Sari Beth Rosenberg was supposed to begin student teaching in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. At 26 years old, she was scheduled to observe a U.S. history class at LaGuardia High School.
She didn’t get the chance. Even before she could report to the classroom, airplanes had struck the World Trade Center. The next year, she became a full-time history teacher at the High School for Environmental Studies. This year marks her 25th educating students there about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath.
Rosenberg’s first few years teaching about the attacks meant remembering an experience she shared with her students. There were school assemblies and moments of silence. But Rosenberg’s lessons gradually shifted from sharing memories to having students interview their parents about their recollections.
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By the 15th anniversary of 9/11, the students in her classes didn’t personally remember 9/11. About 10% of adults today were born after 2001, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. Of those who are between the ages of 18 and 24, 60% first learned about 9/11 in class or through school assignments.
“What’s starting to get different now is the growing share of parents who weren’t around for it either, or weren’t old enough to be aware,” she said. “This whole firsthand memory pipeline [of 9/11] in the household is thinning. That’s why I think it’s more important than ever to learn about it, because there’s so many different threads to unpack — how it relates to the current day and where we are today as a country and a world.”
An Associated Press analysis found that while at least 40 states currently expect or suggest that schools address 9/11 in some way, education standards vary widely in scope and framing. Some don’t specify what to teach.
A 2019 University of Wisconsin-Madison national survey of secondary school teachers found that educators usually spent a short period of time on the topic — often on the anniversary — and that it was common for the narrative to be oversimplified.
States that have revised their standards to expand instruction around 9/11 in the past few years include Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, South Dakota and Utah. A 2024 Alabama law requires fifth graders to track U.S. military conflicts, including those after 9/11, while juniors have to evaluate the country’s response to the terrorist attacks.
In 2022, Arizona lawmakers approved a requirement that every public school devote time to “age-appropriate education” on 9/11 around the anniversary. But the law was revised three years later to limit instruction to grades 7 to 12.
Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, New Hampshire and North Dakota have education standards that suggest the topic for consideration in classrooms. A few states, such as Wyoming, Washington and Vermont, don’t have any requirements at all, and Minnesota doesn’t mention 9/11 in its guidelines, according to the Associated Press analysis.
“Policy helps, and [9/11] being in the standards helps because, to me, the biggest challenge of 9/11 is there’s not a single aspect of the story that isn’t complicated,” said Jennifer Lagasse, education programs director at The National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City. “Where do you start the story? How do you make it age-appropriate? I fully understand why it feels like it might be easier not to talk about it, but if our students aren’t getting their information from us, the question becomes: Where are they getting their information?”
In New York, eighth graders are expected to learn about 9/11’s effects on national security, the Patriot Act, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the war on terror. Sophomores and juniors analyze global security and the government’s reaction to the attacks.
The museum has published 9/11 lesson plans for teachers across the country to use for many years, Lagasse said. Its latest K-12 set is currently online for the 25th anniversary.
“We have reinvested in laying a factual foundation of what happened on 9/11, because students are coming in with no lived knowledge and sometimes less received knowledge,” Lagasse said. “It’s crazy to think that it’s already been 25 years, which is a full generation. But at the same time, that means that 9/11 hasn’t made it into all of the history books or curriculums yet. So the amount of formal education that students are receiving can be very uneven.”
Lagasse said new teachers are also coming into the classroom without personal experience of 9/11, making it harder to educate children about the subject.
Rosenberg said it’s become more difficult to teach about the terrorist attacks because students view it as just another tragedy that happened a long time ago, like Pearl Harbor and President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, rather than an event that occurred in the recent past.
It’s also hard to get to events that happened in 2001 when American history lessons begin in 1492, she said.
“But even if you do, you’re going to have to rush through a lot,” Rosenberg said. “I think that it’s so important that kids understand the past 25 years of history, because 9/11 has — without them even realizing it — shaped their world, from ICE to the wars that we’re engaged in, to Islamophobia and civil liberties issues. The fact that we don’t have a lot of time to talk about that day, let alone recent history, is a big concern.”
In the 2019 University of Wisconsin-Madison report, researcher Jeremy Stoddard found that of the 1,047 surveyed teachers, 50% who taught U.S. history said they provided instruction about Islamophobia or anti-Muslim attitudes. About 86% reported teaching about terrorism and 75% about Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of the terrorist attack.
“Our research suggests a major issue in how the majority of secondary school social studies teachers in the U.S. teach about the events of 9/11 and [the war on terror],” the report said. “There is little historical context or depth in their engagements with students. Further, by continuing to focus on 9/11 as a memorial event and emphasis on heroes and Muslim villains, with the U.S. as victim, teachers have likely reinforced rather than challenged the endemic anti-Muslim sentiment.”
On Friday — the second day of school in New York City — Rosenberg will dedicate a full day of instruction to topics around 9/11. She said she plans on covering issues like foreign policy and the Islamophobia that followed the attack.
“You can hold those truths that it was a tragic, awful day, but also you know it was awful what happened afterward,” she said. “I think that not teaching all of that and just teaching it as a horrific day for America because people died and then moving on doesn’t tell the whole story — especially for kids to understand it and the complexity of history.”