Curriculum

As the 2026-27 school year draws near, some schools across the nation will be reopening their doors with the Ten Commandments on their walls after high-profile lawsuits seeking to stop such displays have been relatively unsuccessful thus far. 

Since 2021, nine bills have reached a governor's desk related to Ten Commandment displays or student instruction in public school classrooms.  Out of those bills, eight were signed and one was vetoed, according to an analysis of legislation by the Education Commission of the States. Out of those eight bills signed into law, Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama — which was enacted most recently and goes into effect in January — have required Ten Commandment displays in schools. 

While only four states require religious displays, others allow them, according to ECS, such as Tennessee and North Dakota.

North Dakota, in 2021, for example, permitted district boards to display the Ten Commandments alongside other historical documents in schools and classrooms. The law also excuses superintendents, administrators and other education employees or board members from liability for any damages resulting from a school's decision to display them.

Nationwide since 2021, there have been a total of 82 bills in 26 states that relate to Ten Commandments in schools in some way, marking a "sharp uptick" in the years following, said Jennifer Thomsen, principal and researcher for ECS, in an email. 

Supporters of Ten Commandment laws, including their displays, have said the text is integral to U.S. history and literature, especially considering its influence on the Founding Fathers. 

“Including the Ten Commandments in the education of our children is part of our state and national history, culture, and tradition,” according to Louisiana's law, the first such one to be passed in 2024.

Legislators have also openly cited a need to bring Christianity into the classroom. 

“A lot of people, their children, are not attending churches," said Louisiana Rep. Sylvia Taylor, co-author of the legislation, according to a 2025 article in The Center Square. "We need to do something in the schools to bring people back to where they need to be.”

However, opponents take issue with the posters' potential religious influence on students and say they discriminate against the First Amendment rights of non-Christian religious groups. 

As schools prepare for students to return, here is where Ten Commandment laws stand:

Embroiled in controversy from the start

In 2024, Louisiana became the first state to require public schools to display Ten Commandments in every classroom. The same day the Louisiana law was signed, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil liberties groups vowed to sue the state, saying the law violated the First Amendment and U.S. Supreme Court precedent. 

The law, they said, “would require school officials to promote specific religious beliefs to which people of many faiths, and those of no faith, do not subscribe." 

After a lower federal court temporarily paused the Louisiana law in Roake v. Brumley, about a month after it was signed, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision earlier this year. The appeals court judges said that classrooms had not posted the displays yet and, as such, it was too early for the courts to decide whether the displays violate the First Amendment. 

The reversal marked a blow to those hoping to challenge the Ten Commandments' movement.

In April, the same circuit court also narrowly let Texas' version of the law through in Nathan v. Alamo Heights Independent School District, saying that the law "looks nothing like a historical religious establishment" under the First Amendment because "it punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason.”  

Supreme Court and other attempts to stymie laws

Following those losses in court, the ACLU said it plans to appeal the Texas decision in the coming weeks.

In the Louisiana case, the state told the Supreme Court in May as "a purely protective measure" to not take up the Louisiana case and that, if it does, to take it up alongside the Texas case. Justices are expected to deliberate on Louisiana's request in late September.

"After the Fifth Circuit’s rulings this Spring, parents and children in Louisiana and Texas are likely to return to public schools next month and be confronted with religious texts in their classrooms," said Heather Weaver, senior counsel for the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, in an email to K-12 Dive.

A separate lawsuit in Arkansas, Stinson v. Fayetteville School District No. 1, has been appealed by Arkansas to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but has not yet been scheduled for an argument, ACLU said.

In the meantime, parents in opposition of the Ten Commandment displays are seeking another way to stop the laws. 

In Harris County, Texas, three parents from various non-Christian faiths filed a lawsuit last week, this time challenging Texas' Ten Commandments law under the Texas constitution and state law, rather than the First Amendment. The lawsuit was filed against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas Commissioner of Education Mike Morath, and three school districts, including Houston Independent School District.

Parents in the lawsuit say that the Ten Commandment displays "will cause their children to feel pressured," to join the Christian religion and “sends a message to the Plaintiffs' children that there is only one religion — Christianity — with teachings worth making visible." 

Posters have already been displayed in classrooms of at least one of those school districts, Spring Branch Independent School District, according to the court documents. 

