Rural History Teachers Choose Education Over Politics

One 2025 study published in the Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy found censorship laws did real and measurable harm to young people and educators. The harm varied “from experienced teachers leaving the field, to students learning an inaccurate or incomplete version of history, to marginalized students experiencing further marginalization and attacks on their identities.”

What about rural students?

Rural schools go beyond education in the classroom. As anyone who’s attended a rural high school football game knows, rural schools are community hubs and places that inspire civic engagement. Rural schools are less socioeconomically segregated than urban schools. Smaller class sizes mean students attending rural schools are more likely to receive individualized support from educators. Unlike their urban or suburban colleagues who might specialize in one or two classes, rural teachers are often tasked with mastering and teaching a variety of content areas.

When it comes to history education, rural schools face unique challenges. The educational resources that social studies educators draw from often give rural people short shrift. Katy Swalwell, 45, co-author of the book Social Studies for a Better World, says this is partially because history textbooks have an “urban-centric bias.” When rural people and places are mentioned in these texts, if at all, it is often with derision or as a stereotyped monolith. After their inclusion in westward expansion, alongside the erasure of Native histories and justification for Native genocide, rural places are often highlighted only as a backdrop.

“If the only time students learn about rurality is during the era of Industrialization, when people are moving from the countryside to cities, that leaves so much out,” says Swalwell. For rural students, this means they learn to see their homes only as places to escape from. It means their neighborhoods are not worth caring for. It teaches them that when it comes to what’s important enough for textbooks, they themselves don’t make the cut.

How we teach and learn about the past shapes how we understand ourselves and the future. “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future,” is how Frederick Douglass put it in 1852. In the United States, since the signing of the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, our history remains contested. With the founding document’s ink long dry but the nation still young, Douglass appealed to these documents for liberties denied in his present.

Decades later, the United Daughters of the Confederacy countered Douglass, justifying oppression by their appeals to particular imagined pasts. Back and forth the debates over history see saw: Carter G. Woodson in the 1920s demanding what would eventually become Black History month. The John Birch Society in the 1960s banning history textbooks. The 1619 Project. The 1776 Commission. Today, the descendants of all of these traditions carry on—Moms for Liberty traveling the deep worn channels of the Daughters of Confederacy, while good public school teachers persist in the refreshing streams of those like Douglass and Woodson. It is in underfunded rural schools where these streams often crash in angry waves.

Despite the strong odds against rural schools, magic still happens in them.

I spoke with rural history teachers in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Ohio and Alabama about the current debate over history education. These educators’ work reveals an incredible resilience; they’re creating potent possibilities amidst considerable constraints.

Dan Stevenson, 48, is in his 19th year of teaching social studies in southeast Iowa’s rural Muscatine County. He has a tattoo on his body and has painted his 8th grade classroom walls with three words, “We the People… .”

Early in the academic year, Stevenson encourages students to look at colonial U.S. history and ask who was and wasn’t included in the Constitution’s preamble. Charismatic, patriotic, and principled, Stevenson has broad community and district support for his work. Yet, he has abandoned some classroom resources that examine direct legacies of historical injustice.

There is much to fear for teachers like Stevenson: running afoul of vague state laws like Iowa’s “divisive concepts” law criminalizing teaching that makes students feel discomfort, getting doxed by far-right media, or accidentally saying “gay” in a state that criminalizes such words. These fears don’t dictate Stevenson’s approach, but they’re something he considers.

The 1980s farm crisis hit Iowa hard. According to the State Historical Society of Iowa, by the end of the decade, one in four Iowa farms were no longer in operation. More rural banks failed in 1985 than in any year since the Great Depression.

Stevenson tells me about a former student who talked about the farmhouse that she lived in with her family. She knew her family had lost a good portion of their farmland before she was born, and later sold many acres more to afford upkeep on their farmhouse. The student was embarrassed about it.

Stevenson asked his student if she had heard about the farm crisis and how hundreds of small farmers were driven off their land by federal economic policies that placed no value on family farms. She hadn’t. The class then explored the causes of the farm crisis. Some students cried when they watched a music video for John Cougar Mellencamp’s “Rain on the Scarecrow,” written in 1985 about the emotional and economic toll of the crisis.

