A lot of Dr. Karlos Hill’s outlook is informed by his youth in the Mississippi Delta —music, food, the Black vernacular, and his sense of Black history. He considers a large part of the latter his cultural inheritance. But he did not learn this history from his school. It was his grandmother, who had lived through the Jim Crow South, who taught him not just her history but also ways to survive in this world as a Black person. In schools, history was a true-or-false test, administered by sports coaches who “taught” history, and sat at the back of the class as students filled in the blanks.
Much has changed since Dr. Hill’s days in school. Much hasn’t.
As the country goes through a round of sweeping changes under the Trump administration, including dismantling the Department of Education, rolling back DEI initiatives, scrubbing certain vocabulary, cutting federal grants to universities, and countless other actions, the threat to teaching is imminent. Teaching Black history, especially, is imperiled.
“Being a teacher in 2025 is probably one of the hardest things that anyone can do,” said Dr. Quiennise Miller, an assistant professor of educational leadership at the University of Houston at Clear Lake. She said teachers today not only have to meet moving targets set by states and the federal government, but also must constantly raise their skills to meet the new generation of kids, who have grown up with disruptors like COVID-19 and social media.
Adding to this is the federal government’s intentions to dismantle the Department of Education—which regulates pedagogical frameworks, along with managing grants and initiatives that make school systems more accessible and equitable—and threats of withholding federal funding from schools that don’t comply with orders that direct what can and cannot be taught.
Florida was the first to ban an AP course in African-American history from the state in 2023. But that was neither the beginning nor the end of the trend.
“Since 2021, at least 21 states—including Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi and even New Hampshire—have passed bills and policies to limit discussions of race in public school classrooms,” said Amy Reid, senior manager for PEN America’s Freedom to Learn program. “Though a couple have been met with successful legal challenges, K-12 public school educators across the country face serious limitations when teaching issues central to the understanding of U.S. history and our present moment.”
Being a teacher in 2025 is probably one of the hardest things that anyone can do.
Dr. Hill, the Regents’ Professor of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma, said that even in states like his that are actively trying to eliminate DEI from universities and secondary education, it is important to to talk about its value, how it has been truly transformative, and allowed for language around inclusion instead of otherness.
“Diversity, equity, inclusion, outside of being a kind of philosophy, provided resources to disadvantaged communities,” said Dr. Hill. He emphasized that DEI is a direct response to the era of segregation and color blindness. “It created space for marginalized communities in so many areas of American life where we have been excluded, whether it’s education, employment, markets, health care, all the major institutions.”
Outside of DEI initiatives, educators say curriculum and curriculum-setting is itself a problem.
“The main thing that teachers are hearing and fearing is just the kind of attacks on curriculum, and the kind of attacks on what has been beautiful, Black-centered work,” said Stevona Elem-Rogers, an educator and co lead at Black Education for New Orleans (BE NOLA), a non-profit focused on empowering Black-led educational initiatives in the city.
Dr. Miller said increasingly, the K-12 curriculum is being set to better align with the annual state assessments given to students in certain grades. In an attempt to shift what students are learning, the state has been shifting how they are assessed. In a state like Texas, where she works, it also means dealing with a lot of book banning and libraries altering what they have been offering for years.
“The assessment test, and the focus on passing that state test, has a lot more political and financial agendas than it does truly meeting the needs and preparing children,” Dr. Miller said, stating her personal opinion.
“Teaching is not about teaching content,” said Dr. Miller. “Teaching is about teaching children.”
She called the system broken, before realizing the system is actually working, but in favor of one group it privileges.
“The history that we learn in American public schools does not encompass the true history of everyone that American schools teach,” said Dr. Miller. “It’s a system that has historically taught and told a story and created a narrative around who people are, why they are, where they come from, that isn’t necessarily the truth. What’s dangerous about that is that we begin to then operate in what someone else’s view, vision, or agenda is for us to think or feel or move about ourselves.”
“We seem to be stuck in terms of our state’s leadership in trying to limit history, the discussion of certain histories, to limit curricula,” said Dr. Hill. “Anything that is seemingly Critical Race Theory, anything that references diversity, equity, and inclusion, by virtue of our state, has been banned.”
Dr. Hill has seen first-hand the positive outcome of changing narratives around historical topics through education and programming. He has also seen how quickly it can be undone.
