A closer look at the struggle for inclusion in school curricula

Graphic by Ria Dubey, News Editor

Bedansh Pandey, Copy Editor & Ria Dubey, News Editor

In light of recent events, some students and teachers have increased their calls for diversifying educational curriculum to include a more multicultural and in-depth understanding of concepts, while others pushed back strongly. This culminated in the Georgia Board of Education’s resolution recommending that public schools ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) on June 3, 2021, sparking further discussion regarding the representation of marginalized communities in history and literature classes.*

Current Situation

To understand the condition of diversity in education today, it is worth noting what the state curriculums are and whether or not students and teachers believe the curriculums adequately represent the history of traditionally marginalized communities. 

“We don't learn very much about different sort of cultures, especially,” Northview senior Pranay Ippagunta said. “Even in classes like world history, we only learn from the viewpoint of American writers and imperialism.”

Other students have also expressed concerns about the inclusivity of the curriculum and the representation of peoples of color, especially in social studies.

“At Northview, [teachers] definitely stick by the books, which isn't really as productive as it should be, seeing [as] we have such a diverse group of students,” Aaliyah Guthrie, senior and president of the Black History Club, said. “We need to include things not only dealing with slavery in the Black community, but also Black excellence, and not just focus on the negativity of what may have happened in these races and cultures, but also what good may have happened.”

Ippagunta and Guthrie are not alone in this belief. According to a survey of 51 Northview students, only 15.7% of students believe Northview's overall curriculum represents marginalized groups very well. Ippagunta adds that even basic history curriculum is taught through a Eurocentric lens, one that inhibits students from gaining a full understanding of events, such as the abuses to the United States’ indigenous population. Kasey Smarr, a US history teacher at Northview, wholeheartedly agrees.  

“If you look at just the bare bone standards, it may not be extremely diverse and inclusive,” Smarr said. “There’s a real lack in some areas in Reconstruction, where we see the first times where Black people are able to be elected to offices and hold Senate seats. There’s not enough emphasis on that.” 

Smarr also notes that the current US History curriculum treats Black people as a monolith, failing to acknowledge the diversity in contributions that the community has made. 

“During the Civil Rights Movement, a lot of people watered [it] down to just [Martin Luther King Jr.] and what he did, rather than looking at the full scope of who else was involved in the fights and how they interacted with different people,” Smarr said. 

Students like senior Juliette Salah believe this trend is also present in world history classes, where curricula may focus primarily on European culture and exclude other worldviews. But Mark Anderson, an AP World History teacher at Northview, fundamentally disagrees. 

Anderson explains that courses such as AP US History and AP World History, along with their on-level counterparts, are not meant to be in-depth analyses of historical events. Rather, they are meant to serve as brief snippets of what are actually much more nuanced concepts. An example he gives is the Roman Empire –– historically, it was one of the most expansive societies whose elements of existence still permeate the 21st century. Due to the sheer amount of content he needed to cover through the entire year, however, Anderson was only able to spend two days discussing the Roman Empire, which he deems one of the most impactful empires in human history. 

“You have to understand that when you take a world history class in high school, it's just a survey of the world,” Anderson said. “The College Board tried to address that two years ago by taking the [AP World History] curriculum and limiting it to [start at] 1200, so that teachers can even begin to have the possibility of exploring some things in more depth. But even then, obviously, just too much happened.” 

He also believes the world history curriculum already gives students a diverse perspective, especially on the history of slavery; students get to see things happening relating to slavery on four different continents as well as what the varying interactions looked like. After that, they are exposed to a global movement for abolition, followed by nativist backlash. By examining all of these trends from a multicultural viewpoint, he firmly maintains that students can better understand how the world got to be the way it is. 

“I've never personally had a big problem with [the standards], but that's because so much happened in history. It's not because it's you who doesn't know or doesn't care, or we're too Eurocentric, and therefore we just ignore Asia. It's because [time constraints] just stop [us from learning about] them,” Anderson said.  

Despite how crunched teachers may be in terms of time, Smarr sees a benefit to College Board requirements for AP classes as compared to the county standards. 

“I think the College Board does a lot better than our standards in the other classes,” Smarr said. “They look at things very concretely. Instead of really getting into more of the analytical side of things, [the standards] just tell the stories of how [women or African Americans] might have been oppressed or things like that, rather than the stories of progress that they also had.”

Although teachers may want to diversify their lessons, they must first overcome challenges posed by the existing standards. Northview Language arts teacher Jonathan Waters explains that there are quite a few obstacles he faces as a straight, white, male teacher trying to incorporate other voices such as being able to understand other perspectives, and even including representation while following county guidelines.

