teacher slavery assignment

Mock slave auctions, racist lessons: How US history class often traumatizes, dehumanizes Black students

On Wednesday, an official at a Mississippi middle school apologized after eighth graders were asked to pretend they were enslaved people, including writing letters discussing their "journey to America" and the family they "live with/work for."

During Black History Month, a Florida high school teacher was suspended with pay after allegedly telling students slaves were not whipped by white people and that the N-word, a racist slur, “just means ignorant."

In February 2020, a student-teacher in Tennessee gave her fourth grade students an assignment called "Let's Make a Slave"  about a speech from the 1700s about keeping Black slaves under control.

In 2019, a fifth grade teacher was accused of holding a mock slave auction in which white students bid on Black students in New York.

Such careless assignments and lessons can traumatize students, experts said, and they are just one example of how teachers in the USA have long struggled and failed to teach the complex history of slavery.

"Unfortunately, (slavery is) addressed often in ways that are either marginalizing or it's the only way that Black people ... are brought into the curriculum," said Keffrelyn Brown, a professor of cultural studies in education at the University of Texas-Austin.

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'He did not want to be Black anymore '

In May 2019, teacher Patricia Bailey made Nicole Dayes' son and another Black student stand in front of their class while other students bid on them during a social studies lesson at North Elementary School, according to a lawsuit filed on Dayes' behalf.

The children were told to refer to the winning students as masters and were warned not to try to escape because they would "be chased down and violence would be done to them," according to a report from the New York attorney general's office.

Dayes said her son had to receive counseling after the incident, which the attorney general's office found had a "profoundly negative effect on all students present – especially the African American students."

"He told me that he did not want to be Black anymore," Dayes said. "He didn’t want to go to school because he didn’t know if he could trust the teachers."

More than a year and a half after the incident, Dayes said her son, 12, still worries that he's judged because he's Black when they're out in public and his friendships have been seriously affected. 

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'Not isolated incidents'

Simulations are a useful way to teach parts of history, such as civic education, but using this technique to teach about slavery is ineffective and fails to consider the impact on students, particularly Black students, experts told USA TODAY. 

These kinds of lessons are just one symptom of the systemic problems with how American schools teach – or in some cases fail to teach – about slavery and Black history as a whole. 

Brown said that when teachers ask students to imagine themselves as slaves or slaveowners, they may be attempting to bring history to life to build empathy or give students a more emotional and visceral experience. 

"We can never re-create, nor should we want to re-create, enslavement," she said. "It minimizes the trauma of the history itself."

No groups track how often such incidents happen across the country, but Brown said it's clear these kinds of lessons are being taught at multiple grade levels across the country.

"These are not isolated incidents," she said. 

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Dozens of teachers "proudly" reported that simulations were their favorite lessons when teaching about slavery, according to a report in 2018 titled "Teaching Hard History" from the Southern Poverty Law Center, which surveyed more than 1,700 social studies teachers and analyzed textbooks.

Teachers said they had students simulate the middle passage, the sea journey taken by slave ships from West Africa; others had students clean cotton and role-play as enslaved people and enslavers.

In addition to the problems with simulations, the SPLC report found that the U.S. education system fails to effectively teach about slavery across the board.

Teachers fail to discuss the relationship between white supremacy and slavery, teach about slavery as an exclusively Southern system, focus on the white experience instead of the perspective of enslaved people and rarely make connections between slavery and present-day structural racism, according to the report.

Machayla Randall, a senior at Cherry Hill East High School in New Jersey, said she grew disappointed and uncomfortable after years of learning only about the civil rights movement and slavery in school. She said she was never upset with her teachers but always wanted more from the curriculum.

"The fact that we only discuss (slavery) is kind of dehumanizing for the African American culture," she said. "Especially in the perspective of history textbooks, we’re only seen as tools and people that were utilized."

Brown said teachers struggle with lessons around slavery because they are not properly trained and because the country itself has had a difficult time addressing race and racism. Although some states adhere to common core standards, there is no national standard for teaching slavery, she said.

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Slavery simulations should never be used in the classroom, according to Jalaya Liles Dunn, director of the SPLC project that produced the "Teaching Hard History" report. Instead, primary source documents can offer students more insight into the true experience of slavery, she said. 

She encourages teachers to explain the root causes of the institution of slavery, the connection to political power and how those injustices still impact life.

"We need to be honest and tell the truth," she said. "We can’t romanticize it."

Brown , the University of Texas professor, is cautiously optimistic that more conversations are being had about this topic, but she said she has experienced pushback to talking about racism.

"I’m curious to see how that will play out and whether we will see it to its full fruition or if we will let this moment pass as moments have passed before without really doing the work," she said.

What can parents do if this happens to their child ?

If parents encounter a problematic assignment, Brown said, the first step is to talk to the teacher to better understand the intention of the lesson and what the rest of the curriculum entails.

"That's where you can begin to push for a more expansive and really transformative curriculum experience at the school," she said.

As a parent of two school-age children, Brown said it is important for kids to learn about hard histories, including slavery, at home first and to humanize the experience of people who were enslaved. She emphasized that parents should make sure slavery is not the only time their children learn about Black history in school.

"As an African American parent or parent of Black children, I am interested to know how do Black people and the Black experience play out in the curriculum," she said.

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LaGarrett King, an associate professor of social studies education at the University of Missouri who contributed to the "Teaching Hard History" report, suggested parents look at the assignments their children are given and consider what kind of message or narrative the work presents. He said parents should better educate themselves about the history of slavery and use additional resources to supplement what students may or may not learn in the classroom.

He noted that even when students are taught about slavery in a complex way, it can be difficult for them because "history is psychologically violent." Creating space for students to critically examine the actions of people who have not been historically held accountable is "extremely important."

"Holding white people historically accountable for their actions is extremely important if we’re going to teach slavery in a more humane way and complex way," he said.

Students push for change

Black students demand better Black history lessons in their schools.

Only a few states, including New Jersey , Florida and Illinois,  require public schools to teach Black history, but what exactly is taught is often decided by school districts.

Randall , the New Jersey senior,  and members of her school's African American Culture Club worked with authors and college professors to develop a Black history course, which was approved by the school board. The Cherry Hill School District became the first in New Jersey to require students to take African American history  to graduate Tuesday . 

Inspired by a trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, students at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Early College got the Denver Public Schools Board to unanimously vote to pass their  resolution to ensure the narratives and knowledge of Black, Indigenous, Latino and other communities of color are incorporated into every part of the district’s curriculum.

Students Kaliah Yizar, Dahni Austin, Alana Mitchell and Jenelle Nangah push to make that resolution a reality by including a new textbook, Black History 365 , into the curriculum . Yizar, a sophomore, said focusing only on select civil rights leaders and slavery minimizes the entirety of Black history. 

"When you only teach Black kids about them going through trauma and struggling, they’re going to think they're only going to be able to have trauma and struggle," she said. 

