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Gallery: New York City Debuts Nation’s First K-12 Black Studies Curriculum

Marianna McMurdock — Tue, 03 Dec 2024 13:30:00 +0000

Veronica and Odyssey, both six, didn’t get to know their grandparents.

So when their first grade teacher at an Harlem elementary school introduced an activity to learn about their ancestors, the two girls knew immediately who to choose.

Taking turns giggling in a P.S. 125 hallway this fall, they wondered about their grandparents’ lives: where were you born, what is it like? How did you fall in love?

The pair are two of close to one million students being introduced to the nation’s first K-12 Black studies curriculum, rolled out across New York City’s public schools this academic year after a pilot at 120 schools.

Rather than relegating Black history to one month, one self-selected elective course, or one passionate educator, the curricula exposes young people year-round to the stories, lived experiences, and contributions of Black people across the world.

After a concerted push from advocates, educators, and the City Council, schools across New York City, where students are Black, are expanding lessons at each grade level.

“We’re here to tell the truth and to teach the truth,” former New York City Schools Chancellor chancellor David Banks said earlier this year. “Black history is American history. Period. Full stop.”

Its unveiling comes at a pivotal moment in American history, as states like , Florida, and Texas look to limit the inclusion of Black history in the classroom, attempting to dismiss it as teaching kids race or to hate the country that subjected Black families to violence for centuries.

But the words students and educators used in association with New York’s Black studies were consistently positive: joyous, exciting, fun, engaging. For the first time, students are seeing themselves and their perspective of the world in the material.

Sera Mugeta (Marianna McMurdock)

The ancestry lesson at P.S. 125, for instance, built upon a book students had read by Jacqueline Woodson, Show Way, which explains how one person descends from generations of others, and how quilts were one way Black families catalogued that history.

“They really thought about what their ancestors would be like during that time. Not ‘what do you do’ but ‘what are you like? What’s it like back where you were?’ ” said their teacher Sera Mugeta. “They really enjoyed that.”

“It feels really good,” she added, smiling, to be able to bring in the “specific parts of African American history and Black history that are not highlighted in history books and in history classes otherwise.”

After three years of development, the guides and reading lists that comprise Black Studies as the Study of the World are now intended to be a model for schools nationwide.

Developed by a coalition of six organizations, including the City Council’s Black, Latino Asian caucuses, United Way, and Columbia Teacher College’s Black Educator Research Center, “our hope is that it will provide an opportunity to affirm the racial identity of Black children, which I don’t think is happening in a lot of places,” said Sonya Douglass, founding director of Columbia’s BERC.

Teaching Black history allows students “to be able to better understand and celebrate and appreciate the contributions of individuals who came before,” Douglass added.

The work was in part inspired by, “the movement of social justice and reform during the COVID-19 Pandemic and civil unrest of this time,” the coalition said in a press release.

Without the representation, students start to question,“ ‘Oh, why am I not as valuable in the same way?’ ” said P.S. 125 principal Yael Leopold.

Now eighth graders, for instance, can do a three day lesson on investigative journalism, protest, and resistance to lynching as they learn about . The lesson plan starts with prompting small group discussions on her famed quote: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

One Brooklyn high school teacher told Douglass a group of black boys, the subset , used to skip class to play basketball regularly.

After incorporating a few lessons, she saw higher attendance and engagement, an overall “desire to be in class and see what was going to be taught the next day.” It is bringing back a curiosity and “joy of learning that I think unfortunately doesn’t exist for far too many Black students.”

Illustration of investigative journalist and activist Ida B. Wells from a TED Ed video resource cited in NYC’s Black Studies curricula.

Lorraine Hansberry’s work A Raisin in the Sun makes an appearance in recommended reading lists for the eighth grade. (Getty Images)

The impact is being felt by young people and educators across the city.

In Queen’s District 28, one eighth grade teacher said, “students were more engaged than ever and even those who usually do not participate had a lot to share and make connections to today.”

A fifth grade teacher in the same district said, “my Haitian students were delighted and were very active in the activity, they had a great sense of pride. Some of my parents offered to come to class to speak about Haiti.”