“The county-approved [book] list makes [assigning books] challenging because I don't think that list is very diverse,” Waters said. “However, if it's a choice for students to read, then we have a little bit more freedom to make those calls and offer a variety of options.”

As students and teachers attempt to further diversify public education, Fulton County Schools (FCS) has instead chosen to focus on character education and building students’ social skills; it recently implemented a new program called Student Success Skills that aims to address these issues through daily lessons. Tim Corrigan, Fulton County’s Zone Six superintendent, explains that the reason why the county is focusing on character education is out of concern for the students' well-being as they transition back to a sense of normalcy from the pandemic. 

“The kids that are suffering, and where we see the biggest challenge, are not the kids saying ‘Oh gosh, I really wish there was a class on diversity,’” Corrigan said. “They're like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can't [sleep] at night. I have these panic attacks.’”

Corrigan believes that when diversity in education is compared with character education, there is a clear precedent in the county’s priorities.

“This is, in a sense, saying this relationship piece is much more important right now than diversity of the curriculum,” he said. 

Efforts to Diversify Education 

Although teachers such as Smarr and Waters face the aforementioned problems with current state standards, they are making efforts within their classrooms to ensure students are exposed to material they may not be familiar with. 

“I like to try to use materials that not only are new but also bring in a lot more of a different perspective,” Smarr said. “The main thing that I really like to do as a teacher is give everyone as much primary source material that tells the full view of the story as possible.”

As for literature classes, Waters says that by assigning texts that are written by authors from varying backgrounds, he allows students to take on a more multicultural lens when analyzing literature. 

“When I do book talks, I try to make sure I pull from lots of different areas and design my library to try and pinpoint some different parts of the world: the Black experience in America, the immigrant experience, LGBTQIA+ [community], and female voices,” Waters said. “So I try to make sure [students] have a sense of where they have been, and then for the texts that we use in class, I try to make sure they’re not by mostly old white men.” 

However, Smarr maintains that efforts to diversify curriculum in the day-to-day operations of the classroom are not enough––he believes this diversification also requires a detailed realtering of the state standards, which are beyond his control. His reasoning for this is rooted in the base-level concepts students learn in their early days of education. For example, he notes that, since elementary school, students are taught the same reasons for the cause of the Civil War or the spark of the Civil Rights Movement whenever they learn history.

“You never know exactly what story [students have] been told before,” Smarr said. “When the standards get really repetitive, they cause an issue where the kids might tune [new material] out because they feel like they've already heard this story, but there's a lot more that needs to be added to it.”

In an attempt to diversify students’ understanding of the struggles of marginalized communities through history, FCS recently approved an African American studies course that is meant to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the past and present situation of African-descended people in the US. Smarr served on the committee for the creation of this class. 

“The committee was dedicated to making sure that this course provided not only a more directed focus of Black history but also more of a story than simply looking at forms of oppression and interactions with other groups of people,” Smarr said. “A major focus of the course is meant to be celebrating moments and people in Black history.”

The one-semester class will serve as an elective for social studies and is meant to be separate from other disciplines. Though Smarr sees this class as a step in the right direction for diversifying the curriculum, he notes that since it is not a graduation requirement, students do not have much of an incentive to take it. 

“At Northview, especially for the students who may benefit most from this class, it is not a priority in their eyes in place of adding more STEM-related courses to bolster their coursework,” Smarr said. 

It is worth noting, though, that the African American studies course has yet to be placed on the Northview course catalog as an option for students to diversify their course load. When asked about the lack of African American studies at Northview, Principal Brian Downey said this was due to the time frame in which the county approved the course.

“Philosophically, we build our master schedule based on the course requests that come from the students,” he said. “[African American studies] wasn’t approved [in time] for us to go through that process, so they’ll be in this year’s cycle.”

However, Alpharetta High School already offers this class despite having been bound to the same time frame as Northview, according to Alpharetta senior Austin Huang. He explains that the general reception of the course has been positive and that the course itself was added through initiative from the staff and administration. 

“Generally, students say they thought it was an interesting course. I've heard of a lot of interest from those with female and African American identities,” Huang said. “But again, one of the big things is that it's not a mandatory class. It's not something that [students are] required to learn, so that does impact a lot of students' decisions regarding whether or not to take it.”

When Downey was later asked about why other schools in Fulton County have already implemented the class when Northview has yet to, he explained that the level of student interest and constraints in staffing inhibit his ability to offer all classes that have been approved at the state and district levels. 

“I can really only speak about Northview, and it’s because our student body hasn’t asked for it yet,” Downey said. “Being approved, being offered, and then having the actual class are three different things. Even if we get the approval and the class is in our course offerings this spring, if only [a few kids] ask for the class, I’m not going to be able to offer the class.” 

