New York City public schools implement "black studies" curriculum for children

In New York City, all public schools for grades pre-K through 12 will use a new black studies curriculum this school year (which was funded by the City Council).

Known as "Black Studies as the Study of the World," the coursework was created by the Educational Equity Action Plan (EEAP) and the Black Education Research Center at Columbia University Teachers College (and had already been employed in a portion of the city's schools). Sonya Douglass, Professor of Educational Leadership at Columbia University's Teachers College, commented to ABC:

This is not a curriculum about a particular racial group, necessarily, but about the history of inequality and the hierarchy of stratification in the United States (...) When young people, as well as teachers, who may not even have 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.

Curriculum includes "the Construction of Black America"

The curriculum includes subjects in which other U.S. citizens (belonging to other races or ethnic groups) are left out. Some are:

- The African Diaspora

- Case Study: Nigeria (extended learning)

- Case Study: Egypt (extended learning)

- The Geography of the African Continent

- Blacks and the American Revolution

- Blacks and the U.S. Constitution

- The Struggle for Black Freedom in the United States

- Blacks and the Civil War

- Emancipation

- The Black Reconstruction

- The Construction of Black America

- African Americans and the First World War

- The Economy: American Capitalism and the Exploitation of Black Labor; Economic Disenfranchisement and Obstacles to Black Wealth Creation

According to its description, "It is the result of decades of academic research, community organizing, policy advocacy, and leadership committed to ensuring that students have access to lessons that infuse the experiences of people of African descent in the United States and around the world."

However, there is no word on whether all parents of students who have classes in the city's public schools were consulted about this curriculum that their children will henceforth learn at school.