The impact is unsurprising to scholars familiar with identity development and school engagement: research has long shown students perform better when they feel their experiences are acknowledged in the classroom.

Sonya Douglass

“It is important for us to be able to have that type of education in order to create the type of country that I think many Americans would like to see going forward,” Douglass said, “which is inclusive and diverse.”

A Harlem student giggles while clapping during gospel choir class. (Marianna McMurdock)

Schools across District 5, one of a few New York City districts that’ve been vocal in their commitment to integrating the lessons at each grade, have found ways to incorporate the contributions of Black leaders, visionaries and families for years.

Home to the , the area’s schools like P.S. 125 have been “unapologetic,” said Leopold, in incorporating world histories by default, reflecting the families they serve better than pre-existing social studies curricula.

“What made it an easy transition for us is we were doing so much of that work already that it didn’t feel like an add-on,” she added. “…Our teachers and our educators were yearning for more.”

P.S. 125 principal Yael Leopold (Marianna McMurdock)

The school already adopts monthly themes like Black joy and liberation. They introduce their elementary schoolers to jazz, gospel choir, and African drumming.

“We’re trying to build all of our children to be advocates and agents for social change,” Leopold said. “That will only happen if they have the opportunity to be exposed to those things – all children.”

Deicy Solis’ classroom in P.S. 125 features colorful papel picado banners, a tribute to her Mexican heritage. (Marianna McMurdock)

The culture of change trickles down into small decisions, like ensuring the skintones of cartoon hands to use for classroom posters used for counting or storytelling aren’t always white by default.

And at the end of each lesson plan in the city’s curriculum, a question prompts educators to reflect on their own biases: “how will you maintain high expectations for all students?”

Through monthly professional development sessions at their school and separate offerings through BERC, educators like Sera and kindergarten teachers Michelle Allen have become more confident in both the subject matter and how to facilitate the classroom conversations in ways that are developmentally appropriate.

Daniel Calvert (Marianna McMurdock)

“It’s something I wish I had as a kid,” said Assistant Principal Daniel Calvert. “I wish I had the tools and the license as a teacher to figure out how to apply things that matter to me, as an educator and as a person, into my teaching.”

Allen, for instance, starts first by introducing, what is Africa? Breaking down what students already have heard or think they know about a place, showing them maps and how maps can be distorted, is a helpful starting point before they go deeper into particular cultures or traditions.

One family, from Eritrea, after witnessing the activities happening throughout the school asked if they could come in and do a tea ceremony for the students.

“In that way, respecting the families’ cultures creates a stronger community that maybe had the Black curriculum not been here, it might have not fostered that same thing,” said Allen. “It does give you something to lean back on.”

The work is being noticed in other parts of the country. California’s Long Beach School District is now in talks with BERC to develop a summer program. Columbia University’s Gordon Institute has received half a million dollars to work on what will ultimately be a Latino curriculum. And the City Council recently freed up $750,000 in additional funding for educators’ training.

“The heavy lift is really going to be the training and professional development because this is content and information that I would say a majority of educators have not had access to because it’s not required in our K-12 education system,” Douglass said.

Odyssey, photo taken by Veronica

For now, in Harlem, the rollout feels like an honoring — of the place, its people, and the work of its educators.

“The best part has been it feels like we’re rebuilding trust with the community that really had been in some ways lied to and bamboozled for many generations in terms of public education,” principal Leopold said, adding that Black studies is, “allowing our children to find joy in their learning and in themselves.”

High School Seniors Eye Campus Protests as High-Stakes College Decision Looms

Amanda Geduld — Fri, 03 May 2024 19:50:12 +0000

Updated, May 6

With just a few hours remaining until the midnight deposit deadline, West Virginia high school senior Sam Dodson thought he knew which university he’d commit to for the fall but second thoughts were bubbling up. Accepted to a number of prestigious institutions, he had narrowed his final choice down to two: Columbia University and Dartmouth College.

There were multiple considerations at play: academic opportunities; social life; Manhattan’s Upper West Side vs. bucolic Hanover, New Hampshire. And over the past few weeks a new one had emerged: the quickly spreading pro-Palestinian campus protests and subsequent arrests for which Columbia was ground zero.