The parents are asking the court to issue a temporary pause on the Texas law until the case proceeds and then eventually permanently block the state from enforcing the law.

A federal grant program aimed at reducing teen pregnancy rates has faced sudden changes this summer under the Trump administration — including the abrupt cancellation of 53 of the 66 current grants in late June.

Established by Congress in 2010, the bipartisan Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program funds about $101 million in grants annually to improve the sexual and reproductive health outcomes of youth by using evidence-based education programs. The program’s goal is to help teens make healthy decisions that, in turn, reduce risky sexual behaviors and decrease sexually transmitted infections and unintended teen pregnancy.   

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told AccessMatters, a nonprofit public health organization in Philadelphia, that its TPP grant was canceled on June 26. The organization’s CEO and president, Ayana Bradshaw, said AccessMatters’ five-year grant had two years of funding remaining — amounting to a total loss of $2.4 million.

The nonprofit used the funds to work with nine traditional public and charter schools in Philadelphia reaching over 2,200 youth, Bradshaw said. AccessMatters planned to expand its program to more schools in the city before the grant cancellation notice, she said. 

During the school partnerships, AccessMatters collaborated with Education Plus Health to facilitate lessons in high schools about medically accurate information regarding HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. The curriculum, known as “Be Proud, Be Responsible,” also taught students about pregnancy prevention, hygiene, healthy relationship communication and consent.  

AccessMatters’ grant cancellation notice from HHS said that some of the curricula used with grant funds was “normalizing adolescent sexual activity” and “not age appropriate” because it contained “overtly sexually explicit or pornographic content,” Bradshaw said. 

AccessMatters has since filed a formal appeal for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health to review. 

HHS faces legal challenge

Meanwhile, a July lawsuit was filed against HHS by two local governments, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. The plaintiffs filed the case in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asking it to vacate implementation of the policy changes to TPP and to administer the existing grants as required by federal law. 

The complaint alleges that days before HHS canceled most of the existing TPP grants on June 26, the agency released two new Notices of Funding Opportunity, which said that TPP funds must: 

• Include “abstinence-only ‘sexual risk avoidance’” education. 
• Require awardees to “align” with agency priorities prohibiting “gender ideology” and diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
• Restrict discussion of teen sexual activity despite the program’s statutory mandate to reduce teen pregnancy using “medically accurate” and “age appropriate” interventions.

The plaintiffs claim that when HHS cut the TPP grants in the middle of their funding cycles, it did so because “awardees’ curricula failed to conform to the same agency priorities that had been introduced as program requirements in the new NOFOs three days prior.”

The TPP program has reached over 1.4 million youth since 2010, according to the lawsuit. 

Because of these changes to TPP grants, the plaintiffs said they and other recipients had to suspend or begin dismantling their teen education programs while also “jeopardizing” their partnerships with schools, healthcare providers and community organizations.

“Those harms are ongoing and will only grow worse absent preliminary relief. Many participating schools organize programming around the academic calendar,” the complaint said. “In the end, the adolescents that the Program is designed to help will suffer as appropriated funds are redirected to programs that have not been proven to reduce teen pregnancy.” 

HHS did not respond to a request for comment on the TPP grant cancellations in time for publication.

TPP cuts are not unusual under Trump

In a July 1 letter to U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a group of Senate Democrats expressed “outrage” over the TPP grant terminations and called for their reinstatement. 

The senators said teen birth rates have declined over the past 35 years due to several factors — the use of more effective contraception, greater access to information about pregnancy prevention, and a decline in teen sexual activity — efforts the TPP program has supported for over 15 years.

The letter also said that the Trump administration has long targeted TPP, from proposing to cut the program in his fiscal year 2026 budget to attempting to cancel every TPP grant in 2017 during his first administration. 

Because AccessMatters’ TPP grant termination went into effect immediately, Bradshaw said the nonprofit didn’t have time to ramp down its school partnerships. As schools prepare for the 2026-27 school year, she said she expects many of the partnering schools will feel the impact of the grant cuts when students return to class.

Philadelphia has the second highest STI rate among major U.S. cities, and the AccessMatters TPP grant worked toward addressing that, Bradshaw said.

In Pennsylvania, there isn’t a comprehensive statewide sex education policy, meaning each school and district likely approach the curriculum differently, Bradshaw said. Federal programs like TPP help supplement what some schools may not be directly providing, she added. 

