Questions Raised About New Statewide Black/Latinx Studies Curriculum

Last June, Governor Lamont signed into law Connecticut Public Act No 19-12, requiring that all public high schools in the state offer a course in “Black and Latino Studies” by the 2022-23 school year; districts may at their option begin offering it in 2021-22. The Act empowered the State Educational Resource Center (SERC) to develop the course, and the State Board of Education to review and approve the course by next January.

This spring, SERC convened an advisory committee of educators, policymakers, and others to develop the course content; more about their process is available here. In May SERC announced that there would be a uniform course with a single mandated curriculum that all schools must teach, and that the course will “be divided into a semester by semester focus (i.e., African American/Black semester 1, Puerto Rican/Latino semester 2.” The SERC has also indicated a preference that preference to teach the course would be given to credentialed History teachers.

Members of the ARTLC who have served on the Advisory Committee have raised a number of concerns about the process, including: 

• That it mandates a single “one size fits all” curriculum, potentially displacing existing teacher-developed courses 

• That it fails to provide adequate funding, resources, and training to teachers who lack teaching experience in these areas

• That it has not included meaningful and ongoing participation roles for students and teachers

• That in separating African American and Latinx Studies into two separate units, it misses opportunities to talk about the history of race, racism and the transatlantic slave trade.

At the Collective’s October meeting, participants discussed these implementation challenges and reached consensus to send a letter outlining these concerns to the SERC and the legislators who sponsored the original bill last spring.

Written by the ARTLC Team