Do Holocaust education mandates work?

States hope to achieve ambitious goals like preventing future genocides and reducing antisemitism by requiring that students learn about the Holocaust.

State education mandates have been around for decades, and complaints about them have been around just as long. In 1999, Thomas F. Kelly wrote an impassioned plea in Phi Delta Kappan entitled, “Why State Mandates Don’t Work.” Kelly argued that mandates do “incalculable” damage to teachers and schools and that “most educators are forced by fear of state wrath into compliance with activities that they know are futile” (p. 546).

One state-level mandate that arose around the time of his writing was the requirement that public schools teach students about the Holocaust. Early adopters like New York and New Jersey made some form of Holocaust education compulsory beginning in the early 1990s. In recent years, the number of states with similar legislation has increased dramatically. Depending on how you calculate it, 26 or 27 states currently require some form of Holocaust curriculum in K-12 schools, with the majority of these mandates having been enacted after 2018 (Freedman, 2022; Stillman, 2022; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, n.d.). Altogether, well over 75% of K-12 students live in states with a Holocaust education mandate (Freedman, 2022). That percentage may increase as three additional states consider pending legislation.

At the federal level, Congress enacted the Never Again Education Act in 2020 to expand the curricular offerings of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a reauthorization of that act is currently making its way through Congress. These state and federal initiatives point to a clear emphasis on formalizing the teaching of the Holocaust in K-12 settings.

States often pair legislative mandates with requirements to teach the Holocaust alongside other historical and contemporary genocides. The stated goals of the mandates include:

Increasing Holocaust content knowledge.
Fighting antisemitism.
Improving students’ levels of civic engagement and human empathy.
Preventing future genocides.

These calls for increasing Holocaust education have taken on greater urgency after the events of Oct. 7, 2023. Pundits and policy makers are seeking to combat rising antisemitism in the U.S. through public education. For instance, in
a press release that accompanied the proposed bipartisan reauthorization of the Never Again Education Act, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio stated, “In the wake of the October 7th attack by Hamas, echoes of Holocaust denial are a stark reminder of the persistence of antisemitism. Now more than ever, it is important to develop resources to fight against antisemitism” (Rosen, 2023).

Yossi Klein Halevi (2024), writing in The Times of Israel, took the argument one step further, contending that the narrative about Israel espoused by anti-Zionist protesters in the U.S. “marks a historic failure of Holocaust education in the West.”

As parties on all sides of this conflict invoke themes of oppression and genocide to further their cause, calls for Holocaust education focus on the need to combat bigotry and increase tolerance. It’s too early to see how the Israel-Palestine conflict will affect the teaching of the Holocaust and other genocides in the U.S., but we are seeing greater urgency and pressure regarding these subjects in response to domestic and international events.

Questions about effectiveness

Given the widespread adoption of Holocaust curriculum mandates across the U.S., it’s reasonable to ask if such laws are effective. When states pass laws mandating the teaching of the Holocaust in schools, do students become more tolerant and less antisemitic? Do they demonstrate more empathy, more willingness to intervene in injustice, and more commitment to preventing future genocides? Or, as Kelly (1999) warned, do mandates merely breed resentment among teachers who feel coerced?

While these questions may sound reductive or cynical, the impact of legislative mandates is an open question among Holocaust educators (Freedman, 2022). Likewise, states have begun to question the effectiveness of their policies. Arizona’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne recently asked all school district superintendents to report on how they are implementing the state’s mandate, including their choice of curriculum on the Holocaust and other genocides (Miller & Wong, 2024). New York’s state legislators passed a bill requiring that its education commissioner survey all public school districts to obtain evidence of compliance with Holocaust curricular requirements (Tress, 2022). These calls for accountability could indicate that elected officials are not seeing the results they want from their Holocaust education mandates.

Questions about the effectiveness of curriculum mandates go beyond the teaching of the Holocaust. California, for instance, recently mandated that, starting with its graduating class of 2030, all students in its public high schools will have taken an ethnic studies course (Tagami, 2023). This mandate similarly raises questions about what is reasonable to expect when it comes to a specific curriculum’s ability to give students the skills and capacity to recognize and disrupt moments of individual or systemic violence.

There is limited research that could provide some clarity on questions about the effectiveness of Holocaust education mandates. I would be remiss, however, if I did not acknowledge the significant caveat to this line of inquiry: Putting aside the question of if these mandates are effective, is it reasonable to expect them to be? Have we placed too much of a burden on the teaching of a single moment in global history and, for that matter, placed that burden too directly on history and English language arts teachers (Rich, 2022)?

Regardless of these questions of should, policy makers do continue to expend significant political and financial capital on such curricula and curricular mandates. It is important to take a critical look at the support for these efforts.

