Tuesday, September 16, 2025
Chair Lewis, Chair Gordon, and Members of the Joint Committee on Education:
My name is Jonathan Cohn, and I am the Policy Director of Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide grassroots advocacy group committed to fighting for an equitable, just, democratic, and sustainable Commonwealth.
We urge you to give a favorable report to S.371/H.655: An Act to promote comprehensive and inclusive curriculum in schools and S.340/H.656: An Act relative to healthy youth.
In recent years, we have seen an attack from organized conservative forces on the teaching of US history, fueled by a desire to whitewash history and erase the contributions of women, people of color, and LGBTQ communities. The Trump administration has been doubling down on this with a multi-front attack on public education and civil rights with the Orwellian term of “patriotic education.”
Students benefit from learning the entirety of history, not sanitized versions of it, and they benefit from seeing themselves represented in the materials taught in the classroom. We should be ensuring that students receive an inclusive, comprehensive, anti-racist curriculum that will set them up for success.
S.371/H.655 would require that the state’s academic standards include the achievements, contributions, and other works in the humanities, science, math, literature, arts, and other disciplines by people from underrepresented groups; and the accurate heritage, customs, and identities of underrepresented groups, including the histories of slavery, colonial settlement, land appropriation, territorial expansion, tribal reservations, and present-day effects of such pasts. All our students benefit from such a fuller understanding of history and culture.
S.340/H.656 (“The Healthy Youth Act”) would expand the reach and positive impact of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Comprehensive Health and Physical Education Framework, which includes updated standards for sex education and was unanimously approved by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in 2023. This new Framework is a significant step forward, but the Healthy Youth Act is still needed to ensure that the sex education students receive in school is medically accurate, age appropriate, and LGBTQ-inclusive. It is disappointing and shocking that MA is behind many other states in this regard. We should be leading, not playing catch up, when it comes to basic education.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Cohn
Policy Director
Progressive Massachusetts