Students at Stanford University launched a campaign called Diversify Our Narrative to get one book by and about a person of color added to the curriculum in every school. The campaign has attracted more than 5,000 student organizers in 850 school districts.

Victoria Gorum, the campaign's director of project management and research, and fellow Stanford sophomore Beth Engeda said they were inspired to join the campaign amid the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. Engeda, the campaign's director of finance, said she saw information about Black history circulated on social media during the protests and recalled yearning to read books that reflected her own experience in the classroom.

"In school, the only time I would get to read about Black people was in history textbooks ... they wouldn't really talk about anything other than slavery," she said. "I just thought it would be better if schools had these things already incorporated into their curriculum."

Follow N'dea Yancey-Bragg on Twitter: @NdeaYanceyBragg

Wisconsin teachers put on administrative leave after asking students how they would 'punish' a slave

• After an insensitive assignment on slavery, teachers at a Wisconsin middle school were put on leave.
• The assignment asked sixth graders how they would punish a slave. 
• The answer was "According to Hammurabi's Code: put to death."

Teachers at a Wisconsin middle school were put on administrative leave after giving students an assignment that asked them how they would "punish" a slave, several outlets reported. 

Sixth graders at Patrick Marsh Middle School were asked to determine how a slave should be treated as part of an assignment on ancient Mesopotamia, CNN reported. 

"A slave stands before you. This slave has disrespected his master by telling him, 'You are not my master!' How will you punish this slave?'" the assignment read. 

The assignment said the answer was "According to Hammurabi's Code: put to death."

The Code of Hammurabi is the oldest and most complete written legal code . The 282 rules that make up the code include harsh punishments and concepts like an eye for an eye.

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Sun Prairie Area School District did not reply to Insider's email request for comment, but in a statement sent to parents said they were investigating the incident, WMTV reported. 

"We deeply regret that this lesson took place, and we also recognize that this was a breakdown in our curricular processes and our district-wide focus on equity," the statement said. "In addition to immediately addressing this situation, it is important that we commit to changing our curriculum and professional development for all staff."

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In a joint statement also sent to parents, Principal Rebecca Zahn and assistant principal Amy Schernecker said they regret that the assignment "was not racially conscious and did not align to our district's mission and vision of equity," according to WMTV.

Dazarrea Ervins told WMTV that her son Zayvion showed her the assignment, and she was shocked by the language and that it also happened to be given on the first day of Black History Month. 

"I can see how they're learning about this era, but the wording of the question and the statement — it was just wrong," Ervins said.

The lesson came from the online marketplace for educational resources, Teachers Pay Teachers, according to NBC . The organization told the outlet that the lesson was "unacceptable, inappropriate, and antithetical" to its values, and said they removed it as soon as they were aware it from the site as soon as they became aware of it. 

In its statement, the district said that this "lesson was not a part of our district curriculum and therefore, no student should participate in or complete the assignment." 

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9 Resources for Teaching About Slavery

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A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center ’ s Teaching Tolerance project recently found that only 8% of high school seniors surveyed identified slavery as a central cause of the Civil War and two-thirds didn’t know that it took a constitutional amendment to end slavery. The report also found that slavery is often sanitized and sentimentalized in classrooms through “feel-good” stories such as the Underground Railroad. It is a stunning study that demonstrates a widespread failure to teach the difficult and nuanced history of our nation.

In a preface to the report, Hasan Kwame Jeffries said, “To achieve the noble aims of the nation ’ s architects, we the people have to eliminate racial injustice in the present. But we cannot do that until we come to terms with racial injustice in our past, beginning with slavery.”

The resources below offer more honest and impactful ways to confront our painful shared history.

1. 13th

Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th about the prison system in the United States draws a line that starts with chattel slavery and leads to today’s inequities in the justice system. It is intended for mature audiences so be sure to preview it before playing in a classroom.

2. The 1619 Project

The New York Times’ expansive 1619 Project reframes the history of our country from the perspective of African Americans, focusing on their contributions, beginning in 1619 when the first enslaved Americans arrived on our shores. The project offers a podcast, a visual history of slavery and lesson plans created in conjunction with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Learning about Slavery Through Primary Sources .

3. The Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education

The Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education is the University of Missouri-Columbia’s annual conference focusing on research projects and teacher development to improve K-12 Black history education. This year’s conference is scheduled online July 23-25.

4. Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery

Last Seen: Finding Family After Slavery  is a database that recovers the stories of families separated in the slave trade. Students can take on a project by helping transcribe the ads, and the website offers ideas for how to use the stories in the classroom. Similarly, Lost Friends Messages is a searchable database of more than 2,500 advertisements placed by freed slaves seeking lost loved ones after the Civil War.

5. Slavery in America: A Resource Guide

The Library of Congress collections make primary sources available for free and accessible online. Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938 includes more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs.

The Lincoln collection includes 20,000 documents, such as the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln’s notes on the history of the African slave trade, and the plan Frederick Douglass shared with Lincoln for helping slaves escape from rebel states.

6. Talking About Race: Historical Foundations of Race.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Talking About Race project dives into how the colonies defined race as a social construct to keep people enslaved. The site includes definitions of chattel slavery,  indentured servitude, Dred Scot, as well as several short videos, including a CrashCourse .

7. Teaching the Civil War.

PBS Learning offers several short documentaries from American Experience , as well as lesson plans, links to primary resources, and teacher’s guides. Topics include the abolition movement, the Emancipation Proclamation and an examination of Lincoln’s complicated relationship with slavery.

8. Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project features a comprehensive  Framework for Teaching American Slavery , including resources and guidelines for teachers. The framework provides a list of key concepts and more than 100 primary source texts as well as a set of sample Inquiry Design Models, questions that guide students through an analysis of primary sources. The Teaching Hard History Podcast is produced for teachers. Topics include Slavery in the Supreme Court, Slavery and the Northern Economy and Slave Resistance, with each topic explored by one prominent history scholar.

9. The Thirteenth Amendment.

For a deeper understanding of the 13th Amendment, take a look at the Interactive Constitution by the National Constitution Center . The project details the common interpretation of the amendment as well as matters of historical debate. The Constitution in the Classroom framework provides videos and questions broken down by grade level. If your class is ready for a deeper discussion, you can sign up for a classroom exchange that will connect your classroom with another and an expert moderator.

Jennifer Snelling is a freelance writer from Eugene, Oregon, and mom to two digital natives.

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Lesson Plans

Researchers at the Georgetown Slavery Archive have designed three units of lesson plans for high school teachers to use and adapt to the needs of their individual classes:

- Slavery at School

- Slavery and Catholicism

- Putting a Human Face on the Domestic Slave Trade: The GU 272

Each unit is designed for five forty-minute class periods.

The units have been designed to adhere to the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm. Context, Experience, Reflection, Action, and Evaluation are crucial aspects of the lesson plans. Please find more information about each unit, including download links for the lesson plans and additional resources, below. 

