A Black Studies Curriculum Is (Defiantly) Rolling Out in New York City

Late last fall at the Hugo Newman School in Harlem, two social studies teachers handed out pages of hip-hop lyrics to their seventh graders, and then flicked off the lights. The students appeared surprised.

They had been studying ancient matriarchal societies, including Iroquois communities that had women leaders. Now, their teachers were about to play the song “Ladies First” by Queen Latifah and Monie Love. The teachers instructed their students to highlight any lyrics that reminded them of the Iroquois women, who were known as the Haudenosaunee Clan Mothers.

Although they did not know it, the middle schoolers were in the midst of their first lesson of “Black Studies as the Study of the World,” a curriculum that rolled out in September and is now available to every New York City public school.

Tristan Vanderhorst, 12, took notes and bobbed to the music. “I had never seen a woman rap like that,” he said afterward.

The curriculum, which spans from pre-K to 12th grade, covers early African civilizations, Black American history and the achievements and contributions of the African diaspora. The curriculum emphasizes what is known as “culturally relevant” teaching, an approach meant to help students connect their own lives with what they are learning. It has been used by dozens of schools across the city since the last school year, to little fanfare.

But the Trump administration has moved aggressively in its first weeks to ban programs related to diversity and equity across government, including in schools.

Local school districts have traditionally been insulated from interference from the federal government. New York’s curriculum — and similar efforts to bring discussions about race and history into schools — could test those lines, and how far the Trump administration might go to enforce its edicts.

Already, many K-12 educators, including the architects of New York City’s new Black studies curriculum, appear defiant.

“In New York, we are trying our best to be Trump-proof,” Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the New York City Council, said in a recent interview. “We are doing everything we can to protect the curriculum.”

In his second week in office, President Trump signed an executive order to withhold funding from schools that teach that the United States is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory.” The order bans what it called “discriminatory equity ideology,” which “treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.”

Whether New York’s curriculum — or other Black history efforts — violate those terms is open to interpretation.

That executive order, and others like it, enter an ongoing debate about how schools should handle race and ethnicity. Some states, like California, have embraced ethnic studies education, a discipline born on the left that connects the experiences of people of color throughout history. Others have sought to limit or ban it. Since 2021, more than 44 states have restricted how race is discussed in public schools.

Last week, the Trump administration issued guidance to schools detailing how it might pursue its orders. Officials might examine elementary school with programs that “shame students of a particular race or ethnicity” or that “accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy.” In its guidance, the administration also suggested it would look at schools that it argued “have sought to veil discriminatory policies with terms like ‘social-emotional learning’ or ‘culturally responsive’ teaching.”

Ms. Adams, who helped allocate $27 million to develop the Black studies lessons, has called New York’s curriculum a “model of fearlessness.” The curriculum offers students an “African-centered perspective that predates slavery” and is optional for schools.

But about 200 have adopted it, and in early February, nearly 2,000 students gathered at the Channel View School for Research in Rockaway, Queens, for a Black studies student fair connected with the curriculum.

Melissa Aviles-Ramos, the city’s schools chancellor, said the curriculum was essential in a diverse school district.

“When students connect with the material, they are more engaged, develop critical thinking skills and build a deeper sense of belonging,” she said in a statement. “I am proud to lead a school system that values inclusion and the powerful truth that our diversity is our strength.”

In the curriculum’s pre-K and elementary school lessons, students contemplate their identity through name study and ancestry exercises. In middle school, they are introduced to the concept of agency while studying local Black communities. They also learn about the Black media and the Black Panthers.

In high school, students explore Black liberation, slavery, disenfranchisement, policing and other hot-button political issues like reparations while reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations.”

Peta-Gaye McLean, one of the seventh grade social studies teachers who began a lesson with a hip-hop music video, said she appreciates the new material, even though she has been teaching about Black history for years.

“Not only does it legitimize it, it gives the teachers a responsibility,” she said.

Some of her students took personally the lesson comparing the roles of women in pre-colonial America and Africa. Tristan said his takeaways were “don’t take women for granted. Respect them highly.”

His classmate, Amelia Sierra, 12, said the class taught “all these good things about women and the ladies — how helpful they were and how important they were,” she said. “So I think that shows me how important I am.”

That is part of the goal. Some education experts say that making connections to students’ own lives and culture helps them master the material. One study found that students who take ethnic studies classes are more likely to graduate and go to college.

“The ability to really dig into problems that kids care about is one of the things that I think sets culturally relevant pedagogy apart,” Gloria Ladson-Billings, an education scholar who coined that term in the mid-1990s, said in an interview.

Not all educators agree with that approach. Ian Rowe, the founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a charter school in the Bronx that embraces the classics, urges students to “reject victimhood.” He said his school would never adopt the “Black Studies as the Study of the World” curriculum.

His students, who are predominantly Black and Latino, are still exposed to Black history, Mr. Rowe said. But, he added, “We’re going at it from the human condition, a universality. So we don’t want our kids to only see themselves through the prism of race only or gender only.”

Conservative and liberal educators may have more in common than they realize when it comes to teaching about Black history, said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

In both right- and left-leaning parts of the country, new standards and lessons related to African American history often emphasize teaching about the strengths of the Black community. He said that heated political rhetoric prevents both sides from appreciating some of their shared values.

“Instead of trying to find common ground on antiracism or inclusive history or ways in which we can broaden the canon,” he said, partisans “have instead found it more politically beneficial to plant an extremist flag.”

Alesha Smith, an English Language Arts teacher at Eagle Academy in Harlem, an all-boys school that is using the New York City curriculum, said she loved teaching about empowerment in difficult lessons about slavery, for example.

“The strengths of this curriculum are in identifying the strengths of the individuals and the flaws in the system,” she said.

Nevertheless, conservatives who have taken issue with ethnic studies might make similar criticisms of New York’s curriculum, which was informed by some of the issues the Trump orders condemn, like “equity.” It also does not discuss many Black conservatives.

Still, in some lessons, race never comes up. Professor Sonya Douglass, who oversaw the development of the curriculum as the director of the Black Education Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, said the intention was to have students think more about “concepts like identity and empowerment, self-knowledge, culture.”

In December, Ms. Smith led a lesson on how enslaved people subverted the institution of slavery. An illustration at the front of the room showed a rose climbing out of concrete, a reminder of the class’s previous discussion of Tupac Shakur’s poem that reflects on the same imagery.

Students chose from several writing prompts, including one asking how they had overcome adversity in their own lives and another about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

TriNahum Jones, 18, described how Dr. King used his platform as a minister to inspire legions of supporters. And Muhamed Toure, 17, wrote his essay about being stopped and frisked while walking home from the gym.

“It kind of just showed me racism hasn’t gone away,” he said. “It has just evolved and changed throughout time.”

After they put their pencils down, the class talked about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. They also spoke about quieter acts of rebellion, like learning how to read and write.

“I come out of class more impressed with the resilience of my race,” TriNahum said.