Dodson was one of these students, watching closely as protesters occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall were cleared from the building Tuesday by the New York Police Department..

“All of that made me wait until kind of the last minute to officially decide,” the track runner told ��.

The class of 2024 has had a high school experience bookended by jarring national news, their freshman year coinciding with school shutdowns and COVID-era virtual learning and their senior year ending amid a volatile movement protesting Israel’s assault in Gaza that has swept up dozens of colleges and brought over 2,000 arrests, according to a tally. As seniors weigh options for their future universities, some are looking to the actions of college student activists and the responses of their respective administrations before making final decisions.

“I do think that all of the turmoil and things that are going on definitely had me reconsidering. It had me having second thoughts about different things and had me, I guess, take second looks at different schools,” Dodson said. “But ultimately I guess I tried to look past anything with that and understand that this is a choice I’m making for the next four years and what I think would be the best experience for me — academically, personally, in terms of just student life. All of those things.”

Dodson’s experiences are reflective of as well. Safa Al-Omari, a senior at NYC’s The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology told she is still deciding between City College and Hunter College. The Yemeni student said she wants to do more research about City College’s response to the protests before she commits.

“Being Middle Eastern, I have a lot of feelings about what’s going on,” Al-Omari said. “I would not want to go to a college that is arresting students based on them speaking for people who are suffering.”

For Sam Dodson’s mom, Sarah, there were also conflicting emotions. “It’s very hard to put the ‘yes’ when you have a lot of … chaos,” she said. While she said her son was drawn to the diversity of perspectives on Columbia’s campus, the more heated elements of the past few weeks have given him pause. At the same time, she emphasized the importance of being in a higher education space where free speech is strongly respected and encouraged.

“You never want your kid to go to a school that is on the national news because of police involvement, right? It just doesn’t sit really well,” she said. “However, I guess I am under the assumption that there’s going to be resolution … I’m guessing because this is a college platform that they are going to hopefully have more engaging, open conversations so that there can be some sort of — I don’t know — persistence of everyday campus life that is not so inflamed.”

For now, all academic activities on Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus — including finals — have been moved fully remote for the remainder of the semester. On May 6, the school to cancel the university-wide commencement scheduled for May 15 and instead focus on school-level graduation ceremonies. The NYPD had been asked to maintain a police presence until two days after the main commencement; it was not immediately clear how the cancellation might impact that.

Sam Dodson with his parents, Sarah and Jeff, at the National Honor Society ceremony. (Sam Dodson)

Sam Dodson, who began his freshman year of high school in hybrid learning, said it would be frustrating if his first year of college classes also goes remote because of campus unrest. On the other hand, “there’s something interesting about being in the center of the news or the center of exactly what’s happening.”

Students reconsider and recommit

It was about two week after pro-Palestinian students and activists on Columbia’s campus first erected the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that a group occupied Hamilton Hall, a building with a long history of . Hours later, the cops moved in, arresting, 112 people, including 32 who were not affiliated with the university.

By this point, the movement had spread across the country, including to Dodson’s other contender, Dartmouth, where nearly were arrested this week. About a week and half before that escalation, Columbia hosted its accepted students weekend and Dodson was there.

He took some time, he said, to wander around campus and speak with protesting students near the encampment. “They were like, ‘Hey, new Columbia students. Come talk to us!’ You know, I guess, they were very like welcoming. They were very much wanting to talk with the admitted students, which I thought was a nice thing.”

While he was disappointed that many of the accepted student weekend activities had been canceled or modified, he was grateful he got to experience the events on campus firsthand and form his own views.

Around the same time, another high school senior Lila Ellis, who uses they/ them pronouns, was also closely observing the activities on Columbia’s campus. A Jewish student from Massachusetts, they had committed months before to the dual-degree joint program between Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Lila Ellis is a rising freshman at List College, the dual-degree joint program between Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. (Andy Ellis)

Ellis said that because of their religion, they’re concerned there are certain places on campus they won’t be welcomed. “I think that to just stay away from all secular extracurriculars entirely, is a disservice to myself and to the community as a whole,” they said. “And I’m just thinking about, like, how am I going to balance that while also, you know, recognizing that some spaces don’t want me in them?”