Slavery at School

This unit invites students to learn about the history of slavery at select schools in the United States and how these schools taught the “science” of racial inferiority. This unit consists of lesson plans for five, forty-minute class periods (Lessons I-V). These lesson plans may be used in conjunction with Georgetown Slavery Archive’s curricular units “Slavery and Catholicism” and “Putting a Human Face on the Domestic Slave Trade.”

The goal is for students to work in collaborative groups to produce mini-presentations about US colleges and universities’ historical ties to slavery, and to learn how ideas and practices circulate from institutions of higher learning to secondary schools. Instructors may wish to ask students to produce original research into the history of their own school.

Lesson plan and corresponding Powerpoint

Slavery and Catholicism

This unit teaches students about the history of the Catholic Church and slavery in the United States. This unit consists of lesson plans for five, forty-minute class periods (Lessons I-V). These lesson plans may be used in conjunction with Georgetown Slavery Archive’s curricular units “Slavery at School” and “Putting a Human Face on the Domestic Slave Trade: The GU 272.”

The goal is for students to gain critical knowledge of the Catholic Church and Catholics’ contradictory roles during the age of American slavery. The students will choose from a variety of individual creative projects to respond to the history of the Catholic Church’s endorsement and participation in enslaving humans, including fellow Catholics.

Lesson plan and corresponding Powerpoint .

Putting a Human Face on the Domestic Slave Trade: The GU 272

This unit will introduce students to the history of the domestic slave trade through the lens of the "GU272," the community of people sold south by the Maryland Jesuits in 1838 to help finance Georgetown College. This unit consists of lesson plans for five, forty-minute class periods (Lessons I-V). These lesson plans may be used in conjunction with Georgetown Slavery Archive’s curricular units “Slavery and Catholicism” and “Slavery at School.”

The goal for the end of the unit is for students to write a three- to five-page research essay that attempts to humanize the narrative of the forced transport of enslaved people. Each homework assignment will help students complete the first, and then final, drafts of their essays.

Since 2016, history teacher Ed Donnellan has led students at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, DC, on a journey of discovery about their own school's history of slavery . For a digital version of an exhibit prepared by Gonzaga student-historians, click on Searching for Truth in the Garden: Gonzaga's History With Slavery . For a volume of poems written by Gonzaga students in response to learning this history, click on Garden: Gonzaga Poets Respond to the Slavery Research Project .  

What Kids Are Really Learning About Slavery

A new report finds that the topic is mistaught and often sentimentalized—and students are alarmingly misinformed as a result.

A class of middle-schoolers in Charlotte, North Carolina, was asked to cite “four reasons why Africans made good slaves .” Nine third-grade teachers in suburban Atlanta assigned math word problems about slavery and beatings . A high school in the Los Angeles-area reenacted a slave ship —with students’ lying on the dark classroom floor, wrists taped, as staff play the role of slave ship captains. And for a lesson on Colonial America, fifth-graders at a school in northern New Jersey had to create posters advertising slave auctions .

School assignments on slavery routinely draw national headlines and scorn. Yet beyond the outraged parents and school-district apologies lies a complex and entrenched set of education challenges. A new report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project points to the widespread failure to accurately teach the hard, and nuanced, history of American slavery and enslaved people. Collectively, the report finds that slavery is mistaught, mischaracterized, sanitized, and sentimentalized—leaving students poorly educated, and contemporary issues of race and racism misunderstood.

In what it describes as the first analysis of its kind, Teaching Tolerance conducted online surveys of 1,000 American high-school seniors and more than 1,700 social-studies teachers across the country. The group also reviewed 10 commonly used U.S.-history textbooks, and examined 15 sets of state standards to assess what students know, what educators teach, what publishers include, and what standards require vis-à-vis slavery.

Among 12th-graders, only 8 percent could identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War. Fewer than one-third (32 percent) correctly named the 13th Amendment as the formal end of U.S. slavery, with a slightly higher share (35 percent) choosing the Emancipation Proclamation. And fewer than half (46 percent) identified the “Middle Passage” as the transport of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to North America.

Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance, said the research, conducted in 2017, revealed the urgent need for schools to do a better job of teaching slavery. “Students are being deprived of the truth about our history [and] the materials that teachers have are not particularly good,” she said. “I would hope that students would look at this and realize that they deserve to know better … and teachers need to know there are better ways to teach this [topic].”

The student results, which the report labels “dismal,” extend beyond factual errors to a failure to grasp key concepts underpinning the nature and legacy of slavery. Fewer than one-quarter (22 percent) of participating high-school seniors knew that “protections for slavery were embedded in [America’s] founding documents”—that rather than a “ peculiar institution ” of the South, slavery was a Constitutionally enshrined right. And fewer than four in 10 students surveyed (39 percent) understood how slavery “shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness.”

Examining the teachers’ survey results might help explain why students struggled to answer questions on American enslavement: Educators are struggling themselves. While teachers overwhelmingly (92 percent) claim they are “comfortable discussing slavery” in their classroom, their teaching practices reveal profound lapses. Only slightly more than half (52 percent) teach their students about slavery’s legal roots in the nation’s founding documents, while just 53 percent emphasize the extent of slavery outside of the antebellum South. And 54 percent teach the continuing legacy of slavery in today’s society.

Additionally, dozens of teachers rely on “simulations”—role-playing and games—to teach slavery, a method that Teaching Tolerance has warned against on the grounds that it can lead to stereotypes and oversimplification. Meanwhile, a large majority—73 percent—use “slaves” when talking about slavery in the classroom instead of “enslaved persons” (49 percent), the latter term of which has gained favor for emphasizing the humanity of those forced into bondage.

The overwhelming majority of teachers who participated in the survey (90 percent) are somehow affiliated with Teaching Tolerance and its learning materials. Costello said this indicates the problems revealed in the survey results could be much more pervasive than the findings suggest. “If anything, I think [this collection of survey respondents] is a group that’s more sensitive to issues of race, more likely to confront them in classrooms” compared to the broader teacher workforce, she explained, adding that the findings are “a silhouette of the problem.” Similarly, many of those surveyed were elementary-school teachers, which Costello said was noteworthy considering the ability of slavery education in the early grades to form the narrative—the “fake history”—that students carry through high school.

Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, a high-school U.S.-history teacher in Lake Oswego, Oregon, a Portland suburb, has encountered students’ common misconceptions—such as the belief that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and that the Civil War was really about states’ rights. Her straightforward solution is assigning original documents: “Read Lincoln’s first inaugural address and you do not find a fiery abolitionist, but someone promising to enforce the fugitive slave clause; read the articles of secession, and you find striking declarations from slave states that their actions are rooted in a desire to protect [slavery].”

