Missouri lawmaker: Most proposed education bills would limit how history is taught

Tucked into a piece of Missouri legislation mandating the creation of a state portal allowing parents to view school curricula is language that also would prohibit giving teachers diversity training.

The bill doesn’t actually use that term, likely on purpose. Without carefully reading the entire bill, its intentions could easily be missed.

But there’s no hiding that Missouri lawmakers want to limit how schools teach history, and what teachers can say about race and gender.

State Rep. Mark Sharp, a Kansas City legislator on the House Education Committee, said that about 75% of all education bills under consideration include language blocking diversity training, limiting how history is taught or allowing parents to pull their children out of lessons they don’t like.

Some also include provisions that label any teaching about racism in American history as divisive. How, then, to teach about slavery? The Civil War? Jim Crow?

Racist incidents happen with unnerving frequency right here and right now. How are students supposed to understand the historical context of this problem?

Don’t look to the legislature for help with that understanding. Bills often contain contradictory language, Sharp said.

“At the same time our Republican members want to limit how we teach Black history, they will say they believe Black history (and) civil rights should be taught,” Sharp said. Only, they want it taught so that “America is the hero. But you can’t be the abuser and the hero.”

Will kids be told that Bull Connor was a dog lover, and that Lincoln was assassinated by someone hoping to lower the suddenly soaring labor costs for southern farmers?

To educate students about civil rights, one proposed bill, HB 1933, calls for teaching the “tactics and strategies of nonviolent resistance” that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. championed, “and the universal lesson that hatred on the basis of immutable characteristics such as race or ethnicity … can overtake any nation or society and lead to profound injustice.”

Never mind that the King reference is a cynical distortion of the late civil rights leader’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Missouri hasn’t even passed legislation acknowledging Black History Month.

If you need any more evidence that these lawmakers are pushing Republican politics into the classroom, SB 1175 proposes that teachers should receive training in “patriotic” education as laid out in the “1776 Report,” a product of former President Donald Trump’s commission to refute teaching about racism and slavery. The American Historical Association condemned the report for relying on “falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions and misleading statements.”

SB 694 proposes that school districts be prohibited “from accepting private funding for the purposes of teaching any curriculum substantially similar to critical race theory or The 1619 Project.” So not only are GOP legislators attempting to ban what opponents mischaracterize as “critical race theory,” — which, again, is not taught in K-12 education — they also want to block anything similar, which is wide open to interpretation.

That same legislation bans school discussions about race that include “assigning fault, blame, or conscious or unconscious bias to one or more members of a race or sex.”

It also says if a teacher does discuss such topics in class, “both sides” must be taught. So teachers are supposed to present the positive aspects of slavery, Jim Crow laws and denying women the vote?

Some bills go to absurd lengths to “protect” their children from “divisive” subjects. One called the “Parents’ Bill of Rights for Students Well-Being” would require teachers to notify parents weeks in advance of teaching “divisive or controversial” topics about race, ancestry or color. Are they not aware that young people sometimes raise these topics on their own?

One victory to be found in the education legislation: a bill requiring all students to spend several weeks studying the Holocaust. Perhaps it’s easier for Republican legislators to support educating children about a genocide on foreign soil. Will teachers also be able to say that the U.S. sent Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis back to Germany to die rather than grant them entry here in 1939? Since FDR was president then, maybe.

With a majority-Republican legislature, it’s more than likely some of these bills will pass. But the public should know the lengths lawmakers are going to keep schools from accurately teaching America’s history. And that our children will get a lesser education as a result.

This story was originally published April 7, 2022 at 5:00 AM.