If we don’t understand how the past has formed our present life, we might assume the wrong conclusions about our spot in society. We may believe it is because of our ancestors’ failings, or, conversely, their imagined self-made successes.

Thief River Falls principal rallys his community

In Thief River Falls, a town of 8,749 in northern Minnesota’s Pennington County, 70 miles south of the Canadian border, Josh Watne, 33, currently serves as principal of Franklin Middle School. His district, like many rural districts, serves as a hub for surrounding communities despite receiving a fraction of funding compared to neighboring districts. If not for a recently passed local referendum, his school’s future may have been in jeopardy.

Watne says that during that referendum campaign, there were “a lot of people coming out of the woodwork saying ‘the [public school] system is broken. Quit funding failing systems.’ “ Rhetoric like this catches on because its disseminated through billionaire backed propaganda machines. Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-backed libertarian group, has even initiated lawsuits to prevent communities from funding their schools. More often, well-paid, anti-government consultants spread their message through Facebook, mailers and local news outlets. By the time they leave town, whether or not they prevent school funding, they leave in their wake ruined relationships and a broken trust in local government. But schools are broke, not inherently broken. Now an award-winning educator for the same district that nurtured him, Watne’s story testifies not to schools’ failures, but their success.

“People like me aren’t supposed to end up here with something like this,” Watne said as he accepted a statewide Educator of Excellence award issued in 2025 by the Minnesota Rural Education Association. Watne says that he received free and reduced lunch and was raised by a young, single mother. “Nearly every connection I have today came from the school system,” he says. He then recounts the type of ongoing support that comes only from tight-knit, rural communities and schools.

It was teachers who taught him how to navigate the world, who helped him realize what he was capable of and who mentored him. It was coaches and choir directors who helped him find his voice and strength. Through school connections, it was community leaders who helped him get his first job. The three graduate degrees Watne earned were only possible because of a solid foundation provided by the rural school he once attended and now helps lead. And it was the people tied to this rural school that kept him safe and supported.

“Anytime I’ve fallen, they didn’t let me hit the ground, or at least I didn’t have to fall too far,” Watne said to the crowd attending his award recognition. “This is not only the benefit of public education but a specific advantage of rural education—our connections are deeper and the impact is much stronger, which is a reason people come back to our towns. It’s why I did.”

When adequately funded, rural schools are a boon to their communities and the lifeblood of democracy. Against the ongoing efforts to undermine the “existence of public schools, at least in rural America,” Watne sees a potential safeguard in historical thinking. During the first two failed attempts to pass the local referendum crucial to his school’s survival, Watne recalls the challenge of cutting through online misinformation and a loathsome attitude toward taxes. Civic reasoning, critical thinking, and empathy were all bedrock practices in Watne’s social studies classroom. These were also the key to unlocking public support for their underfunded rural school.

When it came to passing a funding referendum, organizing was needed as a counter-balance to the well-oiled libertarian propaganda machines and the true believers these inspired. Debates sprang up in community meetings, town halls, and Facebook.groups.  Some people were convinced by circular arguments that imagined schools to be doing poorly and therefore saw them as undeserving of the funding that might improve them. Others saw their personal needs as trumping those of the community.

Watne took his role of educator outside the classroom and spoke of the costs if the referendum passed: $11 a month for those with homes worth $100,000. He also spoke of the costs if the referendum failed: the students’ and community’s future. Websites were made, memes shared, and hard conversations were pursued to address the myths promulgated by the propagandists. Eventually, a critical mass of community members, including those identifying as political centrists, came together to support their public schools and pass the referendum.

A few powerful people set state standards

State history standards—and how those standards are shaped by moneyed political organizations—reveal how a few powerful people exercise undue influence over our collective memory and language.

Historian Timothy Messer-Kruse suggests that state history standards are only the most recent venue in a longer conservative, Christian Nationalist campaign to replace “democracy” with “republic,” as a description of the United States in both language and practice. While the country was certainly established as a Democratic Republic, undemocratic forces have long sought to emphasize the word Republic in order to undermine the practice of Democracy. Building on the work of segregationists threatened by an inclusive Democracy, the conspiratorial John Birch Society made billboards and wrote books in the 1950s and ’60s declaring that America is “a Republic… not a democracy. Let’s keep it that way!” This distinction, notes researcher Mike Caulfield, “is largely one created in the 1950s, not the 1780s.”