Still, Wolfe-Rocca echoed the report’s teacher respondents in stressing the inherent challenges in tackling the subject well. As a white teacher, she admittedly struggles with presenting an unsanitized version of slavery that doesn’t desensitize her students at Lake Oswego High School to the violence and black pain. “Kids walk into my class ‘knowing’ about slavery. But their recitation of this knowledge is dull, lifeless, and bored,” she said. “It has the feel of something memorized [and] rote, rather than internalized and meaningful.” She uses personal narratives of enslaved people to teach the ugliness and injustice of the past while being “careful to keep the rape and whipping to a minimum.”

Wolfe-Rocca aims to strike a delicate balance, but she wonders whether she’s whitewashing history: “How do we surface the realities of slavery without resorting to spectacle?” Like teachers cited in the report, she finds that exploring the true costs of slavery is difficult but essential.

Further compounding teachers’ difficulties is the quality of textbooks and state content standards. Teaching Tolerance found that textbooks generally lacked comprehensive coverage of slavery and enslaved people—the best textbook earned a score of 70 on the project’s rubric of essential elements for bringing slavery into the classroom—and state standards were generally “timid,” focused more on abolitionists than on the everyday experiences of slavery.

Taken together, the study exposes a number of unsettling facts about slavery education in U.S. classrooms: Slavery is taught without context, prioritizing “feel good” stories over harsh realities; slavery is taught as an exclusively southern institution, masking the complicity of northern institutions and citizens in America’s slave-based economy; slavery is rarely connected to white supremacy—the ideology that justified its perpetuation; and slavery is seldom connected to the present, drawing the arc from enslavement to Jim Crow, the civil-rights movement, and the persistence of structural racism.

LaGarrett King, an assistant professor of social-studies education at the University of Missouri, served on the Teaching Tolerance advisory board that developed a framework for teaching American slavery—basically, the concepts that every graduating high-school senior should know—as part of the report’s recommendations. As a teacher educator, he said the study fills a significant void.

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Students training to be teachers, especially those being educated to teach in elementary schools, know little about the history of slavery, he stated, noting that “much curriculum and teaching around racially and ethnically diverse [people] features a fun—foods and festival—approach to learning.” By contrast, King said, the framework provides a guide to delve into topics such as slavery and black history with a thorough and academically sound approach, versus teaching slavery in reductive and superficial ways.

“Can you teach slavery without it being psychologically violent to the children? The answer is no, violence will occur and is expected,” he said. “The key is the recognition of white supremacy and [of] the humanity of black people that helps aid in the complexity of the subject.”

Relatedly, the study also drew attention to teachers who struggle to have open and honest conversations in mixed-race classrooms about the atrocities of slavery. Antoinette Dempsey-Waters, a black social-studies educator at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, said she relies on autobiographies to give a vivid picture of enslavement that helps all students in her highly diverse school “walk away with the knowledge of the evil of slavery,” as they come to “understand and respect … the fight for freedom” waged by enslaved people.

Notably, Teaching Tolerance recommends using primary sources and original historical materials to improve instruction, and making textbooks better to reflect a more accurate and inclusive view of slavery.

“It’s clear that the United States is still struggling with how to talk about the history of slavery and its aftermath,” the report concludes. “The front lines of this struggle are in schools, as teachers do the hard work of explaining this country’s history and helping students to understand how the present relates to the past.”

Here’s what I tell teachers about how to teach young students about slavery

Professor of Practice in Education, Clark University

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Raphael E. Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Nervous. Concerned. Worried. Wary. Unprepared.

This is how middle and high school teachers have told me they have felt over the past few years when it comes to teaching the troublesome topic of slavery.

Although I work with teachers in Massachusetts, their reaction to teaching about slavery is common among teachers throughout the U.S.

Fortunately, in recent years there have been a growing number of individuals who have weighed in with useful advice.

Some, such as history professors Hasan Kwame Jeffries and Kenneth Greenberg , have advocated for helping students see the ways in which enslaved people fought back against the brutality of slavery. Whether through a focus on the fight to maintain family and culture, resistance at work, running away, physical confrontation or revolt, students get a deeper understanding of slavery when the lessons include the various ways that enslaved people courageously fought against their bondage.

Others, like James W. Loewen, the author of the popular book “ Lies My Teacher Told Me ,” have argued for a focus on how slavery has deeply influenced our popular culture through movies , television series , historical fiction and music .

There are also those who recommend the use of specific resources and curriculum materials , like the Harriet Jacobs Papers Project , the four-part documentary series “ Africans in America ” and the Freedom on the Move database , which features thousands of runaway slave advertisements.

Heeding some of these recommendations, in my work with teachers we have sought to come up with lessons that students like Ailany Rivas, a junior at Claremont Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts, say have helped them to become “more informed and educated about the brutal history of slavery and its legacy.” These lessons that I have developed take a variety of approaches but are all rooted in taking a look at the realities of slavery using historical evidence.

Many students have echoed Ailany in feedback that I have collected from nine different classes where I have helped design lessons about slavery.

And the teachers whom I have worked with have all shared informally that they are now confident in taking on the challenge of teaching the complex history of slavery.

Much of this confidence, in my opinion, is due to four things that I believe are mandatory for any teacher who plans to deal with slavery.

1. Explore actual records

Few things shine the light on the harsh realities of slavery like historical documents. I’m talking about things such as plantation records, slave diaries and letters penned by plantation owners and their mistresses.

It also pays to examine wanted advertisements for runaway slaves. These ads provided details about those who managed to escape slavery. In some cases, the ads contain drawings of slaves.

These materials can help teachers guide students to better understand the historical context in which slavery existed. Educators may also wish to look at how people such as historian Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, who wrote a chapter in “ Understanding and Teaching American Slavery ,” have used historical documents to teach about slavery.

2. Examine historical arguments

In order to better understand different perspectives on slavery, it pays to examine historical arguments about how slavery developed, expanded and ended.

Students can read texts that were written by abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and pro-slavery advocates like George Fitzhugh .

They should wade through the newspaper advertisements that provided details about those who managed to escape slavery.

Looking at these different arguments will show students that history is filled with disagreement, debate and interpretations based on different goals.

For instance, in examining arguments about slavery, teachers can show students how early 20th-century historians like Ulrich Bonnell Phillips sought to put forth ideas about kind masters and contented slaves, while others from the 1990s, such as John Hope Franklin, co-author of “ Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation ,” focused on how Black people resisted slavery.

Seeing these starkly different portrayals of slavery gives students a chance to examine how things such as choice, context, racism and bias might affect the way slavery is seen or viewed.

3. Highlight lived experiences

In my 11 years of teaching history, many students entered my classes with a great deal of misinformation about what life was like for those who lived under slavery. In pre-unit surveys, some stated that the enslaved worked only in the cotton fields and were not treated that badly. We know the historical records tell a different story. While many worked as field hands, there were others who were put into service as blacksmiths, carpenters, gunsmiths, maids and tailors.

