Many first-time teachers entering classrooms this year weren’t yet born on Sept. 11 2001, but the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil continues to shape their schools 25 years later.
Education Week’s stories in the months following the tragedy document fresh conversations about student safety, patriotism, and the enduring effects of childhood trauma—and those themes still reverberate today.
The school day was just starting on the East Coast when hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pa. Educators in New York City and Washington-area schools scrambled to provide a sense of safety for students despite their own uncertainty.
In lower Manhattan, teachers at PS 150 had children face north as they marched them out of their school building, hoping to avert their eyes from the disaster unfolding nearby, Education Week reported.
“We just knew we had to keep them facing forward,” then-school secretary Christine Walford said hours after the attack. “We didn’t want them to look behind and see the building falling.”
Today, a generation of adults who were children then share stories of huddling around television sets in schools across the county to watch the news unfold.
Americans immediately realized the events would change their country for good. That has proved true for its system of public schools, too.
Here are five effects that still linger a quarter century later.
A broader understanding of how trauma affects students
Though researchers started probing the effects of childhood trauma well before, the fallout from the attacks showed those effects on a massive scale. Schools grappled with how to support students and educators who’d lost family members or had their sense of security shaken by the events.
In New York City, 10.5% of students in grades 4-12, or 75,000 children, suffered symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder a year after the attack, psychologists from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discovered. About 60,000 students suffered from serious depression, nearly 74,000 from anxiety, and 107,000 from agoraphobia, which is the fear of being in or near public places, they estimated.
By February 2001, about a fifth of students with symptoms of PTSD sought help from a school counselor, Education Week reported. And researchers found the mental health effects spread well beyond the schools located closest to the World Trade Center.
The effects of trauma exposure—through both large-scale community events and ongoing life circumstances like chronic neglect—can also affect students’ working memory and concentration in the classroom.
Child psychologists who studied the events determined that children well outside of the affected cities were at risk of mental health effects from media exposure and witnessing the stress of adults. In a randomized telephone poll of 569 adults conducted the week of the attacks and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 35% of respondents said their children had one or more stress symptoms, and 47% said their children were worried about their own safety or the safety of loved ones.
In the time since 9/11, the rise of social media has made students’ exposure to troubling national events more immediate and constant. Rather than seeing a headline about an act of violence, a student today might see multiple videos from inside a classroom during a school shooting on social media.
Schools’ understanding of the effects of collective trauma has also increased. In 2020, educators around the country grappled with how to help students face the sustained uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, even as they conducted classes remotely.
Debates over schools’ role in promoting patriotism
A post-9/11 surge in patriotism spilled into the nation’s schools in the form of assemblies in flag-draped auditoriums, “God Bless the USA” banners in hallways, and a renewed interest in civics education, Education Week reported in 2001.
Some civics education experts likened the sentiments to efforts to bring the country together during World War II.
“You live in a great country,” President George W. Bush told students at a New York City elementary school Oct. 3. “One of the things that we’re learning out of our sadness is what a great country this is. ... Study hard, because this country says, you work hard, you can realize your dreams.”
The president, who led the class in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, added his thoughts to a large, white wall poster titled, “Why I Love America.” He wrote: “I love America because I love freedom.”
As districts opened new schools, they chose names like Freedom, Unity, Heritage, Liberty, and Independence.
“What we’re after with kids is not just being patriotic in a flag-waving sense, but understanding why they are patriotic, why they should be committed to basic principles of democracy,” Margaret S. Branson, then the associate director of the Center for Civic Education in Calabasas, Calif., said in 2001. “The young people of today have not seen the kind of cataclysmic events of previous generations. This is going to be a very sobering experience for them.”
Others cautioned that an emphasis on patriotism shouldn’t come at the expense of teaching the country’s complete history, including its mistakes.
“This kind of love of country is important, but the problem with patriotism is that it often blinds us to the negative side of American history,” John Marciano, the author of Civil Illiteracy and books on how textbooks cover the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars, said in 2001.
Such arguments echo today as states like Texas stress the importance of “American exceptionalism” in debates over social studies standards. Some teachers also report new state laws restricting teaching of “divisive concepts” have had a chilling effect on discussions of historical issues like slavery and segregation.
Schools also face fresh questions about student dissent and free speech over protests like athletes kneeling during the national anthem or student walkouts to protest national issues, like race relations.
And, even as the country vowed to “never forget” after 9/11, many states don’t explicitly include the events in their social studies standards. In 2025, members of Congress proposed a bipartisan resolution urging all schools in all states to teach about the attacks.
Schools support belonging for students from all religious backgrounds
Muslim and Arab American students reported increased incidents of bullying and discrimination after Sept. 11 as both classmates and the media discussed radical Islamist groups; al-Qaida, the group that masterminded the attacks; and the Taliban, the power behind the Afghan government that the United States sought to overthrow following the 9/11 attacks.
“The feeling that I have about 9/11 is betrayal. I feel very betrayed by [those] people who called themselves Muslim,” Rhode Island student Shayreen Izoli, who was 6 years old on the day of the attacks, told Education Week in 2011. “As a Muslim in America, I’m paranoid all the time. I have to set an example.”