“Because we don’t have comprehensive sex ed in the state, we can’t take away programs like this when it’s being taught in different ways,” Bradshaw said.

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Today's classrooms have never been more diverse. Students bring different strengths, abilities, backgrounds, interests, and learning preferences to every learning experience, making it increasingly important for digital curriculum to be designed with learner variability in mind.

When evaluating digital curriculum, five key pillars define course quality: standards alignment, audience-centered design, data-informed decision-making, accessibility, and continuous improvement.

One of the most revealing questions educators can ask is this: Who was this course designed for?

If the answer is "every learner," accessibility can't be an afterthought. It must be built into the curriculum from the start. Increasingly, schools are asking whether a course can truly be considered high quality if every learner cannot fully engage with it.

More than 8 million students in the United States receive special education services, and many use assistive technologies as part of their everyday learning experience. Some may rely on screen readers, text magnification tools, speech-to-text software, or adaptive devices. Others benefit from options that allow them to customize how they interact with content and demonstrate mastery.

Accessible design benefits far more than students with identified disabilities. An English learner may benefit from listening to content while following along visually. A student recovering from a concussion may need an alternative method to access text-heavy materials. A learner accessing coursework may benefit from responsive design and flexible navigation.

Many of these practices align with the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which encourages educators to provide multiple ways for students to engage with content, process information, and demonstrate understanding. Rather than designing for a single type of learner, UDL recognizes that flexibility benefits all students and should be incorporated into learning experiences from the beginning.

In practice, accessible digital curriculum incorporates features that make learning more flexible and intuitive for a broad range of students, including:

• Closed captioning and transcripts for multimedia content
• Meaningful alternative text for images and graphics
• Keyboard-only navigation
• Screen-reader compatibility
• Accessible color contrast and visual design
• Descriptive links and navigational elements
• Resizable text and responsive interfaces
• Multiple ways for students to engage with content and demonstrate learning

When these elements are integrated seamlessly into course design, students experience greater independence, confidence, and flexibility in how they learn. They are also better positioned to take ownership of their learning, access information in the format that works best for them, and demonstrate mastery in course content.

FlexPoint's World Languages courses offer one example of accessibility and engagement working hand in hand. Multimedia resources support language acquisition and provide students with multiple ways to engage with content. Students can record themselves speaking, review their pronunciation, and receive immediate feedback, creating opportunities for personalized practice and skill development at their own pace.

As schools evaluate digital curriculum, accessibility remains one of the clearest indicators that a course was designed with all learners in mind. Curriculum providers that prioritize accessible design are not only expanding access but also building stronger, more flexible learning experiences that help more students succeed.

“It’s not just the presidents and the politicians and the tycoons. What makes up American history are families and people who experience everyday events, and how they react.”

So says Kristen Crews, who teaches AP U.S. History and women’s studies at Ronald Wilson Reagan High School in Pfafftown, North Carolina. According to Crews, that takeaway was strengthened for her after participating in a professional learning program hosted by New York City’s Tenement Museum.

The museum in July hosted its second annual Summer Teacher Institute, where educators could discuss teaching about immigrant history and how curricular materials can overlap with students' own family stories.

Educators toured the museum’s replicas of immigrant homes, heard from historians, and talked about the experiences of a different immigrant group each day during the July 20-25 program.

The summer institute is an example of how schools can work with museums and other historical resources in their areas and beyond to enhance professional development.

The Tenement Museum programming is "nuanced, but not graduate-level,” said Mike Agovino, who teaches geography, world history and AP Seminar at Queens Gateway to Health Sciences Secondary School in New York City's Queens borough, and participated in the museum’s 2025 cohort. “It’s applicable to a 15- or 16-year-old." 

For Crews, who participated in the program’s 2025 cohort, the program imparted valuable insights about teaching American history through the lens of families and individuals that make the lessons applicable to today's students’ lives. 

Both Agovino and Crews have used the museum’s “Your Story, Our Story” publishing portal to inspire students to write personal stories that illustrate who they are, whether it’s an immigration-related story or something else about them. 

The institute "helped us to turnkey this to our students across the nation,” Agovino said. “I used it as an icebreaker to get to know students in an authentic way. They ate it up. They were excited to be published on a museum website and also to share their stories.”