To combat misconceptions like this, I advise teachers to use historical sources that feature details about the lived experiences of enslaved people.

For instance, teachers should have students read Harriet Jacobs’ memoir – “ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl ” – alongside diaries written by white plantation owners.

Scrutinize photographs of slave quarters and excerpts from the Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project , which contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery.

Ask students to examine various historical sources to gain a better understanding of how people lived through their bondage over time.

4. Consider the relevance

It is also crucial for teachers to consider the various ways in which slavery is relevant to the present with their students. I advise them to ask questions like: How has the history of slavery influenced the status of Black people in the United States today? Why are there so many movies about slavery?

In Ailany’s class, we ended our unit by providing students with a chance to read and think about the relevance of recent picture books about slavery like Patricia Polacco’s “ January’s Sparrow ,” Ann Turner and James Ransome’s “ My Name Is Truth: The Life of Sojourner Truth ” and Frye Gallard, Marti Rosner and Jordana Haggard’s “ The Slave Who Went to Congress .”

We asked students to draw on what they had learned about slavery to consider and then share their perspectives about the historical accuracy, classroom appropriateness and relevance of a selected picture book. Students always have much to say about all three.

Teaching slavery has been and will continue to be challenging. To teachers who are asked or required to take on this challenge, the four things discussed above can serve as strong guideposts for creating lessons that should make the challenge easier to navigate.

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‘Slavery was wrong’ and 5 other things some educators won’t teach anymore

To mollify parents and obey new state laws, teachers are cutting all sorts of lessons

Excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Passages from Christopher Columbus’s journal describing his brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples. A data set on the New York Police Department’s use of force, analyzed by race.

These are among the items teachers have nixed from their lesson plans this school year and last, as they face pressure from parents worried about political indoctrination and administrators wary of controversy, as well as a spate of new state laws restricting education on race, gender and LGBTQ issues.

“I felt very bleak,” said Lisa Childers, an Arkansas teacher who was forced by an assistant principal, for reasons never stated, into yanking Wollstonecraft’s famous 1792 polemic from her high school English class in 2021.

The quiet censorship comes as debates over whether and how to instruct children about race, racism, U.S. history, gender identity and sexuality inflame politics and consume the nation. These fights, which have already generated at least 64 state laws reshaping what children can learn and do at school, are likely to intensify ahead of the 2024 presidential election. At the same time, an ascendant parents’ rights movement born of the pandemic is seeking — and winning — greater control over how schools select, evaluate and offer children access to both classroom lessons and library books.

In response, teachers are changing how they teach.

A study published by the Rand Corp. in January found that nearly one-quarter of a nationally representative sample of 8,000 English, math and science teachers reported revising their instructional materials to limit or eliminate discussions of race and gender. Educators most commonly blamed parents and families for the shift, according to the Rand study.

The Washington Post asked teachers across the country about how and why they are changing the materials, concepts and lessons they use in the classroom, garnering responses from dozens of educators in 20 states.

Here are six things some teachers aren’t teaching anymore.

Are you a teacher no longer teaching materials on race, gender or LGBTQ issues? Tell us.

‘Slavery was wrong’

Greg Wickenkamp began reevaluating how he teaches eighth-grade social studies in June 2021, when a new Iowa law barred educators from teaching “that the United States of America and the state of Iowa are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist.”

Wickenkamp did not understand what this legislation, which he felt was vaguely worded, meant for his pedagogy. Could he still use the youth edition of “ An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States ”? Should he stay away from Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’ s “ Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You ,” especially as Kendi came under attack from conservative politicians?

That fall, Wickenkamp repeatedly sought clarification from the Fairfield Community School District about what he could say in class, according to emails obtained by The Post. He sent detailed lists of what he was teaching and what he planned to teach and asked for formal approval, drawing little response. At the same time, Wickenkamp was fielding unhappy emails and social media posts from parents who disliked his enforcement of the district’s masking policy and his use of Reynolds and Kendi’s text. A local politician alleged that Wickenkamp was teaching children critical race theory, an academic framework that explores systemic racism in the United States and a term that has become conservatives’ catchall for instruction on race they view as politically motivated.

Finally, on Feb. 8, 2022, at 4:05 p.m., Wickenkamp scored a Zoom meeting with Superintendent Laurie Noll. He asked the question he felt lay at the heart of critiques of his curriculum. “Knowing that I should stick to the facts, and knowing that to say ‘Slavery was wrong,’ that’s not a fact, that’s a stance,” Wickenkamp said, “is it acceptable for me to teach students that slavery was wrong?”

Noll nodded her head, affirming that saying “slavery was wrong” counts as a “stance.”

“We had people that were slaves within our state,” Noll said, according to a video of the meeting obtained by The Post. “We’re not supposed to say to [students], ‘How does that make you feel?’ We can’t — or, ‘Does that make you feel bad?’ We’re not to do that part of it.”

She continued: “To say ‘Is slavery wrong?’ — I really need to delve into it to see is that part of what we can or cannot say. And I don’t know that, Greg, because I just don’t have that. So I need to know more on that side.”

As Wickenkamp raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, she added, “I’m sorry, on that part.”

Wickenkamp left the Zoom call. At the close of the year, he left the teaching profession.

Contacted for comment, Noll wrote in a statement that “the district provided support to Greg with content through a neighboring school district social studies department head.” She did not answer a question asking whether she thinks teachers should be permitted to tell children that slavery was wrong.

Christopher Columbus’s journal

For 14 years, a North Carolina social studies teacher taught excerpts of Christopher Columbus’s journal without incident. The point was to show how Columbus’s marriage of enslavement with his quest for profit helped shape the world we live in today.

The teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of harassment, directed children to the first chapter of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” titled “ Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress .” Throughout the chapter, students encountered paragraphs taken from the explorer’s journal in which Columbus delineated his views of, and interactions with, the Native peoples of America.

“As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force,” Columbus wrote in October 1492 , in a slice of the journal quoted by Zinn. “They would make fine servants. … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want,” he also wrote.

But last school year, when the North Carolina teacher tried to give this lesson to her sophomore honors world history class, a parent wrote an email complaining that her White son had been made to feel guilty.

The teacher recalled replying by asking, “Why would your child feel guilty about what Columbus did to the Arawak?” The parents of the student escalated the issue to human resources, the teacher said, spurring an administrator to warn that she needed to stop “pushing my agenda — telling me that having my children learn the truth about Columbus was biased.” Soon after, she said, New Hanover County Schools placed an admonitory letter in the teacher’s file and ordered her to halt the lesson on Columbus.

Asked about the teacher’s allegations, New Hanover schools media relations manager Russell Clark wrote in an emailed statement that the district “cannot comment on individual personnel matters due to privacy laws,” but that any “disciplinary action taken by our district is done in accordance with our policies and state and federal laws.”

