Pa. has rescinded its ‘culturally relevant’ teaching guidelines after a lawsuit by a conservative group

Pennsylvania has rescinded its cultural competency standards for teachers, after a conservative legal group filed a lawsuit last year that claimed they were issued illegally and violated teachers’ First Amendment rights.

Under a settlement reached Wednesday with several Western Pennsylvania school districts, teachers, and parents who were plaintiffs in the case, the Pennsylvania Department of Education agreed to notify all K-12 schools that they have “no legal obligation to implement or comply” with the “Culturally Relevant and Sustaining Education” guidelines.

Those guidelines had directed teachers to reflect on their own biases, work to remove bias from the education system, and recognize and challenge microaggressions, among other standards.

Instead, the department agreed to issue “Common Ground Framework” guidelines — which appear to mostly incorporate the former version, but include additional sections on understanding student trauma and engaging with technology, under information released Friday.

The department will not require school districts to use the guidelines.

Here’s what to know about the now-rescinded guidelines, the lawsuit, and what happens now:

As part of a standard enacted in 2022 requiring Pennsylvania teachers to be trained in “culturally relevant” education, the Pennsylvania Department of Education issued guidelines with nine competencies it said professional development and educator preparation programs were required to incorporate.

In part, the competencies called on teachers to reflect on their “own cultural lens,” including their connection to different identity groups; design “culturally relevant learning” that would enable students “to identify and question economic, political, and social power structures”; and provide “equitable and differentiated” opportunities to learn, within an environment that challenges “stereotypes and biases about the intelligence, academic ability, and behavior of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and other historically marginalized learners.”

Proponents said the guidelines stemmed from a need to better prepare all teachers to educate a diverse student body, and to better support — and, hopefully, retain ― teachers of color, who have been underrepresented in Pennsylvania’s classrooms.

In April 2023, a group of Western Pennsylvania school districts, teachers, and parents sued the Pennsylvania Department of Education, saying it had imposed the new competencies without following a required rule-making process.

“The public schools, teachers, and parents never had an opportunity to be heard on these issues,” said Thomas W. King III, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. King previously won a lawsuit overturning Pennsylvania’s school mask mandate, also by arguing former Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration had failed to follow its rule-making process.

But the lawsuit challenging the teacher guidelines — which was financed by the conservative Thomas More Society, a Chicago-based group that has defended antiabortion activists — also claimed that the guidelines violated teachers’ First Amendment rights.

“They’re quite radical,” King said, noting that the competencies included standards for particular beliefs, including for teachers to “believe and acknowledge that microaggressions are real.”

“You can’t regulate thought that way,” King said.

Under Pennsylvania’s school code, teacher preparation programs are still required to cover culturally relevant education, as are programs for new teachers entering a school district. And while the state’s guidelines for meeting that requirement are changing, they still include some of the same expectations.

The settlement agreement — made public Wednesday by the plaintiffs — includes a new “Common Ground” framework that will be issued to K-12 schools statewide, with “examples of considerations for professional development.” The examples list different factors that could affect students’ school experiences, including poverty, military families, farming families, homelessness, trauma, and disabilities.

The agreement includes three areas of competencies: cultural awareness; trauma-aware, mental health, and wellness; and technological and virtual engagement. In the settlement agreement, those sections are blank, with each reading “competencies will be inserted/linked here on website.”

A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania education department, Erin James, said Thursday that the department was finalizing the guidelines and would be contacting schools “in the coming days with guidance about the new framework.”

On Friday, the department published the completed guidelines on its website, with “cultural awareness” competencies that largely mirror those previously issued. There is no reference to microaggressions, however; instead, teachers are advised to “recognize comments or actions that subtly and often unconsciously or unintentionally express a prejudiced attitude and take steps to educate oneself about the subtle, unintentional ways in which these may be used to harm and invalidate others.”

James said Friday that the new framework marked “an improvement on previously issued guidance, with an expanded focus on digital literacy, mental health, and trauma — real issues that impact those in all spaces of learning within every Pennsylvania community.”

The Pennsylvania Educator Diversity Consortium, which helped develop the former guidelines, said Thursday that it “remains committed to helping school leaders ensure that every teacher is prepared to do their best for every student, no matter their background,” the group’s codirector, Donna-Marie Cole-Malott, an assistant professor of professional and secondary education at East Stroudsburg University, said in an email.

The settlement agreement does not govern colleges and universities and their teacher preparation programs, King said.

It also doesn’t bar school districts from following the former guidelines. “If there are school boards out there that want to implement regulations like this in their local school districts, that’s up to them,” King said.