A sure sign of spring is the dropping of new GOP bills regulating what is taught in schools. This year’s legal seedlings are trending toward more sweeping restrictions.
Missouri’s “Sunlight in Learning Act” threatens to cut half of any district’s budget found to be teaching prohibited concepts. It turns out the lights on many topics of historical discussion. Going beyond merely banning the New York Times “1619 Project” as many states have done, it takes the novel step of banning not just that but “any successor theory or concept.”
The 1619 Project is actually a collection of essays by highly regarded scholars such as Michelle Alexander, Matthew Desmond, Jamelle Bouie, Tiya Miles, Mehrsa Baradaran, Jeneen Interlandi, Kevin M. Kruse, Linda Villarosa, Trymaine Lee, Wesley Morris, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Martha S. Jones, and Bryan Stevenson. Among the theories these researchers discuss is how the African American experience of oppression influenced popular music; the role of the commodification of sugar on world history; the deep connections between the failures of Reconstruction and the persistent racial wealth gap and the rise of mass incarceration; the role of enslaved peoples in westward “settlement”; the century-long debate about whether slavery was capitalist or a an obstacle to economic growth; the role slavery and segregation and even urban planning played in the development of the modern U.S. financial system and the modern health care crisis.
Not to mention what initially aroused anger against the 1619 Project, Nicole Hannah Jones summary of historians’ arguments about the role of slavery in propelling American revolutionaries toward independence. Fencing off all these historic debates from the classroom will leave only the feel-good Mason Weems morality tales of George and the cherry tree, or worse, the Uncle Remus Tales of Joel Chandler Harris.
Both Ohio and New Hampshire are close to passing legislation named in memory of Charlie Kirk. Ohio calls its bill the “Charlie Kirk American Heritage Act and the Granite State is debating the Charlie Act, which is an acronym for “Countering Hate And Revolutionary Leftist Indoctrination in Education Act.” They are different in that Ohio’s Charlie Act attempts to wedge religious lessons into public schools while New Hampshire tries to ban ideas conservatives don’t like.
Both claim to rest on political neutrality and historical fact. Language is, of course, a pliable thing, but in both states the concepts of historical accuracy and neutrality is pulled like taffy until it folds into its opposite. Ohio attempts to justify violating the separation of church and state by proclaiming that “Accurate historical instruction regarding verifiable, historical impacts of religion on American history…is not proselytization or a violation of the First Amendment.”
New Hampshire tries to hide its heavy-handed censorship beneath the guise of fighting “indoctrination while preserving academic freedom for neutral, factual discussions.” Patriotic neutrality apparently only tips over into excess when “partisan loyalty” or “total allegiance” is compelled. (It is telling that in defining what America’s core “civic principles” are, the Charlie Act only mentions liberty, equality, and what it terms “republican processes.” Democracy does not make the cut.)
Besides providing no practical guidelines for educators to work with, this sort of formulation normalizes a vast range of indoctrination by inflating the concept of “neutrality” to bursting. This can only make sense to someone who presumes that because the United States is so perfect, so exceptionally magnificent, that it would be irrational to question the glory of its institutions, history, or symbols. Indeed, New Hampshire’s Charlie Act says just this, stating that “Education should never cultivate a hostile… disposition against the founding of America or the constitutions of the United States or New Hampshire.”
New Hampshire’s Charlie Act is a prime example of how MAGA school censorship laws have shifted from banning certain books and authors to defining vast areas of scholarly investigation off limits to schools. It defines a long list of what it calls “pedagogical practices and praxis” as prohibited indoctrination “compelling adherence to these world-views.” Broad areas of knowledge and interpretation are banned, including “Marxist dialectical analysis”, “critical pedagogy”, “critical race theory”, “critical legal theory”, “LGBTQ+ ideology”, and “liberation narratives”. This Charlie Act specifically bans several provable and undebatable historical facts. One of these thought crimes is asserting that the U.S. Constitution is “designed to perpetuate oppression based on race.” (Is it sufficient to note that the Constitution treats Indians as both non-citizens and non-persons?) Another is a broad ban on framing “history or current events as class, racial, or identity-based conflicts intended to foster division rather than resolution.” It is more difficult to think of an example of a contemporary conflict that doesn’t violate this reality-bending mandate than one that does.