To fill the time left over from cutting short her unit on Columbus, the teacher gave children extended versions of her usual lessons on the French and American revolutions, she said. At the end of the year, frustrated and tired, she switched to a different school, where she was able to resume teaching the chapter by Zinn, including snatches of Columbus’s journal, she said.

But she still thinks about her former world history students.

“They missed the truth about exploration; they missed the whole lesson on colonization,” the teacher said. “They were really wanting to learn about Columbus. And what Cortez does, too.”

A data set on police use of force

A self-described nerd, a Northern Virginia teacher has always used math to explain the world around her. The woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional consequences, became a statistics teacher in Loudoun County Public Schools because she wanted to imbue children with that same love of math.

Last academic year, the teacher’s statistics class was diverse along racial lines, she said. Partly in hopes of appealing to her students of color but mostly because she wanted young people to know that math can be used to reveal how society works, she taught a lesson built around a data set exploring the outcomes of the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program.

Analyzing the findings shows that citizens of color saw higher rates of police use of force, she told students.

“The whole purpose of that lesson was to drive home the point: ‘Okay, there is an association’ — but that we can’t necessarily conclude race is the cause of the difference,” the teacher said in an interview. “Association is not causation.”

She got no complaints from students or parents, she said. But at a mandatory professional development session the following summer, administrators warned that Virginia teachers — especially those in Loudoun County — were “under a microscope right now,” the teacher said. Staffers understood the comment, she said, as a reference to Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s first-day executive order limiting education on race and “divisive concepts,” the tip line he set up allowing parents to report teachers, and his intense scrutiny of the Loudoun district for its handling of two student sexual assaults .

The teacher asked higher-ups if she should stop teaching her lesson on the police use of force. She was told yes, because “it might make children uncomfortable” because of their race or if their parents are police officers, the teacher recalled.

Asked about the teacher’s account, Loudoun schools spokesman Dan Adams wrote in an emailed statement that the district remains “committed to maintaining an inclusive, safe, caring and rigorous learning environment.”

The teacher has not taught the data set since. Without bothering to ask, she has also stopped discussing a well-known, peer-reviewed 2003 study that found higher callback rates for job applicants with traditionally White, as opposed to Black, names. She had used the study to explain the concept of a statistically significant difference.

‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’

In Arkansas last school year, 12th-grade English teacher Lisa Childers was struggling to interest her students in Tara Westover’s “ Educated ,” a memoir about growing up in a survivalist Mormon family from a splinter sect that saw little point in educating women.

But she saw a glimmer of curiosity from a handful of female students intrigued by Westover’s references to Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th-century British philosopher and writer best known for her passionate argument for women’s equality, “ A Vindication of the Rights of Woman .”

Childers decided to suggest six passages of optional reading from the text. “Men considering females rather as women than human creatures,” Wollstonecraft wrote in one, “have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses and affectionate wives and rational mothers; and the understanding of the sex has been … hobbled.”

Childers said she wanted female students to know that women had struggled to learn for centuries.

But on Jan. 18, 2022, the assistant principal at Bryant High School, apparently alerted to the Wollstonecraft assignment after reviewing Childers’s syllabus online, sent an email with the heading: “Questions about a document (please respond).”

The assistant principal wrote in the email, a copy of which was reviewed by The Post, that she had “a few questions” about Wollstonecraft’s essay: “What is the purpose of using it?” “How is it connected to what you are doing?” “Is it connected by skills?” “Is it connected by theme?”

The email spawned a lengthy back-and-forth over the next two weeks in which Childers sought to defend the assignment. She emphasized that it was optional — but gave up when the assistant principal kept peppering her with questions about why it was necessary.

The assistant principal never offered a reason for her objections. But earlier that academic year, the same person had objected to a teacher’s proposed assignment of an essay on toxic masculinity by writing in an email, reviewed by The Post, that educators should “bring in articles of empathy and compassion rather than something that could negatively trigger our students.” In 2021, Bryant Public Schools overhauled its middle and high school English curriculums to eliminate books including Anne Frank’s “ The Diary of a Young Girl ,” with officials citing a need for more rigorous texts and tales that were not “overly dark and heavy.”

Asked about Childers’s account, Devin Sherrill, director of communication for Bryant Public Schools, wrote in a two-page statement that Childers did not supply a “requested lesson plan to adequately justify including Wollstonecraft’s work as a part of her lesson.” Sherrill wrote that Wollstonecraft’s text is not part of the district’s “curriculum map” and that Childers failed to show how “learning target(s) would be achieved” by assigning students “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”

Childers said her class finished “Educated” without enthusiasm. The incident, she said, felt like a chilling repeat of censorship that occurs in the memoir.

“We weren’t even allowed to read the things Tara Westover is so pleased to be reading,” Childers said, “when she finally goes to college.”

‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘Of Mice and Men’

Across two decades of working in education, one Missouri English teacher said she received two complaints from parents objecting to Mark Twain’s “ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn .” As best she can recall, both complaints came from Black parents upset by the use of the n-word.

Sensitive to these concerns, the teacher was careful in how she taught the novel, which she believes is important reading because it grants children a glimpse into lives far different from their own.

“We would have a conversation with the kids about trying to understand why the word was used so frequently in the book — and we weren’t reading [the n-word] out loud, we would skip over,” she said. “We would also talk about how this showed the view of minorities during that time.”

But over the past three years, White parents began lodging complaints against “Huck Finn” in the teacher’s largely White and conservative town, she said. The teacher spoke on the condition of anonymity because her district forbids unsanctioned interviews with the news media.

The teacher said she received five complaints from White parents objecting to the n-word. She said several of her colleagues in the Wentzville School District reported similar objections.

In the 2021-2022 school year, right before she was slated to start teaching “Huckleberry Finn,” the teacher met with colleagues at her high school. They discussed how parents in the district had begun sharing on social media details of teacher behavior they disliked, sometimes naming the educators involved.

The teachers decided to cut “Huckleberry Finn.” Also nixed was John Steinbeck’s “ Of Mice and Men ,” which had drawn similar objections over profane language — again from White parents.

“We didn’t wait for complaints,” the teacher said.

The teacher said her administrators stayed out of the issue, content so long as the educators “did not cause problems.” Officials did not request, endorse or question the books’ removal, she said. District chief communications officer Brynne Cramer wrote in a statement that “our educators are empowered to determine which texts best meet the needs of their learners,” adding that “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “Of Mice and Men” are both “available for staff to incorporate” into lessons.

In place of the two books, the teacher sent students a list of dystopian and science-fiction novels, allowing them to choose whatever most appealed to them and read it in small groups. She figured books in those genres were least likely to cause controversy.

But she thinks her students have lost out.

“When you can’t have conversations about class and race … it makes it more difficult for children to understand why people try to fight for equality,” she said. “You’re doing them a disservice.”