Ellis pointed to the example of a protester outside the gates of campus , “Go back to Poland,” at Jewish students. Recently, a January video of one of the student protest leaders, Khymani James, began circulating in which he said, “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” He has since been barred from campus and released a of apology.

Notably, as reported by , protests within the encampment were on the whole peaceful and included Jewish students, though others on campus agreed with Ellis that anti-Zionist rhetoric made them feel unwelcomed.

While Ellis is sticking with their decision to attend Columbia, they did briefly toy with the idea of a gap year or of moving core curriculum requirements around to stay away from the main campus for a while.

“I really do want to be in this program,” they said, “And it’s just a matter of thinking about ‘How do we make that work with what’s happening at Columbia?’ rather than ‘Can it work?’ Because I think it can work.”

As Ellis prepares to enroll for classes — especially literature overview courses on Columbia’s campus — they’re considering a number of factors including whether or not the professors taught from the encampment.

“Hopefully,” they said, “it’s not an issue in the fall, but just thinking about who were the professors who were willing to do that? And is that an environment that I want to be in for learning and for having an open discussion?”

Their father, Andy Ellis, added his own apprehension. All parents, he said, are nervous to send their first child off to college. But the protests on campus, he said, add an extra dimension, especially for a Jewish student.

Ellis, a graduate of MIT, has spent significant time in higher education. He said he was on a Harvard visiting committee and in an academic center there for the last decade but resigned from both positions in October, “when it became clear that people were ripping off their mask around anti-semitism.”

He said that if he were a current student on Columbia’s campus, he would be on the front lines of the counter-protests, displaying footage from Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel.

“I think I would be that person,” the consultant said, “But I know that Lila is not that person. But I also know that Lila is not going to just duck [their]head and stay completely quiet, but I think find a balanced view. Listening to what Lila said about, you know, ‘find the humanity’ is an amazing, generous take. I’m really proud that I think we’ve created somebody who has a better moral compass than I do because I’m a lot more angry.”

Back in West Virginia and with time to spare before Wednesday’s midnight deadline, Dodson had finalized his decision: He committed to be a member of the class of 2028 at Columbia where he plans to study political science and government.

“I think it’ll just be interesting,” he said, ”to go from — to take my perspective from this kind of small town area where like, I mean, I’ve met people from other places. I try to read, I try to keep myself exposed to those things, but it’d be cool to actually meet people from all sorts of perspectives and all sorts of backgrounds.”

‘Behind the 8 Ball:’ How Research is Trying to Catch Up on Cannabis and Kids

Amanda Geduld — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 19:40:45 +0000

About one-third of 12th graders across the country reported using marijuana over the past year, according to a released March 12.

During that same period, about 11% of 12-grade students reported using a lesser-known product, delta-8-THC, a psychoactive substance typically derived from hemp. It can produce a fuzzy, euphoric high similar to — but typically milder than — the THC effects delivered in cannabis.

Delta-8-THC is of particular interest because despite health risks, it’s still widely considered to be legal at the federal level after the 2018 farm bill from the list of controlled substances. It’s legal in 22 states and Washington, D.C. with limited regulation, and in a number of states — including Illinois and New Jersey — there are no age restrictions at all on purchasing it. Concerns are compounded by the fact that it can be found in kid-friendly products, like gummies and chocolates, and can be bought online or from easily accessible vendors, like gas stations.

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The results on pot and delta-8-THC use came from the newly released , which annually surveys teens across the U.S. and is conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan. The study, which was the first to report the extent of delta-8-THC use, included 22,318 surveys given to students enrolled in 235 public and private schools across the country between February and June 2023. Questions about delta-8-THC were administered to a randomly selected one-third of 12th-grade students, or 2,186 seniors in 27 states.

“(Eleven percent) is a lot of people — that’s at least one or two students in every average-sized high school class who may be using delta-8. We don’t know enough about these drugs, but we see that they are already extremely accessible to teens,” National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Nora Volkow said in “Cannabis use in general has been associated with negative impacts on the adolescent brain, so we must pay attention to the kinds of cannabis products teens are using, educate young people about potential risks, and ensure that treatment for cannabis use disorder and adequate mental health care is provided to those who need it.”