Muslim and Sikh students who were sometimes mistaken for Muslim also said they felt unintentionally singled out or intentionally targeted during classroom discussions of current events. Some private Muslim schools dealt with threats and vandalism.
In response to last week's events specifically, I urge you to make sure that assemblies, classroom discussions, and other school activities held to honor victims of the tragedies do not inadvertently foster the targeting of Arab-American students for harassment or blame.
Muslim organizations saw an uptick in requests for meetings with school administrators who wanted to understand how to better support students, Education Week reported at the time.
On Sept. 20, 2001, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to educators, urging schools to protect students from harassment, discrimination, or exclusion on the basis of religion or national origin.
“In response to last week’s events specifically, I urge you to make sure that assemblies, classroom discussions, and other school activities held to honor victims of the tragedies do not inadvertently foster the targeting of Arab American students for harassment or blame,” Paige wrote. “Encourage students to discuss diversity constructively and to express disagreement over ideas or beliefs in a respectful manner. Have a system in place to intervene if particular students exhibit feelings or conduct that could endanger others. Encourage all students to report threats of racial or ethnic harassment.”
Paige’s letter cited Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of students’ actual or perceived race, color, and national origin in educational settings.
In the time since, federal officials from subsequent presidential administrations have repeatedly cited that law as major international events affected classroom environments.
Both President Joe Biden’s and President Donald Trump’s administrations cited Title VI in letters urging schools to protect students from antisemitism and islamophobia during the war in Gaza that started in 2023. That includes responding to racial and ethnic stereotypes; and harassment based on language, dress, or physical features.
“Hate-based discrimination, including based on antisemitism and Islamophobia among other bases, have no place in our nation’s schools,” Catherine Lhamon, the Education Department’s former assistant secretary for civil rights, wrote in a November 2023 letter.
Earlier that year, the Biden administration released a fact sheet with examples of discrimination students had reported. Among them: Muslim students said they’d been taunted with jeers of “you started 9/11" more than 20 years after the attacks.
An increased focus on school safety, crisis response
The September 11 attacks were a significant turning point for school safety, security experts said. The conversations schools had in 2001 built on work they’d already started following the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.
As airports and government buildings added new layers of screenings, metal detectors, and safety protocols, schools reviewed their own plans and practices, Education Week reported.
“There is no question that schools’ preparedness is a hundred times better now than it was eight or nine years ago,” Michael S. Dorn, a safety consultant and former school police chief, told Education Week in 2006.
The Los Angeles Unified School District sent regular “safety grams” to staff explaining what to do in the event of an emergency. In Waterford, Conn., schools near a nuclear power plant began parking buses closer to their buildings to allow for fast evacuations. In suburban Detroit, schools began locking all exterior doors and monitoring entrances for unapproved visitors—a practice that is now common in schools.
Districts also made shelter-in-place protocols, formed safety committees, and improved communications with police and other first responders in their communities.
Today, schools face new concerns about how schools should keep students safe while respecting their civil rights and privacy. And the evolution of safety technology—like artificial intelligence weapons detectors and safety-response drones—has sparked new conversations about what is practical and reasonable.
A surge of goodwill helps Bush pass No Child Left Behind
President Bush was in the middle of a visit to Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., when he received news of the first plane hitting the north tower on Sept. 11, 2001. The Republican president had made education a key issue in his campaign, but a bipartisan group of lawmakers had struggled to get legislation over the finish line.
About four months after the tragedy, Bush signed into law No Child Left Behind, a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that was packed with an ambitious set of reforms and backed by notable Democrats, including Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy.
The law increased the federal responsibility to hold schools accountable for improving academic results for all students. It called for a slate of testing to measure progress and for data to be broken down by student populations, like ethnicity and disability status, to ensure schools served all populations well.
Bush’s aides credited the support he gained in the wake of the attacks for helping to push the bill over the finish line. They continued to work, even as anthrax scares paralyzed Washington. In a 2015 interview in Politico, aides recalled sending workers in Hazmat suits into closed Senate office buildings to retrieve documents so they could continue drafting the legislation.
“One of the silver linings of 9/11 was it did engender a lot of bipartisan goodwill,” Margaret Spellings, a domestic policy adviser who later became U.S. secretary of education, told Politico. “And Sen. Kennedy committed to President Bush, Congressman [John] Boehner and the chair of the House [education] committee that they would work to get this thing over the finish line. … There was a recognition that we had to strike while the iron was hot. This moment would not last forever.”
In the time since, a bipartisan consensus on education policy has become harder to come by. When NCLB’s replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed with bipartisan support in December 2015, President Barack Obama called it a “Christmas miracle.”
President Trump’s administration has championed broad school choice programs, and Congress passed the first federal school choice program on his watch; states are currently deciding whether to opt into that program. Though such proposals have some Democratic support, key civil rights groups that had backed NCLB and other federal reforms oppose them.
Today, there are growing political fault lines over the use of testing in accountability, the most effective ways to improve struggling schools, and the federal role in education. But concerns about American competitiveness still drive debates.