A Library of Congress video of a ‘cakewalk’

Rebecca Fensholt, a teacher at a North Carolina high school, spent weeks developing a three-day unit on “identity power and subversion” for her semester-long social studies class. Students learned how racial, ethnic, sexual and gender identities can be wielded to uphold or undermine those in power.

One part of the lesson, which Fensholt taught for three years with no problems, involved showing videos of “ cakewalks ,” dances that Black Americans began performing in the antebellum era partly to mock the formal dances held by their White, wealthy enslavers. Fensholt played an old Library of Congress video of a cakewalk , in which five Black men and women clad in posh period outfits dance for 41 seconds in a circle.

Fensholt also assigned a prompt that, she said, usually led to thoughtful discussions: “When is imitation subversion, and when is it emulation?”

But things changed this fall when Fensholt decided to pair the video with an essay by bell hooks — “ Is Paris Burning? ” — in which the Black feminist and social critic dissects drag ball culture in 1980s-era New York.

Fensholt said she soon received a flurry of emails from four parents contending broadly that the cakewalk video and the bell hooks text were irrelevant to social studies. One parent accused her — in a profanity-laced message that also promised to report her to the district — of indoctrinating students, she said.

Fensholt devoted hours to replying to each parent, explaining and defending her lesson in emails she said she checked repeatedly for tone. She also contacted Durham Public Schools officials, meeting with building administrators, an instructional coach and a teacher who serves as her mentor. Overall, she felt she got insufficient support from the district, she said. And the parent complaints just kept coming.

Reached for comment, district communications specialist Crystal Roberts wrote in a statement that “Durham Public Schools is in the process of gathering information regarding the incident cited.”

This semester, Fensholt decided she couldn’t face a second round. She skipped the three-day lesson on subversion, the cakewalk video, the bell hooks text: “I just didn’t teach it.”

School apologizes for assignment asking 5th grader to 'pretend to be a white slave master'

by Baylee Wojcik/WJAC staff

SOMERSET COUNTY, Pa (WJAC) — Two Somerset County parents say they were surprised to find what they say is an "alarming assignment" brought home by their fifth-grade daughter last week.

Conemaugh Township elementary parents Shannon and Kenneth Poole say their daughter brought home an assignment last week instructing students to “pretend to be a white master looking to buy a slave.”

“On Thursday morning, we got an assignment in our daughter’s schoolwork folder, and it was basically a colored in worksheet that was titled ‘auctions, winnings to the highest bidder.’ And it was an assignment wherein the fifth graders were supposed to portray slave masters and identify what qualifications they wanted in their slave,” the father said.

The Pooles say the assignment asked the students to draw and describe the living quarters, as well as various scenarios that would occur on a plantation. They say their daughter lost points when she wrote that she would “treat the slaves nicely.”

“I don’t think that we should be teaching our fifth graders or putting them in the frame of mind of what it’s like to own another human being or what qualifications hypothetically you would want in them. And I question the educational value of the assignment because if we’re asking our students to pretend to be slave masters or anything like that, why are we giving them points off if they said they’d treat a slave with empathy? That seems to suggest that there’s a certain type of response that’s correct or incorrect.”

The Pooles say they contacted the teacher and principal, but they say that school officials were initially unwilling to remove the assignment or apologize. In response, the couple says they took to social media, and their Reddit post currently has over one thousand comments.

“The consensus is just overwhelmingly that this was inappropriate. And I think the point in doing so wasn’t to condemn the institution or reprimand any teachers or anything like that, it was just to bring awareness to the fact. And when we tried to bring that through the proper channels, it sort of fell flat. And again, it’s our hope that this will bring awareness to the issue and correct these so that there aren’t other little children going through this.”

In a statement to 6 news, the superintendent of Conemaugh Township school district says the assignment was intended to help students to comprehend slavery, but a different approach should have been taken.

The assignment has been eliminated from the class and the district deeply apologizes to all who were offended by the assignment. The matter is, otherwise, being handled internally and measures are being taken to ensure that an unfortunate event like this does not happen again.

“It’s important to advocate for your children. I mean, at 10, they might not identify a problem but then they’re growing up and they’re going to see this thing and wonder and think ‘oh my God.’ And why didn’t your parents speak up for you. As parents we have an obligation to represent our children and to help them and make sure they are okay," the father added.

The couple says they are relieved to hear that the assignment has been removed from the class, and they hope other schools can learn from this.

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Teacher on leave for ‘pretend you are a slave’ assignment

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IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) — A high school teacher in Iowa has been placed on leave for assigning students to “pretend you are a black slave.”

The Iowa City Press-Citizen reported that the assignment for an Iowa City school district online learning program for students assigned to different schools asked students to write four sentences about what they would do if they were a slave who was freed.

“Think very, very carefully about what your life would be like as a slave in 1865,” the assignment reads. “You can’t read or write and you have never been off the plantation you work on. What would you do when you hear the news you are free? What factors would play into the decision you make?”

The teacher, whose name was not released, was placed on administrative leave and the assignment was removed, Iowa City Community School District spokeswoman Kristin Pedersen said. A statement from the district called the assignment “inappropriate” and said it “does not support and will not tolerate this type of instruction.”

Dibny Gamez said her 14-year-old daughter, Ayesha, could not complete the assignment because it made her feel uncomfortable. Ayesha is among a small number of Black students in the class.

“She just starts tearing up,” Gamez said. “And I was, like, ‘No, listen, you don’t have to be ashamed of who you are.’ I said, ‘You are beautiful for who you are. Don’t let not one soul make you uncomfortable for who you are.’”

Assignments asking students to role-play enslaved people or slave owners trivialize or distort the actual events of slavery, said Justin Grinage, a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Minnesota who focuses his research on race and education.

“The best-case scenario with lessons like this is that students come away with a fabricated lie about history. So, best-case scenario, they don’t really learn anything, or they learn the wrong thing,” Grinage said. “Worst-case scenario is that it’s a deeply traumatic experience for students of color, particularly Black students.”

This story has been corrected to note the assignment was made in an online learning program, not a specific school.

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Iowa City teacher on administrative leave over 'pretend you are a black slave' assignment

Editor's note: This story has been edited to make clear that the teacher who's been placed on leave was working with the district's Online Learning Program this fall and was working with students from buildings across the district, including those at Liberty High.

The Iowa City school district has placed a teacher on leave after she assigned students to "pretend you are a black slave."

The assignment asked students to write four sentences using proper grammar and punctuation about what they would do if they were freed:

"Think very, very carefully about what your life would be like as a slave in 1865," the assignment reads. "You can't read or write and you have never been off the plantation you work on. What would you do when you hear the news you are free? What factors would play into the decision you make?"

Dibny Gamez said that her 14-year-old daughter, Ayesha, who would've attended Liberty High School this year if not for the pandemic, couldn't bring herself to complete the assignment earlier this week in her 9th-grade class with the district's Online Learning Program.

