New York City is implementing a new Black Studies curriculum in its public schools from pre-kindergarten through grade 12 as students return this week.
“This is not a curriculum about a particular racial group, necessarily, but about the history of inequality and stratification hierarchy in the United States,” Sonya Douglass, a professor of Education Leadership at Columbia University’s Teachers College who helped craft the syllabus, told ABC News.
“When young people, as well as teachers, who may have not even had access to this content in their own training and education are grounded in that history and grounded in perspectives that may be different than their own, I think it helps us to better understand the challenges that we’re facing currently as a society.”
New York City Public Schools is the largest school district in the United States, with more than a million students. Douglass sees this as an opportunity for New York City schools to be an example for the rest of the country when it comes to education.