Alabama’s 2024 state history standards, updated for the first time in 14 years, plainly reveal the effectiveness of this larger project. In Alabama schools, for example, students no longer learn that the United States is a “Constitutional Democracy,” it is instead a “Constitutional Republic.”

But Alabama’s new social studies standards do more than reflect linguistic shifts influenced by far-right interests. Some educators are excited about the new standards.

Jeremy Clabough, 43, grew up in rural eastern Tennessee and taught at middle and high schools there before his current position as Associate Professor of Curriculum Instruction in University of Alabama-Birmingham’s School of Education. In Alabama, Clabough works with rural, urban and suburban teachers in addition to his own research and teaching. Clabough says the new Alabama standards present teachers with an opportunity—in part because they emphasize inquiry and critical thinking, encourage the practice of critical media literacy, allow for the identification of causes, and require analysis of complex texts.

Unlike history standards in some states that emphasize rote memorization, Alabama’s new standards now require students to practice thinking like a social scientist—asking them to evaluate, analyze and synthesize facts and different perspectives and form their own arguments. But Clabough is skeptical whether Alabama schools are adequately prepared for this shift in method—a challenge made harder by rural schools’ lack of adequate funding.

The processes of developing state educational standards vary widely. What these processes have in common is that standards reflect popular prejudices, power relations and social positions as much as they are an objective standard of how to teach history. A 2024 study of an education standards committee in the U.S. northeast found that the process is rife with political influence.

In the late 1990s, presaging Alabama’s recently revised standards, Virginia Republicans attempted to “water down or remove standards related to the Civil Rights Movement,” wrote the study authors. Similarly, in the early 2000s, Missouri politicians removed words like “diversity” from their standards, masking a value-laden process as neutral. Both of these moves supported legislator’s political aims more than codified accurate history.

Part of the reason undemocratic politics are so influential in this arena is because wealthy ideologues literally paid for that influence. Through funding astroturf organizations like Moms for Liberty, bankrolling local school board races, and purchasing influence with lobbyists and the politicians themselves, billionaire backers attempt to bend state standards and schools toward their own personal far-right interests.

History teachers face political pressure

“Students want to make sense of things that adults are talking about,” says Heather Stambaugh. Stambaugh, 39, teaches history in the mostly rural Clark County, Ohio, at the same high school from which she graduated.

When she was her student’s age, history education helped expand her world and sense of self. Today, she says, empowering students in similar ways is what gets her out of bed each morning. Stambaugh says part of her job is to enable them to become empathic world citizens and critical thinkers. “I enjoy getting to see students start to formulate their own opinions, to see what they like, who they want to be and how they want to become that.”

Ohio, Stambaugh’s home state, is not one of the 23 states that has explicitly banned particular topics or history lessons in K-12 schools. But while GOP state legislators failed in their efforts to censor K-12 history curriculum, they have wrested control of schools away from educators and the communities they serve and instead granted oversight to a State Board of Education panel now consisting entirely of political appointees instead of a mix of elected and appointed members.

The 19 members of the current state school board, who have a combined 300(!) years of experience in education, will now be replaced by five people, who will be appointed by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. As college students take to the streets to protest similar new undemocratic moves, including statewide initiatives curtailing academic freedom and shuttering university departments, high school students in Stambaugh’s class practice historical literacy skills, learning to draw their own conclusions and decide what historical traditions they want to continue.

Stambaugh’s students, like so many, were disoriented by the January 6th insurrection, but in history class they found parallels with the disputed election of 1876. Though worlds and generations apart, both elections saw allegations of voter fraud, disputes over whether everyone’s vote was or should be counted, voter intimidation, and threats of violence. In 1876, anti-Black voter suppression affected the vote. In 2021, the counting of Black and progressive voters sparked reactionary violence. Despite the bickering and dishonesty of elected officials, Stambaugh says students saw that common people have always found pathways to work for good.