"She's, like, 'Mom, that makes me so uncomfortable.' She just starts tearing up," Gamez said. "And I was, like, 'No, listen, you don't have to be ashamed of who you are.' I said, 'You are beautiful for who you are. Don't let not one soul make you uncomfortable for who you are.' "

Gamez says there are plenty of other ways to teach children about history that don't ask them to recall that their families were once enslaved.

"The way it is in 2020 right now, when it comes to race, you have to be very careful of what you can say and not say," Gamez said.

The assignment has been removed and the teacher, who, as part of the district's online learning program, works with students from multiple school buildings, has been placed on administrative leave, Iowa City Community School District spokesperson Kristin Pedersen said. The assignment was inappropriate, according to a statement from the district, and the district "does not support and will not tolerate this type of instruction."

The situation is being reviewed using the district's internal HR processes, and the district would not provide any additional information. The teacher involved did not reply to a request for comment from the Iowa City Press-Citizen, and the school's principal also declined to comment.

► Racial justice:    In a second protest wave, Iowans demand justice for University of Iowa alumna Makeda Scott

Royceann Porter, a member of the Johnson County Board of Supervisors and president of the Black Voices Project, contacted the district superintendent about the assignment, which, she said, has no place in a classroom.

"With everything that's going on in the world right now, (the teacher) would have been better saying 'Pretend that you were an astronaut.' "

Porter has taken students on civil rights tours to sites around the South, which includes putting students into reflection groups. But never, once, would someone ask a student to imagine they were a slave, she said.

"All the things that you feel while you are there, you have no time to imagine — because you're literally in tears knowing somebody went through that."

Gamez says her daughter has always been a 4.0 student. She's a normal teenager — a "Tik Tok teenager" — who nonetheless has felt singled out and discriminated against for her race repeatedly while in school.

Students of color make up between 31% and 35% of the student body at Liberty High School, according to the district's 2018-19 enrollment report . Ayesha was one of only a handful of African-American students in the class that received the "pretend you are a slave" assignment, her mom says.

Gamez, who is Hispanic, experienced racism in the Iowa City school district growing up, like being called racial slurs on the bus. Now, she feels like she has to protect her daughter from discrimination similar to what she experienced.

"I can handle it — I've got the tough skin for me to handle it," Gamez said. "But their minds are starting to open ... they're really experimenting, they're starting to look at the world, like, 'Oh, what, wait — I have to act this way?'"

The district has laid out a multi-year plan to address inequities in the K-12 education system, acknowledging problems with disproportionate discipline against students of color and opportunity gaps between them and their white peers, according to its 2019-2022 Comprehensive Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Plan. 

One of the district's goals is to attract and retain diverse, culturally proficient teachers, administrators and staff and ensure they use "culturally responsive and equity-informed practices," according to the diversity plan.

As of 2018 district statistics, 89.6% of faculty and staff across the district were white — vastly out of sync with the district's student population, which that year was comprised of 41.6% students of color.

In the 2018-19 school year, 19.9% of the district's students self-identified as Black and 11.8% as Hispanic. The "total minority" population of the district's more than 14,000 students was listed as 43.4%.

The percentage of teachers of color has grown in recent years, but still remains disproportionate compared with the student population.

In the 2014-15 school year, teachers of color made up just 4.33% of the district's teaching staff. In the 2017-18 school year, that number had risen to just 6%.

Assignments that ask students to role-play enslaved people or slave owners are not uncommon — they're referred to as "slavery simulations," and are assignments that either trivialize or distort the actual events of slavery, Justin Grinage, a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Minnesota who focuses his research on race and education, told the Press-Citizen.

"The best-case scenario with lessons like this is that students come away with a fabricated lie about history. So, best-case scenario, they don't really learn anything, or they learn the wrong thing," Grinage said. "Worst-case scenario is that it's a deeply traumatic experience for students of color, particularly Black students."

Last year, students in Tennessee were asked to imagine they were slave owners ; in Austin, Texas, seventh-graders were asked to draw themselves as slaves . This summer, the University of Iowa redesigned an assignment asking students to imagine they were a slave or a slave owner, according to reporting by the Gazette .

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Many students are afraid to report the assignments — especially younger students, who may not understand the gravity of what is happening, Grinage said. Similarly, some students may fear that the people they report to don't believe that systemic racism is real in the first place.

"I'm sure there's a lot of examples that never hit the public and just take place in classrooms and never get reported as such," he said.

The 1619 Project by the New York Times  and the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center have played a role in shedding light on slavery simulation assignments, Grinage said, but they are still common in schools across the country.

Gamez said she and her family have not received an apology for the assignment, despite her attempts to explain why how it made Ayesha feel.

"I just want (the teacher) to apologize," Gamez said. "I want her to, you know, be like 'Hey, I don't I didn't mean for your child to feel that way.'"

Cleo Krejci covers education for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. You can reach her at  [email protected]  or on Twitter via  @_CleoKrejci . 

Your subscription makes work like this possible. Subscribe today at Press-Citizen.com/Subscribe .

Missouri teacher on leave after asking kids to 'set your price for a slave'

A Missouri elementary school teacher has been placed on administrative leave for giving students an assignment that asked them to "set your price for a slave."

The in-class work was given to a 5th grade Social Studies class last week at Blades Elementary School in St. Louis. School administrators became aware of it over the weekend after a photo of the assignment was posted on social media.

"It is so wrong on so many levels," Lee Hart wrote on Facebook . Hart said her friend's child attends the school and was given the assignment.

"This was supposedly a westward expansion lesson," Hart posted. "Some were given food, wood, water, and slaves!!!!!"

The assignment, a copy of which was provided to NBC News by the Mehlville School District, instructs students to set a price for a number of items such as grain, fruit, fish, a container of oil and a cow. The last question asks the children to pick a price for a slave.

"You own a plantation or farm and therefore need more workers," the lesson states. "You begin to get involved in the slave trade industry and have slaves work on your farm. Your product to trade is slaves."

Blades Elementary School principal Jeremy Booker said the educator, who has not been identified, was attempting to teach students about "market practices" and the class was "learning about having goods, needing goods and obtaining goods and how that influenced early settlement in America."

"Some students who participated in this assignment were prompted to consider how plantation owners traded for goods and slaves," he said in a letter to the school community.

"The assignment was culturally insensitive," he said, adding that the teacher "has expressed significant remorse."

Chris Gaines, Superintendent for Mehlville School District, said that asking students to participate in an activity where they have to put a price tag on another person is unacceptable.

"Racism of any kind, even inadvertently stemming from cultural bias, is wrong and is not who we aspire to be as a school district," he said in a letter addressed to the staff and district family members. "I am sorry and disappointed that this happened in our school."

A spokesman for the district told NBC News that the teacher has been placed on administrative leave.

Booker said all teachers and staff will be provided "professional development on cultural bias."

Minyvonne Burke is a senior breaking news reporter for NBC News.