It's important that the history of Black people in America be taught this way: interwoven in the history of the nation, exactly as it happened.
Black History Curriculum Developed for Statewide Use

By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 21, 2003; Page C04

Public school students in Maryland will study African American history and culture as part of their regular curriculum starting next year, with topics including slavery, the civil rights movement and Dixieland jazz.

The program was developed with the help of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, which is scheduled to open late next year in downtown Baltimore. task force that included museum staff members and state education officials spent the past three years creating roughly 80 lessons.

The lessons mirror the museum's three major themes: labor, arts and enlightenment, and family and community. They focus not only on prominent names -- Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. -- but on less famous figures who played important roles in shaping black history in Maryland and across the country. They include the builders of the "skip-jacks" that sailed in and out of Baltimore's harbor during colonial times. And the watermen of the Chesapeake Bay who helped establish the state's seafood industry. And artists such as Jacob Lawrence and William Johnson, who painted scenes of farm and city life during the Harlem Renaissance.

"We have delved deeply into our past," said Charles Christian, the task force chairman and a professor at the University of Maryland. "We've gone beyond show and tell."

State Superintendent of Schools Nancy S. Grasmick said the partnership is the first of its kind in the country. The curriculum will be field-tested next school year and is scheduled to be taught in grades 4 through 8 by 2005, officials said. High school lessons are in the works.The curriculum will not shy away from the harsher aspects of black history, Christian said. An eighth-grade lesson, for example, asks students to describe the origin of the Ku Klux Klan and its impact after the Civil War. Students also will study Maryland laws that established poll taxes and literacy tests to keep black residents from voting.

"It's an attempt to tell a full story of American history, warts and all," said A.T. Stephens, a member of the task force and education director for the museum.

The movement to include black history in U.S. schools began in the 1970s, said Alvin Thornton, associate dean at Howard University and a former member of the Prince George's County school board. Until then, textbooks often portrayed African Americans primarily as slaves, while issues such as the Jim Crow laws were covered in only a few pages, Thornton said. "If you read the history text and looked at the curriculum guides, especially if you were an African American, you were absent," he said. "It's almost like you didn't exist."

The movement reached its peak during the early 1990s. By that time, the development of "Afrocentric" curricula in public schools in the District, Prince George's and elsewhere sparked widespread debate. Some parents and educators criticized the programs for presenting what they said was inaccurate data [P6: It couldn't be accurate as long as it was taught as though Black people's experiences and views were somehow tangential to the rest of the nation]. Others worried that the focus on black history overshadowed contributions by other racial and ethnic groups [P6: Frankly, Black American's contributed half or more of what is distinctly American in our culture, so I'd say it did overshadow the contributions of others].

Currently, Maryland students learn about important black figures in school, but Stephens said most of the lessons hit only the historical highlights. The new curriculum is more comprehensive and could be woven into English, social studies, art and music classes, he said.

Students also will take related field trips to the Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, and staff members from the museum will visit schools to lead workshops and train teachers.

Grasmick said the material could eventually appear on the Maryland School Assessment, the state's mandatory standardized tests. "This will be an integral part of our content standards," she said. "If it's an add-on, then it will be ignored."

Development of the curriculum was paid for by the William L. and Victorine Q. Adams Foundation, a private charitable organization. Museum officials have pledged $5 million toward implementing the program and hope to raise an additional $15 million.

Grasmick said she hopes the lessons will help to narrow the achievement gap between black and white students. States have been grappling with ways to boost test scores of poor and minority students for years, but the federal No Child Left Behind Act passed last year has given the effort new urgency. The law requires all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

On Maryland state exams given in the spring, 43 percent of black students passed the reading test and just more than 75 percent of white students passed. In math, about 30 percent of black students scored proficient, and nearly 65 percent of white students did.

"One of the things we deal with is sort of an attitude that it isn't fashionable -- the kids would say 'cool' -- to be engaged in success academically," Grasmick said. "We want this [curriculum] . . . to so capture the interest of our African American students."

Critics of multicultural education have questioned the link between a more inclusive curriculum and student achievement. They also have said that such programs highlight differences rather than similarities among students. But school and museum officials said that providing black students with historical role models is a necessary ingredient in helping them to improve their test scores, especially if they live in areas of high crime or come from broken families.

George L. Russell Jr., chairman of the museum's board of directors, said, "If we can teach these kids their past, the young black kid from the community [can] see that poverty is not a bar to success."