Crews modified the assignment by asking students to focus on a family heirloom or other object that illuminated elements of their own family history or culture. One student brought in a tobacco stick and talked about the agricultural history of the Winston-Salem, North Carolina, area. Another brought in a Beach Boys album and reminisced about listening to the band’s music with their grandparents. 

This helped students get to know one another and “in understanding what it means to be an American, and how all those pieces worked together,” Crews said.

Throughout the last school year, Crews said, her students were more receptive to history lessons given the focus this approach placed on average people. 

“They paid attention a little bit more,” she said. During a unit on urbanization and how the Industrial Revolution affected immigration, "we were teaching kids how to look at different perspectives and be able to understand. They realized they were from different cultures and backgrounds and wealth, but they also had similarities.”

The Tenement Museum does a thoughtful job of “chunking” content about immigration into themes and time periods so that teachers can easily infuse it into their existing curricula, Agovino said. 

He drew upon the museum’s “Flags of Hope” unit focused on the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and how immigration groups reacted to them. The unit segues into the present day, exploring how "immigrant groups view themselves, legally and emotionally,” in a transformative period in American history, Agovino said. This prompted students to ponder “what they love about the United States, and what they would like to see changed.”

Agovino was able to bring about 200 students to tour the museum. “A lot of these students are first-generation immigrants,” he said. “For them to have this experience, I was very moved and touched by it.”

Crews and her students, being located several states away, made a virtual visit instead. “Being able to walk the halls of the tenements virtually really helped my students … to think about their lives, what they value, and how they become better citizens and better members of their community,” she said. “It helped me think about what’s important and what I should be doing in my classroom.”

Does Advanced Placement Calculus carry too much weight in college admissions decisions? Some math experts are questioning the weight the course carries in lieu of other measures of math achievement such as alternative pathways in the subject.

“Generally, I think too many students are being pushed into AP Calculus,” David Bressoud, professor emeritus of mathematics at Macalester College in Minnesota. “Partly because of this, the competition to get into the best universities is extremely high. A lot of students feel that anything they can do to get into the best universities is worth doing.”

A December 2024 report from the nonprofit Just Equations found that while calculus was required for incoming students by fewer than 5% of colleges, 89% of admissions officers surveyed said that students who take the course were more likely to succeed in college. 

In fact, AP Calculus and calculus were ranked in the top four most important math courses by 74% and 72% of admissions officers, respectively — outpacing precalculus (49%), AP Statistics (37%), AP Precalculus (29%), and advanced algebra/trigonometry (26%).

“There are too many students taking it for the sake of their transcripts, not because it’s something they want to learn,” Bressoud said.

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has been talking about the importance of multiple mathematics pathways at least since the release of its 2017 report “Catalyzing Change in High School Mathematics: Initiating Critical Conversations,” said Latrenda Knigthen, NCTM president. 

“While there is a place for AP Calculus in someone’s high school plan, it’s not the end-all, be-all if you’re going to a four-year college,” she said. “If they’re planning a career in one of the STEM fields, it’s a good foundation for them to have. But there are other things that are important, depending on their [planned] major.”

A more recent report from NCTM, “High School Mathematics Reimagined, Revitalized and Relevant,” examined alternative pathways and asked employers what types of math they need students to be able to do, Knighten says. 

“People are looking for workers who can apply statistics, data science and quantitative reasoning,” she said. “We provided some suggestions and structures as to how to infuse those things into high school courses. In the last few years, we’ve noticed that some of the selective colleges no longer require a student to have AP Calculus.”

Selective colleges might give an application with calculus higher priority, but more important is whether a student has taken four full years of mathematics, which NCTM strongly recommends, Knighten said. 

“I don’t think [AP Calculus] is the barrier it was for people of my generation,” she said. 

Bobson Wong, an AP Statistics, Algebra II and geometry teacher at Bayside High School in Queens, New York, said the main benefit of calculus is for STEM work. 

“The downside is that high school math has become, over the decades, a march to calculus,” he said. “In a lot of ways, statistics is actually harder than calculus. And it’s something that people see more often in everyday life.”

But statistics is often an afterthought, taught at the end of the school year or to students seen as weaker in math skills, Wong said. 

