Yes it does. It explicitly does, by saying anything that is deemed offensive or shameful is out of bounds. They don't create limits, they created a dubious and undefined standard that isn't black and white and can be easily used to take a school to court... something schools don't have money to do... to determine if whatever was taught was out of bounds. It is a form of legalized judicial harassment.
Yup, this is the real issue. It's about going just far enough that it can be used to create trouble for those who aren't actually doing wrong.
What happens when someone feels uncomfortable about being told what white people did even though the teacher doesn't tell them they should be uncomfortable about it?
People should feel uncomfortable about what happened. They just shouldn't be forced to feel guilty for the acts by others, and almost no teacher in the country has done that. Slavery, Trail of Tears, nuclear experiments on humans, our country has done some shady stuff, and we need to learn from that. The South (and Southern wannabes) just have this issue with truth, especially when it isn't convenient for them.
Though part of me wonders how much this has to even do with what is taught in school and rather how much this is about wedging people against each other.
The problem is simply teaching the truth can cause students to be uncomfortable because "my people" did that. I see this as being used to prohibit teaching the uncomfortable bits of history.
When I first really started to understand what Hitler did, it was because I read The Diary of Anne Frank and identified with her because she was a girl just a little older than I was when I read her diary. It made the horror of antisemitism real to me, and the even more horrific concentration camps. I felt horrible because I saw what human beings did to other human beings. When I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I was horrified and more, because once again, I found it horrific what people could do to other people. When I learned about slavery--and mind, you, this was a very mild, watered down 'knowledge-' I felt nauseated, horrified, much more than words can explain to think that some people did this to other people. And worse, in all of these cases because other people cheered it on or merely stood and watched it happen. Around this same time frame, I read the very lurid account of the torture death of a young girl a few years older than myself, who was tortured over a period of some months in a city near where I lived, by the woman who was given her care while the girl's parents had to travel for work. Again, this evil woman recruited others to help her torture this girl and other kids in the neighborhood knew what was going on and no one came to her rescue. Neighbors wondered but did nothing until the girl died.
How reading about these events made me feel is beyond my ability to describe. It still gives me chills to think about any of these. When I was a small child and I heard my grandfather disrespect a black man with a young son for no reason other than he could, it made me feel ashamed, disgusted, sick to my stomach.
I've been proud all my life that my family, as far as I've been able to trace, has never lived below the Mason-Dixon line and so is unlikely to have engaged in slavery. Some fought for the North in the Civil War. Given the level of casual bigotry that surrounded me while I was growing up, it's small enough comfort. Even then, I know that I could be wrong--maybe there were those in my family tree who enslaved other people. If they didn't it was not because they were so enlightened.
I felt and feel all of these things because I am a human being capable of empathy and not too cowardly to face these facts: People do terrible things to other people for profit and for convenience and for political power--and sometimes for very sick entertainment that defies explanation to me.
I am an extremely average human being. I understand parents wanting to protect their own kids from horrific knowledge. But mostly, I think it is the parents who feel uncomfortable, who don't know how to answer difficult questions or how to resolve the fact that Grandpa or Uncle Joe might have been funny, and smart, and hardworking and loved to tell good stories and were great hunters/farmers/mechanics/whatever---but they also were pretty racist.
That's the hard part; Not understanding or accepting that people are sometimes really awful human beings, terrible beyond most people's ken. But that these terrible truths can and do coexist with admirable characteristics: People with intelligence, a sense of duty and caring, talents, ambitions, love for family and friends--also could have some horrible faults and sometimes could also commit terrible atrocities, and more often, failed to stand up for what they knew in their hearts was wrong, or excused horrors as things of the past or justified by some need, as though it was justified to steal someone's life if you needed their labor or their land. Or if it happened long ago.
In order to convince oneself that it was acceptable to slaughter innocents, to rape, steal, murder, kidnap and more, one had to convince oneself that these were justified because you weren't really doing it to real human beings equal to yourself. No, you had to convince yourself that somehow, they were less than human.
Trouble is, it's really hard to eradicate that belief system once it's baked into the laws and customs of the land. How can you justify that Great Grandpa took part in the massacre at Sand Creek and still live with the fact that's how your family came by its homestead? And so on.
It makes people uncomfortable to consider these things. That's why we must consider these things.
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