Stambaugh says that students also found inspiration in the history of local Ohioans involved with the Underground Railroad. On field trips Stambaugh arranged, the kids “started out chasing ghosts, but then really got into the history of it.” Touring the historic home of mill-owner Daniel Hertzler, the docent showed students a room likely used to hide people escaping slavery. Everyday folks like Ohio conductors on the Underground Railroad George and Sarah Gammon, who courageously resisted unjust laws in the service of humanity, certainly offer examples for us today.

Yet, recently in the eyes of conservative politicians, such stories have been twisted into unproductive demagoguery. Failed Ohio bills sought to criminalize teaching about the racism that was the target of Ohio’s abolitionists. While these bills dind’t pass, their ahistorical bent lives on. Community members question teachers like Stambaugh, skeptical of history education because of ginned up political fears. Questions become attacks. Education becomes indoctrination. Patriotism becomes nationalism.

“These parents aren’t mad that we’re teaching history,” Stambaugh says. “They’re mad because their children might not subscribe to their way of thinking.”

One Iowa teacher I spoke with noticed that a strain of far-right partisan identity has become more salient among the high school students he instructs, to the detriment of their own learning. “My first year teaching was 2016 and people came in with MAGA hats,” says Michael, 33, the only social studies teacher at his rural, eastern Iowa high school. (Michael asked to be identified only by his first name.) “Now, it’s stickers on the laptops,” he says, “it’s become a consumer brand as much as a political identity.”

While Michael teaches history in a way that encourages questions and critical thinking, lessons that plant those seeds of critical thinking are less likely to find fertile ground with students whose identities are shaped by partisan talking points. “The more apt the criticism, the more [students] have to reject it to preserve their identity,” he says.

A good history education helps young people become fuller versions of themselves, but only if society allows teachers to engage in open and honest dialogue.

The day after the January 6 attack on the Capitol in 2021, Michael talked with his students about Trump’s allegations of voter fraud, the limited evidence supporting those claims and the affront to democratic norms. The next day he was called to the principal’s office. Parents had raised concerns about what Michael had said about “all Republicans.” He hadn’t, and offered to show his principal a transcript of everything he had shared with students. Thankfully, Michael’s principal was supportive.

The pressures Michael navigates play out differently in other rural schools.

Jay Bickford, 49, taught in rural Iowa middle and high schools before his current role as professor of education at Eastern Illinois University, where he works with rural teachers across the U.S. Compared to when he first entered education 25 years ago, Bickford notes many more teachers today feel unsupported by their communities and districts. This lack of support sometimes results in teachers flattening their curriculum or approach, and sometimes it results in their leaving the classroom.

One 4th grade teacher he worked with in Alabama discarded a lesson on local history because it touched on local racism. He’s seen other teachers, wanting to avoid conservative complaints, leave the classroom. One became an athletic director, another a building administrator.

Those teachers who remain, like Stambaugh in her Ohio social studies classroom, are not free from the chilling effects of history censorship. Stambaugh says she was asked at a birthday party recently whether she’s teaching the “right history.” For the first time in 16 years, she has begun using a textbook in order to stave off these types of complaints. And during her work writing professional learning standards she and her colleagues keep a thesaurus handy so they might avoid using words that trigger state censors.

Teaching is exhausting  “sometimes in the scariest way”

Stambaugh describes teaching as exhausting, “sometimes in the best way and sometimes in the scariest way.” She says:

It’s heartbreaking to have that lie of indoctrination perpetuated. We’re not the ones in that business. There is a whole business of indoctrinating but it’s not in schools. It’s on phones. We just want to love them, and teach them, and enable them to live wonderful lives.

A middle school teacher in rural Iowa echoed Stambaugh’s concerns and hopes. Jayme Kallaus, 40, also teaches in the same district, Highland Community Schools, from which she graduated high school. Her family has lived in the area for three generations and it was important to Kallaus to return home to pass on the gift she received through her schooling.

Now in her 19th year teaching social studies, Kallaus relishes the informal and relationship-dependent conversations afforded those teaching in rural communities. She recalls students who were eager to talk about partisan politics. She asked them questions, not as a rebuttal, but to encourage their own thinking. The students were surprised to talk to an adult who didn’t want to tell them what opinions are best but invited them to think more about their own.

