In Tennessee, schools to heighten emphasis on civil rights curriculum
For more coverage of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the civil rights movement, tune in this evening to America Tonight at 9 ET/6 PT.
For Jared Myracle, the turnaround in Tennessee wasn’t a miracle.
In 2011, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Teaching the Movement” study found that 16 states did not require any instruction about the civil rights movement in their schools. Another 19 states only provided minimal coverage of the movement, according to the study.
Myracle and his colleagues at the Tennessee Department of Education were not taken off guard by the state’s C grade, which was one of the better grades given by the study’s authors.
“It wasn’t surprising just because our standards were very general and vague,” said Myracle, who coordinates social studies content and resources for the state’s Department of Education. “The standards just didn’t give teachers a whole lot of direction.”
Now, Tennessee is about to get a much better report card, going up to a grade of A in just two years, according to Kate Shuster, principal researcher of “Teaching The Movement.”
News of the Volunteer State’s success is seen as encouraging, but it remains unclear whether other states’ school systems will follow suit. (A follow-up study to “Teaching The Movement” is in the works, but no other projections about states’ grades can be made just yet, Shuster said.) With the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington also comes the question of how the civil rights movement will be remembered by our children and their children.
“[The SPLC study] speaks to the distance we’ve come and the progress we’ve made, but that we also still have a distance to travel,” said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the lone living speaker from the March on Washington.
The SPLC study has generated discussion about why the civil rights curriculum, in some states, lacks depth and context.
“One of the things we clearly found was that the Civil Rights Movement and civil rights education had been kind of reduced to two people and four words. They are Rosa Parks, Dr. King, and ‘I Have a Dream,’” said Emily Chiariello, a teaching and learning specialist with the Teaching Tolerance program at the SPLC.
“We have lifted the struggle of the movement out of its historical context and we placed it in a greeting card,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “It is this idea that we can celebrate annually Dr. King and Rosa Parks and Black History Month as a kind of performance where the nation pats itself on the back for having overcome this terrible past. But in fact, the terrible past is not just a distant memory to most, but also an abstraction.”
Muhammad’s sentiments stem from the current standards for education about the movement. Just Alabama, Florida and New York received A grades in the 2011 study, meaning they were the only states to have their schools cover at least 60 percent of the recommended content. Add in the B grades from Georgia, Illinois and South Carolina, which covered at least 50 percent of the recommended content, and just six states have required their schools to cover half of the recommended content on the civil rights movement.
“I don’t know where we dropped the ball,” said Willie Pearl Mackey King, the former assistant for Wyatt Tee Walker, King’s chief of staff during the civil rights movement. “A lot of the younger generations don’t have an appreciation, or even knowledge, of the people behind the movement or behind Martin Luther King.”
In Tennessee’s case, the state was in a better position to pivot toward a better grade. Its schools scored strong grades on teaching the specific events and overall history of the movement. But the state’s core requirements lacked a basic understanding of the history, as well as the groups within the movement, such as the Student Christian Leadership Conference, that brought about change. Teachers were required to point out movement leaders, but they offered little context and background about why those people were important.
Last summer, Tennessee’s Department of Education started to draft the framework to enhance the core requirements about teaching the movement. The turnaround was twofold. The first part put an increased emphasis on connecting Tennessee-centric events to the movement, such as Diane Nash’s experiences in the Nashville sit-ins and the civil disobedience that took place inside Clinton High School and Highlander Folk School. The latter part of the overhaul will make significant works such as “Letter From Birmingham Jail” as primary documents to be handled by students as early as the fifth grade. As part of the new protocol, which was approved last month and will officially go into effect for the 2014-15 academic year, the state’s schools will require teachers to introduce King to students as early as kindergarten.
Myracle’s optimism for how Tennessee will now teach the movement, and what it means moving forward, is evident.
“The teachers are excited to have a great sense of direction in regard to what content should be covered,” Myracle said. “It’s exciting, because we’re providing a real grade of equity for students from every corner of the state, and we can’t say that was taking place before due to the vague nature of the standards.”
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