Fund the Teachers Teaching Honest History

California now requires ethnic studies for high school graduation, beginning with the Class of 2030. Seven other states have mandates on the books. Across the country, teachers are being assigned this material with almost no preparation.

When that happens, one of two things follows. The course gets softened into something comfortable that avoids the actual history. Or a teacher tries to teach it honestly, without the historical and legal grounding to stand behind it, and becomes the target of an organized backlash they were never equipped to withstand.

Blackademics exists to close that gap.

What we do

Teach for Liberation is a nine-to-twelve-month engagement for a cohort of K-12 educators inside the same district. It opens with a multi-day intensive, then continues through the school year with monthly virtual coaching, structured peer review, curriculum development support, and coaching visits to participants' classrooms.

Teachers do not leave with a binder. They leave with lesson plans they have built, taught, and revised, and a cohort of colleagues teaching alongside them.

The curriculum is grounded in evidence: four centuries of court cases, legislative history, presidential statements, and public health data. Not opinion. That grounding is what lets a teacher hold the ground in a classroom, or in front of a school board.

Blackademics was founded by Dante D. King, who championed San Francisco's Racial Equity Ordinance 188-19 — the measure that established the city's first Office of Racial Equity — and trained more than 20,000 city employees on implicit bias, systemic racism, and anti-Black institutional practice. He has written three books on this history.

Where the money goes

We run lean: a small staff, no marketing infrastructure, no satellite offices. Your gift funds three things, including the unglamorous governance work that keeps a nonprofit durable.

Teacher training. The Teach for Liberation opening intensive, monthly virtual coaching, two coaching visits per participant per year, and maintaining the curriculum library. Direct support to the K-12 educators inside the work.

Curriculum development. Research time for the curriculum staff, source-material licensing where required, lesson-plan revision cycles between cohorts, and the publication of curriculum artifacts to the curriculum library.

Institutional memory. Long-term operating costs that make the work durable across leadership transitions: legal counsel, board governance, financial audit, succession planning, the IRS 990 cycle, and the documentation discipline that lets a successor pick up where the founder left off.

What specific gifts underwrite

These are not minimums. They are illustrations of what specific amounts do inside the program. Gifts of any amount contribute to the same three categories above.

$50 — Practitioner. Underwrites one reading packet for one Teach for Liberation cohort participant, including primary source material from the Du Bois Atlanta plates and contemporary state ethnic studies standards.

$250 — Architect. Underwrites one cohort participant's peer-review session: the structured-feedback engine that makes the methodology work.

$1,000 — Citizen. Underwrites one coaching visit, virtual or hybrid, by Dante D. King or designated curriculum staff to a practitioner's classroom across the engagement.

$5,000 — Sustainer. Underwrites a named cohort scholarship for one K-12 educator from an under-resourced district. Cohort scholarships are reported in our annual donor letter.

Blackademics is a registered 501(c)(3). Your gift is tax-deductible.

Fund a Teach for Liberation Cohort

A nine-to-twelve-month engagement for cohorts of K-12 educators.

Team Members