Reviewing the (limited) research

Are Holocaust education mandates effective? The answer to this question is: We don’t know. Scant attention has been paid to evaluating the effectiveness of Holocaust curricular mandates. The kind of research needed to make any direct claims about the effectiveness of these mandates — a longitudinal, randomized control trial to assess the impact on students, for example — does not exist, to my knowledge.

The field has produced several investigations into how individual states came to pass Holocaust education mandates (Klein, 2023; Mathewson, 2015; Tall, 2019). There are reports on the national landscape of Holocaust education mandates (Stillman, 2022; Weeden, 2005) and at least one thoughtful critique of the mandates themselves (Yonas & VanHover, 2024). When Samuel Totten and Karen L. Riley (2005) reviewed state-mandated Holocaust curricula, they found the lessons they analyzed suffered in quality when framed as “a cure-all drug or prevention aid” (p. 128).

Gaps in knowledge

Despite the lack of direct assessment of Holocaust education curricular mandates, we can make some inferences based on available research. In one study, Jennifer Rich (2019) surveyed 120 undergraduate teacher candidates at a New Jersey public university about their Holocaust content knowledge. New Jersey boasts one of the nation’s first and best-supported Holocaust education mandates. The premise of the study was that students educated in public schools entirely under a Holocaust education mandate should demonstrate evidence of robust content knowledge. Unfortunately, Rich found that participants “lacked basic knowledge” and “displayed gross inaccuracies” about the Holocaust (p. 57). Participants demonstrated significant content gaps. For example, 23% of respondents were unable to name a single group victimized by the Nazis.

Rich’s findings parallel a widely cited 2020 survey of 1,000 millennial and Gen Z adults from all 50 states conducted by the Claims Conference. That survey found widespread misinformation, or lack of information, about the Holocaust, including:

The inability to name a single concentration camp (48% of respondents).
The belief that 2 million or fewer Jews were killed during the Holocaust (36% of respondents).
The presumption that the Jews themselves caused the Holocaust (20% of respondents).

A 2020 Pew survey similarly demonstrated that, while U.S. teens could identify roughly when the Holocaust took place, far fewer correctly identified how many Jews were killed (38%) or knew that Hitler had been democratically elected (33%). These trends parallel what Stuart Foster and fellow researchers (2016) found in their expansive study of Holocaust education in the UK: Curriculum mandates lead to increased student exposure to the Holocaust but nonetheless left significant gaps in students’ historical knowledge.

Association with mandates

While these surveys did not consider Holocaust education mandates, we can make some rudimentary associations based on their findings. The Claims Conference (2020) survey created a Holocaust Knowledge Score for each state, a blunt combination of average scores on three test items:

Have “definitively heard about the Holocaust.”
Can name a concentration camp, death camp, or ghetto.
Can identify the correct number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Some of the states with the lowest scores, including New York and Florida, were early adopters of Holocaust education legislation. Conversely, several states that scored highest on Holocaust knowledge, including Montana and Kansas, have no Holocaust education curriculum mandates.

We of course cannot draw conclusive, causal relationships from these trends — for instance, not all respondents were educated in the states in which they live as adults. However, some of these associations call into question the long-term effectiveness of Holocaust education mandates.

Without parallel comparison data from before the implementation of a Holocaust education mandate, we cannot make definite claims about their effectiveness. However, research shows that students continue to demonstrate a broad lack of Holocaust knowledge, despite living in a state with such a mandate.

Effects of Holocaust education

While we have little data to confirm the effectiveness of Holocaust education curriculum mandates, it is worth asking if Holocaust education — mandated or otherwise — can reasonably achieve its goals. More research exists on this question, the results of which are more hopeful, but not conclusive.

A recent survey contracted by several significant organizations dedicated to Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism assessed the effectiveness of teaching a unit on contemporary antisemitism and its historical roots. It found that students who participated in the lessons made significant gains in their Holocaust history knowledge, their recognition of contemporary antisemitism, their commitment to combating antisemitism, and their understanding of how antisemitism is interrelated with other forms of prejudice (Echoes and Reflections, 2024). The findings parallel those of a 2020 Pew poll that found that factors like educational attainment, visiting a Holocaust museum, and knowing a Jewish person are all linked to increased Holocaust knowledge. This knowledge also is associated with “warmer” feelings toward Jews generally.

With respect to other purposes of Holocaust education, Daniel Bowen and Brian Kisida (2020) found that “civic-
oriented lessons about the Holocaust” lead to increases in students’ interest in protecting civil liberties, as well as in students’ overall historical content knowledge. However, their study also showed a decrease in students’ religious tolerance.

Reporting somewhat different trends, Matthew Lee and Molly Beck’s (2021) randomized trial of students found that students who attended a Holocaust education conference demonstrated greater increases in “upstander efficacy,” or the willingness to intervene on behalf of others, than students who did not attend. However, they did not find significant differences between the two groups in measures of historical knowledge or other elements of civic engagement.

