Many states falter on how aggressively they push to teach civil rights history, a new study says, but some also provide excellent teaching resources on the subject.
The report, prepared for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project, is the fourth in an annual series.
This year’s report stresses not just whether states require schools to teach the civil rights movement, but also how schools do it. On the first criterion, Southern states with larger African-American populations dominate the top of the rankings: Georgia, Louisiana, and South Carolina were the only states to get A’s. The report singles out Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Oregon, and Wyoming as states that “neither cover nor support teaching about the movement.”