Founding the Tulsa Race Massacre Oklahoma Teacher’s Institute, Dr. Hill has spent decades researching, teaching, and designing curriculum around the Tulsa Race Massacre—a 1921 incident where mobs of white residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, ransacked houses and looted businesses of Black residents in the Greenwood district of the city over two days, with 39 identified deaths. To empower people to confront the difficult and divisive history around the massacre—which had long been branded a race riot—his approach centers the conversation around reconciliation, supported by oral histories and narratives of survivors and their descendants.
“Our goal was to try to figure out how to teach the race massacre in ways that could create healing and repair and reconciliation versus division, as we have been accused of doing,” he said. “I’m trying to transition from thinking about history as something that we think about, talk about, or reflect about, to something that we utilize to help us lead better lives.”
In June 2021, for the centennial observation, then-President Joe Biden came to Tulsa, acknowledged the massacre, and discussed ways to repair its damage. But just two months following the event, House Bill 1775 was passed in the state prohibiting the teaching of Critical Race Theory.
“Political groups within the state made sure to hijack a conversation by making it about division, making it about harm done, by making it about the white community and their sense of trauma versus the historical trauma of slavery and the race massacre,” said Dr. Hill.
This is just one of the incidents that illustrate how the teaching of history is fragile and feared among groups that want to control the narrative by controlling what is taught in schools.
“You’ve just done your best to get warm, to clean yourself and to prepare for the future,” said Dr. Hill. “And right as you get out of the shower, someone just takes a cold bucket of water and throws it on you, undoing everything you’ve done.”
While that was in 2021, similar trajectories of changing what is taught as history are unfolding across the country.
“There’s a lot of fear and uncertainty happening in the realm of education right now,” said Dr. Miller, though she added that it was too soon to tell what the real effect of the new administration will be.
Adding to educators’ distress are other factors like lack of pay, resources, and options for professional development—all of it one way or another might be affected by the recent executive orders or through the withholding of funding.
“Maybe there’s a world in which we can’t gather the money to support these causes, but what we can all do, and what is free, is respect,” said Elem-Rogers. “To respect the history, to respect that these Black educators wake up every single day to do the hardest work for the lowest pay, and also, do it with so much deep love and rigor and to try to make a curriculum as relevant as possible to a generation.”
You’ve just done your best to get warm, to clean yourself and to prepare for the future. And right as you get out of the shower, someone just takes a cold bucket of water and throws it on you, undoing everything you’ve done.
But the course can still be corrected.
“More so than ever, educators have to decide who they are and how they want to teach,” said Dr. Hill. “What we’re faced with now is an environment where teachers have to really think about the integrity of their classroom.”
He said it takes local communities coming together to discuss culture and remembrance and thinking about how they can connect the two to the current moment and be useful and bring change.
“It’s not hard to see it happening across the country,” said Dr. Hill. “It really just takes really committed activism.”
Recent surveys have also shown Black teachers are more likely to work longer hours and were on average paid less than teachers of other demographics.
“If we could just get to the mindset where we actually respect the craft and the art of teaching, and we respect teachers who are giving their space and time, get to say, okay, since we respect you so much, here’s what the pay looks like, here’s what safety looks like,” said Elem-Rogers.
While the hindrance to teaching Black history is systemic for the large part, teachers are still at the center.
“The teacher is the most important puzzle piece in a classroom, because the teacher sets the tone,” said Dr. Miller. “The teacher is the one that basically creates the environments for children to learn.”
“I would suggest to teachers to teach it compassionately,” said Dr. Hill. “There’s a way to teach hard history in ways that people can approach it, especially in ways that students can approach it.”
It is true that the young always inherit the revolution. They’re always the most brave.
For teachers contending with the present moment, Dr. Miller had a four-piece advice.
First, breathe.
“Breathe and take care of you. Because if you are not whole, if you are not healthy, then you are not going to be able to come and teach children in a whole and healthy way,” said Dr. Miller.
Second, love children.
“Focus your energy on building strong relationships with children. That will take care of your discipline. It will take care of your anxiety,” said Dr. Miller.
Third, get a mentor. “You’re not in this by yourself.”
And lastly, always keep high expectations for yourself and for children.
“They and you will rise to those spaces,” Dr. Miller said.
She proceeded to quote a poem by Dr. Haim Ginott, her personal mantra.
“I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. My personal approach creates the climate. My daily mood makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.”
And in schools, the young, as always, are listening and receiving.
“I think the teachers are confused. I think the students are confused. I think they’re trying to show up happy and enjoy every day, and it’s really hard to do that when you can’t pinpoint what your future would be,” said Elem-Rogers. “It is true that the young always inherit the revolution. They’re always the most brave.”
