A new report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project points to the widespread failure to accurately teach the hard, and nuanced, history of American slavery and enslaved people. Collectively, the report finds that slavery is mistaught, mischaracterized, sanitized, and sentimentalized—leaving students poorly educated, and contemporary issues of race and racism misunderstood.

Among 12th-graders, only 8 percent could identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War. Fewer than one-third correctly named the 13th Amendment as the formal end of U.S. slavery. And fewer than half identified the “Middle Passage” as the transport of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to North America.

In what it describes as the first analysis of its kind, Teaching Tolerance conducted online surveys of 1,000 American high-school seniors and more than 1,700 social-studies teachers across the country. The group also reviewed 10 commonly used U.S.-history textbooks, and examined 15 sets of state standards to assess what students know, what educators teach, what publishers include, and what standards require vis-à-vis slavery.

Only slightly more than half (52 percent) of teachers teach their students about slavery’s legal roots in the nation’s founding documents, while just 53 percent emphasize the extent of slavery outside of the antebellum South. And 54 percent teach the continuing legacy of slavery in today’s society.

Read the full article on slavery by Melinda D. Anderson at The Atlantic