Interviews with teachers and principals across the country reveal that educators are changing the way they teach about race in response to the new laws, sometimes in subtle ways.

In New Hampshire, Given said she used to teach students about racial disparities in economics partly by tying relative lack of Black wealth to Jim Crow laws and discriminatory mortgage policies known as redlining. Not anymore.

“We started avoiding modern parallels in order to avoid any question coming up that we were, by including this information, we were somehow suggesting one group is better than the other,” she said.

An hour north, in Hopkinton, N.H., high school English teacher Kate LaClair said she used to talk about the idea of privilege, including White privilege, during a unit on race. This year she plans to avoid any mention of that. She also is not going to have her students take the implicit bias test from Harvard or read articles critiquing it, as she has in the past.