“Statistics is viewed as a consolation prize for people who can’t do calculus, or don’t have the ability to do the quick calculations and pencil-pushing that’s required in so much of the algebra that we do,” he said. “Statistics is a lot harder because it requires … the verbal rigor of a law course, where if you don’t say things in precisely the right way, it can be misinterpreted. Students who do well in courses like calculus aren’t used to that.”

Knighten said too many students take AP Calculus to place out of entry level math requirements, or because they feel compelled to have it on their transcript. 

“It’s helpful for those students who need it based on the types of things they’re going to explore,” she said. But for other students, she added, maybe that’s not the right pathway. “I would not want someone to use it as a rigid pathway.”

Students in K-2 showed little to no progress for reading readiness, according to end-of-school-year data for 2025-26 compared to the year before in a new report from Amplify, an assessment and curriculum provider.

National composite scores found that 66% of K-2 students are on track for learning to read with 34% of young learners scoring below benchmark. This is the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic and since the 2020-21 school year that early reading readiness has failed to improve from year to year, according to the report.

Amplify recommends districts use a multi-tiered systems of support that coordinates instruction, intervention, progress monitoring and teacher professional development to help young students build reading skills.

When the data is broken out by grade level, it shows that kindergartners maintained last year’s benchmark levels at 70% who are on track for reading, while early reading proficiency for students in grades 1-2 fell slightly.

The analysis also examined subtest data, which can reveal a specific skill where students need support. For this report, Amplify looked at 1st and 2nd graders’ performance in oral reading fluency, which measures how many words a student reads correctly in an unpracticed passage. It is considered one of the best indicators for young learners’ reading progress, Amplify said.

Amplify’s data shows students’ oral reading fluency performance trailing overall composite benchmark results. That indicates many young readers may be limited in their reading accuracy and rate, the report said.

“As year-over-year literacy gains pause, it’s a call to look deeper into the mechanics of student growth and understanding,” said Susan Lambert, chief academic officer at Amplify, in a June 30 statement.

For this analysis, Amplify used data from its mCLASS Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS tests. About 350,000 students across 1,800 schools in 43 states are represented in the data.

In addition to the use of multi-tiered systems of support, Amplify recommends schools support teachers in learning about science of reading approaches, as well as ensure students are receiving evidence-based grade-level instruction.

Educators could predict — as early as kindergarten — whether students will achieve reading and math proficiency by 3rd grade, according to a study released June 25 by research and assessment company NWEA.

Researchers found that reading and math skills upon entering kindergarten strongly foreshadow whether students will reach proficiency three years later. Only 1 in 10 of the lowest performing kindergarteners reached proficiency by 3rd grade, and by the end of 1st grade, those odds dropped to 1 in 50. 

Students' 3rd grade academic performance is considered an indicator for long-term academic and life outcomes. Early identification and intervention "is key as the door to proficiency quickly closes," said the analysis from NWEA, which administers the MAP Growth test. 

Waiting to identify and support off-track students can significantly reduce the likelihood of reaching proficiency by 3rd grade, NWEA reported.

“What our data highlighted is that achievement at Kindergarten entry provides a meaningful signal about later academic outcomes,” said Megan Kuhfeld, director of growth modeling and data analytics at NWEA, in a June 25 statement. 

“But I want to caution that these results should not be interpreted as evidence that students’ academic futures are predetermined. Adjusting trajectories is possible if early intervention is provided,” Kuhfeld said.

While early warning systems assessing students' academic performance are common in the later grades, "it's more complicated" for younger students who are often not tested before 2nd grade and whose development varies widely up until that point, according to the Strategic Data Project at Harvard University's Center for Education Policy Research. 

"The unique growth that happens in early elementary school has raised questions about the appropriateness of standard tests and benchmarks," the SDP wrote in an analysis. "However, because third-grade literacy skills are a critical indicator of student outcomes, districts need to measure progress among students — and intervene as needed — before they reach that milestone." 

However, NWEA said, many states lack systems to identify students who may be off track in both math and reading before 3rd grade, "missing that critical window where trajectories can be addressed for those at risk." 

Third graders who read at grade level were four times more likely to graduate high school by age 19 compared to peers not reading at grade level, according to a 2011 report commissioned by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. On the other hand, 3rd graders who read above grade level are more likely to enroll in college, according to research published in 2010 by Chaplin Hall, a research and implementation nonprofit. 

A 2018 study from the University of Arkansas found that students who don't read proficiently by 3rd grade are unlikely to ever do so.