so much on agency, excellence, resistance to injustice.” 

Related: How do we teach African American history in polarized times?

Sarah Harris, 45, has three children in district schools, including a seventh grader. Her child’s essay about the Harlem Renaissance led to a conversation at home about current art as resistance, including street art and political cartoons, she said by email. The unit took something from the past “and made it real and relevant for my 13-year-old,” she said. That contrasts with her own experience as a student in the ’90s, when social studies involved textbooks, worksheets and multiple-choice tests, she said. “We very rarely had to think critically about what we were learning.”

The Harlem Renaissance class also impressed Zoe Hamilton, one of Lewis’ students. “The art has meaning. It’s not just art for art. It has power,” she said. Seventh grader Maddox Ewing remembered stories of enslaved people drawing escape routes in the braids of their hair, which they read in another unit.  

Seventh grader Finch Carlson said she likes that teachers make them give solid proof for their opinions. In a unit on New York City tenements, it wasn’t enough to say she thought conditions were hard — she had to describe what was in original photos and testimonies to prove her answer. 

Lewis wants students to be listened to out in the world, not just in class. “I tell them, ‘Especially when you’re still young, if you provide your proof, people are more likely to take you seriously,’” she said. And Minton said the curriculum prepares students for membership in a multiracial democracy.

Since introducing the anti-racism policy, the district has had some limited success in reducing gaps in outcomes by race. For example, by 2023, the share of Black students in gifted classes had grown slightly, to 5 percent, and those earning the advanced studies diploma had increased to 7 percent. But suspensions for Black students climbed to 36 percent of the total out-of-school suspensions that year. 

The district continues to debate and refine the curriculum. Seventh grade history teacher Dingani Mthethwa said he wished the core question in the Harlem Renaissance unit was more open-ended. “We’re asking how art can be used as a tool of resistance, but art can also be used as a form of oppression,” he said, citing post-World War I art that depicted caricatures of Black people. 

Minton said by email that among much else the current version of the question gives students an opening to make reasoned arguments about how Black artists resisted oppression.  

A now-abandoned school curriculum is what ensnared the district in Trump’s executive order. In December 2021, five sets of parents sued over an “advisory curriculum” piloted by one middle school that was meant to ease students’ integration into secondary-school life, in part by helping them learn more about their identities and those of other students. 

It included materials the parents said indoctrinated their children and made them uncomfortable. For example, two slides talked about the idea of white privilege and defined anti-racism, which the families said promulgated “racial tropes” and caused one student, who is multiracial, to view his racial identity negatively. 

In June 2022, a county circuit court dismissed the lawsuit, concluding in part that under the parents’ theory, the district would need to create individual education plans for every student and ensure that no student be made to feel uncomfortable. A higher court upheld that decision. 

The district took control of writing a new curriculum, rolling out the new version at an August 2022 school board meeting, and inviting parents to review it. No one objected at that or several subsequent board meetings, and there’s no evidence there have been complaints since. The Hechinger Report contacted four of the five sets of parents who sued, but none responded to requests for comment. 

The fact sheet that circulated that referenced Trump’s order charged that Albemarle’s anti-racism policy is “based on critical race theory.” The order called for three federal agencies to develop a plan by the end of April to eliminate federal funding for “illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination” in schools. (The White House did not return a request for comment regarding the fact sheet.) 

Then, on April 3, the Education Department sent letters to state and district leaders nationwide threatening to withhold federal funding to school districts unless they sign a certificate stating that they comply with the administration’s interpretation of civil rights laws, including that diversity, equity and inclusion activities are illegal. 

Minton said by email that “there is no explicit teaching of critical race theory” in the district. But she said it’s important to define the term: a theoretical framework asserting that racism is more than just individual prejudice but rather is “baked into” larger systems and laws. Albemarle students learn about state laws once requiring Black Americans to take literacy tests and pay poll taxes, for example, which suppressed their ability to vote. “It would be very difficult to dispute that racism against Black Americans was part of the legal system at that time,” Minton said.

District counsel Josiah Black said the district hasn’t heard anything more from the administration and that officials weren’t surprised to be named. “I don’t think anyone was shocked,” he said. “We’re in a place, Charlottesville, that for whatever reason, garners a lot of media attention.” 

He declined to comment on whether the administration might try to cut district funding and how the district might respond. District communications officer Helen Dunn, in an email, said any funding loss would be “a big blow.”

Albemarle County schools did sign the certificate demanded by the Education Department, Dunn said in an email. “We have been and will continue to be compliant with Title VI,” she wrote, referring to the section of 1964 civil rights legislation that prevents discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin.

It’s unclear pulling federal funds would survive a court challenge: Two Virginia Commonwealth University education professors noted in a Feb. 11 op-ed that the order conflicts with U.S. law that forbids federal control of local schools.  

The Albemarle district said it won’t back down from its anti-racism policy or approach to social studies. “We’re not changing what we’re doing,” said Dunn. Black said the school board “doesn’t have a lot of appetite” for making changes to the policy. “We feel good about the steps that we’ve taken to protect kids and to foster an inclusive environment here,” he said. 

But elsewhere, school administrators and teachers unsure of what’s allowed may avoid teaching certain topics. “There’s this fear that parents will take it to a school board or to the news,” said Ellison of the National Council for History Education, noting that a third grade teacher recently told her she skipped a unit on Frederick Douglass because of a parent’s complaint. 

Back in Greenwood’s classroom, her fifth graders were getting ready for their podcasts. As they finished their worksheets, she had them go to the hall to rehearse.  

“My opinion is that violent actions were not justified because at the end, everyone involved got killed,” said one student, citing John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and a revolt by enslaved people led by Nat Turner that resulted in execution or exile for everyone involved. 

By contrast, the student pointed to Henry Brown, an enslaved man who in 1849 shipped himself in a crate from North Carolina to Philadelphia and freedom. “I feel like if you resist and you get caught and killed, it’s not as effective as if you don’t and you stay alive,” the fifth grader said.

Greenwood estimated that about a third of students came down in favor of the idea that violence was justified, 10 percent thought that it wasn’t and the rest said that both were needed. 

“A 10-year-old’s world is this big,” said Greenwood, making a small square with her hands. “This is teaching students different perspectives. These were real people with hopes and dreams.”

Javeria Salman contributed reporting to this story.

Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CarolineP.83 or at [email protected]

A local version of this story was published by Charlottesville Tomorrow, a central Virginia nonprofit news organization.

This story about social studies curriculum was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.