The latest study adds to the understanding of how young people are using cannabis and related products at a time when legalization is far reaching and overwhelmingly favored — now live in a state where marijuana is legal for either recreational or medical use and for those two purposes, according to two Pew Research Center analyses released over the last month.

Ryan Sultan, assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and a cannabis-use expert, said the current climate calls for a more nuanced approach to marijuana’s effects.

“The narrative of cannabis as a ‘reefer madness’ and ruining everyone’s life — that one was a lie,” he said. “And the narrative that cannabis is a magical, natural, benign panacea for everything — that one is also not true.”

At the same time, Sultan warns that young users remain particularly vulnerable.

“The biggest consequence that we think about in the field of child development … is that using substances that are potentially psychoactive and addictive and have effects on development … the younger you are, the more problematic they might be,” he said. “And cannabis is included in that.”

A number of teenagers believe that marijuana is helpful for anxiety and depression, which doesn’t appear to be true in the long term, Sultan said. “The problem is that chronic use seems to not do that. Chronic use seems to actually result in a worsening of that symptomatology.”

Cannabis today is far more potent than it was decades ago, allowing it to bind to receptors in the brain more effectively. So when you stop using it, you end up with even worse symptoms, according to Sultan.

Sultan published a last year showing that adolescents who recently used cannabis but did not meet the criteria for a marijuana use disorder had two to four times greater odds of major depression, suicidal ideation, difficulty concentrating, lower GPA and a number of other negative outcomes. These results reinforce those of earlier as well.

Sultan analyzed responses from 68,263 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health between 2015 and 2019.

He noted, though, that the study did not demonstrate causation: it’s not clear that the marijuana use directly led to these mental health issues and other outcomes.

“It’s more like a cycle,” he said, in which people who are depressed and anxious are more likely to use cannabis in the first place to self-medicate their symptoms but this can end up “spinning out of control.”

“So rather than which came first, the chicken or the egg? They both came and they’re both happening and they’re both interacting with each other.”

Yet, most adolescents don’t think of weed as harmful: Over the past decade, the perceived risk of harm decreased by nearly half, while use for people 12 and over increased from about demonstrate that they think of edibles, in particular, as less harmful, failing to account for concerns around potency, regulation and delayed effects.

A at UC Davis Health and the University of Washington, which surveyed teens over a six-month period, found that they get high for enjoyment and to cope. Those who used it to forget their problems typically experienced more negative consequences like difficulty concentrating. Lead author Nicole Schultz noted that understanding teens’ motivation for getting high is an important first step in developing strategies to intervene early.

Post-pandemic, marijuana remains one of the three substances used by adolescents, along with alcohol and nicotine vaping.

In 2022, the percentage of young adults 19 to 30 years old who reported marijuana use reached record highs, according to a National Institute of Health-funded : About 44% of those surveyed reported use in the past year — a significant increase from the 25% who reported the same in 2012. Young adults also reported a record-high use of marijuana vaping in 2022: 21% up from 12% in 2017, when the measure was first added to the study.

A published in 2020 found that adolescents and adults who vape nicotine were also more likely to also use alcohol and marijuana. In adolescents, the relationship was much stronger: those who vaped were 4.5 to six times as likely to report alcohol and marijuana use and were particularly likely to report binge drinking.

According to a , vaping has emerged as one of the two most popular methods for teens to get high, despite its unclear long-term health implications. In fact, it may actually be associated with greater risk than smoking for lung injuries, seizures and acute psychiatric symptoms.

Vaping is also a more accessible and discreet way to consume marijuana, allowing teens to use it in more settings, including schools, without getting caught. New York City teachers and students have more and younger students are coming to school high and are smoking throughout the day, with hypothesizing that kids are using weed to blunt residual pain and anxiety from the pandemic.

This harder-to-detect delivery method puts a lot of pressure on individuals to manage how often they’re using it, according to Sultan, which is particularly challenging for adolescents who may struggle with impulse control.

Ultimately, though, much of the research that exists on cannabis generally is outdated because it’s based on weaker strains of the substance from years ago, Sultan said: “We are behind the eight ball on cannabis.”