Fighting for the future of LGBTQ-inclusive K-12 history curriculum

After years of advocacy and effort, Don Romesburg and a small, committed team of activists and educators in 2011 achieved a landmark legislative goal: passage of California’s FAIR Education Act. The law was the first of its kind in the country. It requires that LGBTQ history be taught in K-12 classrooms as part of the history and social studies curriculum, which was revised in 2016, along with textbooks, to incorporate the new content requirements. “For LGBTQ students, inclusive history education can enrich their identity, their sense of community [and] safety, and their academic and social success,” Romesburg said, noting that research confirms these educational outcomes. 

With passage of the Fair, Accurate, Inclusive and Respectful (FAIR) Education Act, California became a national leader, modeling a requirement for public schools at all grade levels. Romesburg recalled his surprise in realizing that passage of the law and implementation of the law were two very different things – without a “carrot” or “stick,” or training for that matter, teachers would have difficulty putting the law into practice. Romesburg and his group of activists continued their work, switching to committee meetings and textbook review, to see the effort through to implementation.  

As a historian and the lead scholar on the FAIR Act, Romesburg began to wonder why no one had written about the decades-long fight for more inclusive education nationwide and the legislative victory in California. Soon he realized that the opportunity to change history and to illuminate it both belonged to him. In a recent talk at the Clayman Institute, Romesburg shared past reform efforts, recent legislative wins, and persistent challenges for LGBTQ history education from his new book, Contested Curriculum: LGBTQ History Goes to School. Romesburg is managing editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly at the Clayman Institute and a visiting joint professor in history and women’s, gender, and queer studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. 

In addition to benefiting LGBTQ students, teaching about rights movements provides an opportunity for civic development and civics education, he said. The study of these movements “puts young people into conversation with both what is possible, in terms of pluralistic democracy, and where there have been limits and challenges to that vision of the United States,” Romesburg said. 

Eight states now have similar laws that mandate teaching LGBTQ history, and five more have incorporated the content though no law requires it. However, since 2021, a number of other states have  passed “Don’t Say Gay” and similar laws restricting the teaching of LGBTQ content. A recent Supreme Court ruling, Mahmoud v. Taylor, affirmed the rights of parents of K-5 students to opt out of certain storybooks with LGBTQ content because of their religious beliefs. At the school district level, even in California, debates about how to implement parental opt-outs continue. Romesburg noted such a-la-carte parental requests, with the attendant burdens they place on schools and teachers, are clearly censorious. He ruefully admits that some attention to his book has come from these battles.

Romesburg’s book reaches into history itself to detail previous attempts at curricular reform, from a 1970s effort to secure basic rights for LGBTQ teachers to 1980s and 1990s battles over multicultural curriculum and safe schools initiatives focused on the vulnerability of LGBTQ students. While some positive outcomes were achieved with these efforts, none was successful in changing curriculum. With each attempt, though, more awareness was achieved, and lessons learned.  

More recently, it was important to identify why history and social studies curricula in particular provided an appropriate context for LGBTQ content. “History education is not sex education or health education, something we really had to emphasize at all levels when we were doing this advocacy work,” Romesburg said. Within the social studies framework, rights, restrictions, and cultural expressions may be taught in relation to other forms of belonging and difference. 

Following passage of FAIR in 2011, and the multi-year implementation effort leading to adoption of LGBTQ content into the state curriculum in 2016, Romesburg shifted to training educators on implementation. For all these efforts, he is the namesake of the LGBTQ+ History Association’s Don Romesburg Prize for K-12 Curriculum. In terms of research, he sees his next project as an international one. Romesburg named Scotland and Japan as two places implementing interesting national curricula (few countries have such state-level diversity as the U.S.). Other countries, including Russia, actively prohibit the teaching of LGBTQ content.

Of U.S. efforts at inclusive content, he acknowledges, “Teachers are scared right now,” and they have always been reluctant to adopt LGBTQ content in the absence of training. One marker of progress: so much amazing content now exists that didn’t before, Romesburg said. Some high school social studies classrooms in Florida are even teaching on the new “Don’t Say Gay” laws.