In an essay in The Washington Post, Sonja Santelises, the courageous chief executive of Baltimore City Public Schools, described a problem commonly overlooked in school districts like hers: a “disjointed” curriculum that’s not simply lacking in rigor, but fails even to “connect [students’] experiences to other people’s histories and the larger world.” More than 80 percent of her district’s pupils are black, but according to Santelises, the world they saw through the lens of their school curriculum was impossibly skewed, even depressingly so. Baltimore’s children were “taught about tragedies of African American history such as slavery and Jim Crow but learned nothing about the Great Migration and very little about the Harlem Renaissance,” she wrote.

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