California’s K-12 students will be learning more about the contributions of the LGBT community in the public school curriculum, as early as this fall. The California Board of Education voted in favor of a new History-Social Science Framework that builds on the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive and Respectful (FAIR) Education of 2012, which requires a more comprehensive representation of the LGBT community in school curricula.
“The scholars, LGBT advocates, educators, and students who were pushing for these changes wanted to make sure that there weren’t just token mentions of Harvey Milk and Stonewall in 11th grade,” said Dr. Don Romesburg, an associate professor and chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at Sonoma State University. “We knew that, both for the sake of historical accuracy and for student education and school climate, it was important that all students learn about LGBT lives and history in elementary, through middle and into high school.”
Under the new framework, references to the LGBT community will be woven into the existing curriculum, Romesburg said. Students will start learning about the LGBT community as part of family diversity as early as second grade. In fourth grade, they will learn about Harvey Milk and other LGBT activists. They will learn about LGBT contributions through high school, finally culminating in the U.S. history course in 11th grade, which will now include references to the fight for LGBT equality.
The new framework is the product of the FAIR Education Act, which required that LGBT Americans and people with disabilities be added to the list of social and ethnic groups, such as women, immigrants, minorities and individuals of diverse religious backgrounds whose contributions schools must include in the curriculum. However, when the law was originally enacted, it was not accompanied by explicit guidance from the state for educators to follow nor were new textbooks created reflecting a broader focus on the LGBT community.
With the development of the framework, that is expected to change.
“There was no real carrot for following the law, and there was no stick if you didn’t follow the law,” Romesburg said. “So we started focusing on the framework of the revision as a way of putting meat on the bones of the FAIR Education Act.”
An advisory commission of 20 scholars associated with the American Historical Association provided recommendations to the state Department of Education on the framework.
