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. “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.

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 abo…