Still, she isn’t free from the pressures facing teachers across the country. “

I hate the word indoctrination. It feels like as an educator you lose your sense of identity because you try to give multiple perspectives and you’re worried about what you say being taken completely out of context. I don’t know that it’s necessarily fear but it’s something that takes up half your brain space. Half of it is planning and half is thinking, contingency-wise, that if somebody pushes back on this, ‘how am I going to defend it?’

Like every educator I spoke with, Kallaus takes pains to present history in all its complexity, encouraging students to develop their own informed stances through critical thinking.

That is a big task teaching in states like Iowa, which in 2021 outlawed lessons highlighting systemic racism or sexism (topics deemed “divisive concepts”). Still, Kallaus, like any good educator, recognizes that depriving students of opportunities to think about systems of injustice deprives them of realizing their full potential—and in turn our full potential as a society.

Kallaus hopes her students “are able to make decisions based on being informed and what they feel is right for them and others around them.” History helps them see how interconnected we all are, and how pressure in one area or against one group might be intimately tied to others.

She tells her students, “You can always have your own likes and dislikes, but think things through. What are people doing that you like? What are people doing that you don’t like? And where can you leverage your power to make things better?”

One recently retired teacher I spoke with, Steve Peterson, 65, spent 24 years teaching elementary school in rural Iowa. In the 1990s, right before Peterson entered the classroom, Klan members marched in Dubuque, Iowa. Citizens organized to resist the group, hosting their own march and events. Hundreds showed up to counter the handful of Klan members.

The community also sponsored a remediation program to reckon with its racism. Peterson was part of that community education program, working closely with classroom teachers. Entering education seemed a way he could continue to encourage students to act more like those who marched against racism instead of those who marched for it.

He remembers exploring with his students histories of the 1960s, when so many white people angrily protested integrating swimming pools. His elementary students wanted to know why. He says, the easy, and incomplete answer, would have been to individualize this, to write off those hateful actors as bad people and irredeemable racists. Instead, in language accessible for elementary students, Peterson walked through how systems socialize people into enacting white supremacy. This gave students the power to follow the models of those courageous people who worked against the systemic oppression of Jim Crow.

“We’re going to encounter these types of things too,” Peterson remembers telling students. It won’t be the same as it was 60 years ago, but there will be times when people “do something that seems totally abnormal to us. And so what’s the right thing to do in that situation?” Reflecting on this lesson and the current pressures around history education, Peterson says, “We do students a disservice if we make racism, sexism, etc. into a personal thing about bad people rather than showing them there’s a system in place.”

Peterson worries that pressures against accurate history education are evolving—the boogeyman of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) now replacing CRT (critical race theory)—but he finds hope in the fact that history itself offers us models of resistance.

Thief River Falls community comes together

In Thief River Falls, Minnesota, where principal Josh Watne is paying back his community for the gift public schools gave him, there are signs of a new way forward. Aside from a blip during the pandemic around the manufactured CRT scare, there has been little community pressure around how history is taught. Watne outlines three factors behind this:

• The district has established procedures and transparency inviting community input on curriculum in a way that balances input with standards, best practices, and professional judgements of educators.
• The community has seen the demonstrable benefits of engaging in critical histories and diverse perspectives.
• The district’s administration and board is direct with the community about the needs of its children and how these might be met.

It also helps that Minnesota offers robust support for teachers and schools relative to states with Republican-dominant legislatures. In fact, conservative community members have seen firsthand the benefits that come from engaging in social issues around diversity and history. The school district’s students, through programs with the high school choir that address social justice and history, have been able to share the stage with renowned artists and scholars and have performed at Lincoln Center and on Broadway.

Outside of the choir, parents see how lessons like those from the Zinn Education Project prepared by Watne inspire empathy building, critical thinking and historical literacy skills. These practices spill beyond the classroom walls and parents see the value of history education. “Some of the [negative] stuff you hear about we don’t have,” says Watne. “People making those kinds of waves don’t get very far.” The benefits of robust public schools speak for themselves.

Greg WickenkampMore by this author →

Pushed out of his role as a public school teacher in Fairfield, Iowa, for his refusal to whitewash history, Greg Wickenkamp is an educator, organizer, and proud member of UE Local 896 and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement. A Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Iowa, he studies state repression of social movements and works in an after-school program.