Paula Cowan and Henry Maitles’ (2007) short-term longitudinal study of Holocaust education in Scotland found that students mostly maintained their gains in content knowledge and “tolerance and sympathy toward minorities” one year later (though these students held “worrying” levels of hostility toward the English; p. 128). Dennis Barr and colleagues’ (2015) randomized control trial found that students who received the popular Facing History and Ourselves curriculum about the Holocaust and other genocides made statistically significant gains in historical thinking skills, “civic efficacy,” and tolerance for the rights of people with very different views. Others have found success in using such curricula to communicate important moral lessons but potentially at the expense of historical understanding (Schweber, 2006).

Overall, studies of the effectiveness of Holocaust education show hopeful, if uneven, results. However, limitations in the scale and methodology of the existing research curb the field’s capacity to draw conclusions about impact (Hale, 2020; Levy & Sheppard, 2018; Pistone et al., 2024).

The problem with mandates

Ultimately, we have insufficient research to make any conclusive claims about the effectiveness of state Holocaust education mandates. We do see, however, widespread lack of content knowledge, even among students educated under such mandates. More hopefully, intentional instruction about the Holocaust — particularly visits to dedicated museums and interactions with survivors — appears to provide some positive effects on students’ content knowledge, empathy, and concerns about antisemitism.

How could Holocaust education, generally, yield some positive results while mandating the study of the Holocaust may not? While we cannot speak to that trend directly without new data, we can theorize about what factors may limit the effectiveness of mandates.

Teacher refusal

First, teachers may simply decline to implement their state’s mandate. There are many reasons an educator might not follow a curriculum mandate, including lack of awareness, lack of preparedness to teach the subject, lack of clarity on where the content fits in the curriculum, or a lack of accountability.

For example, there is evidence that Holocaust education mandates do not always lead to changes in state curriculum standards, which teachers cite as a major driver of their decision making (Girard et al, 2021; Yonas & van Hover, 2024). Further, these mandates are often unfunded and do not include resources for materials and professional development (Stillman, 2022). Passing laws requiring the teaching of a particular subject does not necessarily mean such teaching occurs.

Short-lived results

A second explanation could be that the effects of Holocaust education are short-lived. None of the studies I’ve cited in support of the effectiveness of teaching the Holocaust demonstrated that those effects lasted over many years or decades. Holocaust mandates could lead to meaningful teaching and learning about the subject, but students could lose their content knowledge as time passes. Others have suggested that students could experience “Holocaust fatigue.” Saturation of the subject in K-12 curricula and in popular culture may reduce the shock value and limit students’ ability to see its seriousness (Schweber, 2006).

Issues of quality

As Sara Brown (2024) cautions, the national increase in curriculum mandates, university courses, and research centers on Holocaust education may answer a question about educational quantity but tells us very little about the arguably more important issue of the quality of that education. In some cases, teachers may have placed too much emphasis on learning from the Holocaust and insufficient time on learning about the events themselves (Foster et al., 2016). Removing the history and context of the events, some argue, leads to a learn-from approach that focuses on applying moral lessons to contemporary events and personal interactions, In contrast, a learn-about approach places greater weight on understanding the social and political conditions that allowed the Holocaust to occur (Rich, 2022; Smith, 2023).

Educators’ own Holocaust-related content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge may also limit their effectiveness in enacting these curriculum mandates (Barr et al., 2015; Rich, 2023). It is worth noting that many of the studies that have shown effective Holocaust education took place outside of school contexts. Visiting Holocaust museums or memorial sites and/or interacting with survivors may not represent typical modes of classroom instruction on the Holocaust, which rely more on teachers’ own (possibly limited) content knowledge.

The moral and civic burden of the Holocaust

Yair Rosenberg (2022) argued in The Atlantic that Holocaust education in the U.S. can be viewed as a success when compared with how little U.S. adults seem to know about other subjects, such as the workings of the federal government. Be that as it may, few, if any, curricular elements carry the same moral and civic burden as the Holocaust, and few aspects of curriculum exist within such a maelstrom of competing ideologies.

As such, I would echo Sara A. Levy and Maia Sheppard (2018) who note that the limited empirical basis linking Holocaust education and improvement in students’ ethical, moral, and civic dispositions does not mean these efforts should be abandoned. Instead, “the fragility and uncertainty of learning in the classroom about and from systemic violence must be acknowledged and supported” (p. 382).

To that end, we must pay much greater attention to how to make such curriculum mandates effective, including determining what supports, trainings, and accountability measures will help educators effectively fulfill the reach and responsibility of Holocaust education.

References

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This article appears in the December 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 106, No. 4, p. 42-47.