Curriculum aside, another overlooked prong of diversity in education is diversity amongst teachers and staff to create a more inclusive learning environment. Salah and other students believe some departments at Northview fail to meet the demands of diversity courses require. 

“[The teachers] could be more diverse, especially in certain departments, like the social studies department. You're talking about history, and I feel like if [the school] keeps it predominantly white and male, it unnecessarily limits students,” Salah said. 

Downey acknowledges the negative impact a homogenous teaching staff can have on learning but added that from an administrative standpoint, the number of nonwhite Northview teachers who are people of color has remained stagnant due to hiring challenges. 

“We have made a concerted effort to diversify our teaching staff,” Downey said. “But [when] I looked at these data points at the end of the year last year, we have not made a significant improvement in that. What I was finding over the past 10 years is that as I was hiring an Asian teacher or an African American teacher, I had another one retiring or transferring.” 

Even so, Downey explains that there is a larger trend at hand in which it is increasingly difficult for schools to find the right individuals for teaching positions while maintaining the caliber of teachers that Northview currently has. 

“In an ideal world, the adults would match our student demographics, but I don’t know if I would ever achieve that,” Downey said. “In order for me to hire the candidates, there has to be candidates to hire. At a base level, setting race and gender aside, the qualified pool of teachers to hire is getting smaller and smaller.”

The Future of the DEI Movement 

In light of Georgia public education’s shortcomings in representing different races, students are fighting back. After the Georgia Board of Education’s June resolution against CRT, students across the state bound together to create the Students For Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) organization, which is a coalition of young people (both college and high school students) aiming to create more inclusive educational policies. Katy Gates, now a freshman at the University of Georgia, started the movement when she set up its Instagram page (@s4dei_ga). The account has since gained more than 600 followers. 

“I started the organization after I saw something happening in my home county of Forsyth, where there was a good number of parents who were very vocally opposed to our county's skin and bones DEI plan,” Gates said. “I just started the account as a way to keep information on one organized place, and from there, it just kind of spread.”

Gates reflects on her own experiences with non-diverse education as a former student of Forsyth County Schools. She had two nonwhite teachers the entire time she was in the county and recalls a time when her mother called an elementary school about their student-to-teacher ratios but was met with remarks about how Caucasian the student body was instead. 

“When it came to literature that we read, there was an astonishing lack of diverse authors. There were years when we did not read one book written by a woman for the whole school year, which is ridiculous,” Gates said. There were multiple years when we did not read one book by someone who wasn't white.” 

She believes that although counties such as Fulton and Gwinnett may be more educationally inclusive than Forsyth, the rift between true diversity and homogeneity persists in curricula all across the state. That is why Huang, also a member of the Students For DEI movement, describes the organization as having a set of regional networks stretching through Georgia. 

“We kind of have a regional system, with people advocating in Fulton, Clayton, Douglas, Cobb, and Forsyth counties. I’m one of the students working in Fulton County,” Huang said. “I, alongside a couple of other students from other high schools, work together playing events, working on action hours, speaking on board meetings, and doing some strategizing.”

In regard to what that strategizing looks like, Mira Sydow, a Northview alumna and ardent member of the movement, states that the key to creating inclusion is targeting leaders at the district and state levels of education. To do so, she and the other students in the movement have created a petition (which has over 100 signatures at the time of writing) for Fulton County to approve classes such as U.S. Latinx Studies, Asian American Studies, and American Indian Studies and create a POC and LGBTQIA+ literature requirement. 

“As is the case with a lot of school boards around here, there tends to be around three or four of the members [who] would at least support DEI and three or four who would not, when it's a seven-person board,” Sydow said. “So it ends up being very split.” 

Sydow also explains that the biggest impediment to the organization’s journey has been a lack of responsiveness. When she and a group of other students went to an FCS Board of Education meeting to speak on these issues, they brought with them packets containing contact information and a list of demands. The board members thanked Sydow and the other students for taking the initiative. 

“But since then, we've received nothing from them,” Sydow said. “We haven't heard anything either. There haven't been any discussions on school board agendas since then, about anything that we said.”

Despite the lack of response, Sydow, Huang, and Gates are hopeful when looking to the future of the movement. 

“[The DEI movement] is making sure that everyone feels not just tolerated, but also accepted, welcomed, and appreciated for all aspects of their backgrounds,” Gates said. “Nobody should feel like they have to hide any of it or feel that any aspect of their identity makes them less valued or less worthy than any other student—and that’s what we’re getting by advocating for [DEI].” 

*The Messenger reached out to the 11 Board members who voted “yes” on the CRT resolution in June for comment. All 11 Board members failed to respond.