So narrow is the needle which educators must thread to stay within the bounds of New Hampshire’s Charlie Act that it provides a couple of helpful examples as guidance. One example of “permissible pedagogical teaching” (note the idiotic repetition) includes “teaching the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a historical achievement” (which it was) but at the same time “describing critical race theory as a Marxian-derived framework contrary to American legal principles” (which is quite debatable). Republicans seem committed to passing the Charlie Act, even though New Hampshire’s own Department of Justice publicly declared its opposition because the bill “presents constitutional concerns and risks conflicts with other laws.”
Likewise, Ohio’s HB 486, which passed the House with all 62 Republicans voting in favor and all 27 Democrats opposed, hides its true purpose behind the claim that its only goal is an “accurate and historical account of the influence of Christianity on the freedom and liberties ingrained in our culture…” This sounds well and good but is immediately followed by a list of two dozen purported statements of historical fact that range from half-truths to outright falsehoods. Some of the howlers include “Benjamin Franklin’s appeal for prayer at the constitutional convention and the hiring of chaplains that followed.” (Franklin did, in fact, make a motion for a morning prayer and for some “clergy of this city be requested to officiate” but the motion failed and no chaplains were hired.) Another supposedly “accurate” statement about Franklin, that he suggested to Thomas Paine that he burn his The Age of Reason is pure invention as the letter this claim is based upon was written long before Paine wrote his infamous book.
Throughout Ohio’s Charlie Act, “accurate and historical accounts” are slanted to establish a religious consensus among Americans that never actually existed. Take, for example, the law’s direction to teach the “history of the national motto: ‘In God We Trust,’ dating back to the national anthem and traced through its appearance on currency and the inclusion of ‘under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance.” This sentence cobbles together a handful of unrelated facts in order to imply that Americans have been united beneath a religious motto since the early republic. Francis Scott Key did in fact include the line “And this be our motto: ‘In God is our Trust’” in the never-sung fourth stanza of the Star-Spangled Banner he penned in 1814. But no one noticed or cared about his song or his motto for more than a hundred years. Congress did not adopt that tune as the nation’s national anthem until 1931, didn’t get around to making the Pledge official till 1942, didn’t add the words “under God” to the Pledge until 1954, didn’t put the motto on paper currency till 1955, and didn’t make the motto “In God We Trust” official until 1956.
Last week Idaho’s SB 1336, a bill modeled on the “American Birthright” curriculum developed by a coalition of right-wing lobby groups, became law. Idaho already bans teaching “critical race theory” including historical facts that might make white kids feel uncomfortable, or as the law put it any suggestion that “individuals, by virtue of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin, are inherently responsible for actions committed in the past”. SB 1336 goes beyond outlawing what teachers can’t say by mandating what they must teach, in this case a boatload of chauvinistic ideas that American society and “common history and culture” is the “culmination of the Western tradition”, “Christianity,” and “the Western intellectual tradition” and “Anglo-American heritage”. Every Idaho classroom is now required to post in a prominent location a state-approved portrait of George Washington and teachers must teach the “civic virtues” of the “Founding Fathers” and only mention their “efforts during the American Founding…to abolish slavery.” Typical of all the bills pushed by right-wing educational groups, while the bill discusses Greek democracy three times, it never mentions that the United States was founded as one.
As 2026’s legislative sessions are just beginning, it is clear that the old MAGA crusade to ban “CRT and DEI” has lost steam but has been replaced by a broader movement to censor and control what teachers can teach and students can think. The range of topics being prohibited are quietly expanding and doing so with the flimsy claim that such bans are just restoring “neutrality” to the classroom, or worse, supporting accuracy and fact-based lessons. But these laws revealed a more troubling essence of where MAGA thinking is heading: the world is not knowable but known and education exists simply to inculcate official versions of it.
