Most states prompt schools to teach about 9/11, but the details differ, AP finds

For three days this summer, teachers converged at the Flight 93 National Memorial in remote western Pennsylvania to talk about 9/11.

How best to educate a new generation about the attacks 25 years ago? Which details are appropriate for young kids? What do victims’ families want students to be told about the dead?

“Even worse than getting started wrong or using inappropriate language is the total omission of telling the story,” Gordon Felt, whose brother Edward Felt died on United Airlines Flight 93 on Sept. 11, told teachers in one session. “That’s our biggest fear.”

Teaching about 9/11 in schools is more important than ever now that about one-third of Americans were born after al-Qaida hijackers crashed planes and killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, the Pentagon and rural Shanksville, Pennsylvania. A growing majority of states — at least 40 — expect or suggest that public schools address 9/11 in some way, but the provisions vary widely in scope, specificity and framing, The Associated Press has found.

State education standards range from detailed course content to broad concepts. As a result, some don’t specify what to teach about Sept. 11.

A decade after the attacks, about 60% of states didn’t explicitly mention 9/11 in their education standards, but there has been more movement toward teaching it as time passed and the attacks were seen as “a settled event,” said University of Wisconsin education professor Jeremy Stoddard. He, now-retired dean Diana Hess and colleagues have researched 9/11 education for decades.

“For those states that include it, it seems to be going in much more depth than it was in the past,” Stoddard said.

States vary in teaching about 9/11

Twenty-five states have laws or education standards that require or expect public schools to provide instruction specifically on the Sept. 11 attacks, and another 13 have optional mentions of 9/11, according to data AP gathered. Several other states have laws requiring or recommending school observances, bringing the number of states with some policy to at least 40. In states without specific laws or standards, schools and teachers also may choose on their own to discuss the attacks.

The AP gathered its data through requests to all states, reviews of standards in four states that didn’t answer, and interviews with lawmakers and other officials.

While states may share an interest in teaching about 9/11, their approaches differ.

In Alabama, Sept. 11 fits into “the United States’ military involvement in international conflicts since 1980” for students as young as fifth-graders. Texas has taught 9/11 and surrounding events as an example of “radical Islamic terrorism” and a key piece of modern history overall.

Colorado suggests high school students might analyze the aftermath of Sept. 11, including “Middle Eastern discrimination.” New Mexico envisions discussions that could include not only post-9/11 wars and legislation but also the U.S. detention of suspected enemy combatants at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba and the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal.

States’ classroom lessons don’t always map neatly with their political leanings. States as politically different as California, Florida, New Jersey and North Dakota all propose or expect that students discuss post-9/11 efforts to balance national security and civil liberties, for instance.

But social studies overhauls that reflect conservative priorities have tended to include Sept. 11. A 2023 Florida law even specifies that certain middle and high school courses spend 45 minutes on 9/11.

The Louisiana “Freedom Framework” — crafted in 2022 after conservative complaints about an earlier draft — starts mentioning 9/11 in second grade.

“We coalesced around our belief that Sept. 11 needed to be included in a very real way,” Louisiana Education Superintendent Cade Brumley said by phone this spring. He hopes students learn that “threats to our freedom are real, but as Americans, I think, we are quite powerful when we stand together and we face that adversity.”

A 2022 Arizona law required “age-appropriate education” on Sept. 11 in all public schools — until legislators dialed it back last year to seventh through 12th grades. “We have to protect young children from the true horror of 9/11 and ensure older children never forget it,” said state Sen. John Kavanagh, a Republican who sponsored the first measure and supported both.

In Congress, Rep. Andrew Garbarino, R-N.Y., has proposed a resolution encouraging all states to teach students about the attacks.

Educating teachers, along with students

About 60% of U.S. young adults say they first learned about the attacks through school, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll that included about 250 adults born after 2000. But if educators’ role in 9/11 awareness is clear, it hasn’t been easy.

When Megan Jones became the National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum ‘s education chief in 2014, teachers told her they worried about bringing up traumatic memories for students. Now, pupils often need basic facts, and teachers reconcile their own pained recollections with the reality that students see Sept. 11, 2001, as distant history.

The key is “helping them to understand how 9/11 ultimately shaped the world that they live in,” Jones said. The New York memorial has raised over $25 million this year to enhance student field trips, teacher training and other education programs.

The Flight 93 Memorial brought 40 Pennsylvania teachers to its site in June, hoping to kindle more education about Sept. 11, said organizer Donna Gibson, the executive director of Friends of Flight 93 National Memorial.

Fifth-grade teacher Martha “Marty” Runzer went to explore a subject with personal meaning. The former United Airlines flight attendant wears her old wings pin every Sept. 11, tells her West Chester students about her colleagues who died, and emphasizes how ordinary people — such as the Flight 93 passengers and crew members who tried to wrest control from the 9/11 hijackers — became “everyday superheroes.”

John Boston Bradley, by contrast, doesn’t remember 9/11. The 28-year-old social studies teacher has taught his Catholic high school students in Johnstown about the attacks, but he said the memorial symposium inspired him to convey more of the “human, emotional aspect.”

“It will help our students understand that these difficult stories need to be told,” he said.

How kids see 9/11

“Why did they want to crash into us?” Desmond Killian, 9, asked his parents as they looked around the Sept. 11 Memorial plaza in New York one recent afternoon.

“It’s some tough things to talk about,” dad Eric Killian replied.

Desmond took that in, then asked: “Which country?”

“It wasn’t so much a country,” Eric Killian said.

The questions kept coming from the fourth-grader, who said he’d heard the term “9/11” from friends but hadn’t been taught about it yet in his California school. The state recommends that all public schools hold a moment of silence, and it suggests that high schools discuss the attacks’ impact on U.S. policy and world affairs.

Another visitor, 17-year-old New Jersey high school senior Ameya Williams, had learned extensively about Sept. 11, from the missed warning signals before the attacks to rebuilding after.

Her state requires such instruction in public high schools and encourages age-appropriate instruction earlier. Plus Williams has heard stories from relatives, including her grandfather, who was commuting to work at New York’s World Trade Center when it was struck.

“I feel like understanding it is understanding what they went through,” Williams said.

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Associated Press writers Marc Levy in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and David A. Lieb in Jefferson City, Missouri, contributed to this report.