Last Friday was 9/11/2026. Twenty-five years ago that morning, my daughter and I stood in front of our television. The North Tower was already on fire when we watched the second plane hit the South Tower. We kept standing there, watching men and women, some of them hand in hand, step from the upper-floor windows rather than burn alive, because the stairwells below them had been destroyed and there was no escape.
We heard the thud as their bodies hit the ground.
An estimated 200 people died that way. Then we watched one tower collapse, then the other, killing the people trapped above the crash zones, those who had not yet gotten out from below the impact, and the 403 firefighters, police officers, and Port Authority officers who had run into those buildings to help rescue those still trapped.
That is what happened.
Last Friday I also learned what teachers in Virginia’s largest school district were told to say about it.
Fairfax County Public Schools, which is located a few miles from the Pentagon, gave its teachers a six-page guide titled 25th Anniversary and Commemoration of 9/11. The district’s own academic office wrote it. It told teachers, in a list of do’s and don’ts, not to “associate the 9/11 attacks with Islam or Muslims” and not to “center the extremists or the acts of the extremists.” It told them to “intentionally disrupt the implicit associations between ‘Muslim,’ ‘outsider,’ and ‘terrorist.'” It said that if they hear “Islamophobic rhetoric” from students or colleagues, “it is up to you to disrupt” (Fox News, Sept. 10, 2026; WJLA, Sept. 11, 2026).
It also told them this:
“If teachers or schools choose to commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11, please ensure that the specific guidance on this Atlas site is carefully followed and that only instructional resources on the division’s Atlas site are utilized.”
If they choose. The deadliest attack by a foreign enemy on American soil, a few miles from where the district’s own students go to school, and the district’s guidance opens with the word “If.”
By Fox News’s word count, about half of the document is devoted to creating “safe spaces for Muslim and Middle Eastern students.” About 15 percent describes what to teach about the attacks. The guide mentions first responders once and military families three times. It refers to Islam, Muslim students, anti-Muslim racism, and Islamophobia thirty times.
Compare what that document said with what happened on that day, a quarter century ago.
New York
At 8:46 a.m., the first plane struck the north tower between the 93rd and 99th floors. Everyone above the impact was cut off; all three stairwells were severed. At 9:03, the second plane hit the south tower. People on the upper floors of the north tower, facing fire at their backs and a hundred-story drop ahead, chose to jump. Witnesses on the ground and USA Today reporters who later reconstructed the scene counted people falling roughly every few seconds for most of an hour. The New York medical examiner ruled that every one of those deaths was a homicide.
The South Tower fell at 9:59. The North Tower fell at 10:28. Together, they killed 2,753 people. Of those, roughly 1,100 were never identified from remains; their families received nothing to bury. The Fire Department of New York lost 343 members that morning, the largest loss of life by a fire department in American history. The Port Authority Police lost 37. The NYPD lost 23. Since then, more FDNY members have died of cancers and lung disease contracted at the site than died on the day itself.
The Pentagon
At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon’s west side at more than 500 miles per hour. It killed 125 people inside the building and all 59 passengers and crew aboard the plane, for a total of 184.
Retired Vice Admiral Lou Crenshaw was on the fourth floor on that side of the building. He told Fox News that the whole structure shook and that a fire later destroyed his office.
Army Lt. Col. Marilyn Wills was in the section that was hit; she crawled through smoke and led coworkers out a window. The building burned for more than a day. The Pentagon is in Arlington County, next to Fairfax. Thousands of the district’s students have parents who work there.
Crenshaw’s judgment of the Fairfax guide was that it is “sort of a vanilla way to do things,” designed so that “nobody complains,” and that students will not learn the lesson “if we try to shave the facts to the point where it’s hard to figure out what we’re talking about.”
Shanksville
United Flight 93 left Newark late. By the time the hijackers took it, passengers were calling home from the back of the plane and learning what had already happened in New York and Washington. They understood they were on a missile. They voted, and they charged the cockpit. Todd Beamer, a 32-year-old father of two with a third on the way, ended his phone call with the words “Let’s roll.” The hijackers crashed the plane into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, at 10:03 a.m., about twenty minutes’ flying time from Washington. All 40 passengers and crew died. The 9/11 Commission concluded the plane was headed for the Capitol or the White House.
Those forty people are the reason the attack on Washington stopped at the Pentagon. Their story is one of the few things the Virginia Standards of Learning actually require teachers to cover; the state’s own middle-school standard refers to “the heroic sacrifices of Flight 93 passengers.”
To its credit, the Fairfax guide’s suggested script for high-school students gives them two sentences: they “stood up against terrorism” and “saved the U.S. Capitol Building.”
Its script for elementary students gives them nothing. It reads, in full: “Twenty-five years ago today, there was an attack on the United States. Every year on September 11th, we take time to honor the people we lost and the people who helped.” The material says there was an attack in the passive voice, as if it just spontaneously happened. It provides no reason for the attack.
The guide’s governing directive is that the commemoration should focus on “those whose lives were lost and those who sacrificed to help others – not those who attacked the United States.” The people on Flight 93 sacrificed to stop the men who attacked the United States.
What is missing
Nobody I know of wants a lesson that blames a fourth-grader named Omar for what nineteen men did before he was born. The guide’s stated concern, that Muslim children get bullied on the anniversary, is not invented; studies document it. A teacher who lets that happen in her classroom has failed at her job.
But the guide does more than protect a certain class of children.
It names the attackers and then forbids explaining them. It tells teachers to “make clear that the September 11 attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda, a terrorist extremist organization,” and that al-Qaeda’s “ideology and actions should not be attributed to Islam.” That is the only time the word ideology appears, and the guide never says what the ideology was.
In 1998, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri published a declaration under the name World Islamic Front, titled Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders. It declared the killing of Americans, civilian and military, an individual duty for every Muslim, and it gave three grievances: American troops on the Arabian Peninsula, the sanctions on Iraq, and American support for Israel. Bin Laden’s 2002 letter to the American people added the rest: a country governed by man-made law instead of sharia, and an invitation to convert.
The 9/11 Commission devoted a chapter to this. Nineteen men acted on it and murdered 2,977 people. That is what was commemorated on 9/11/2026, the 25th anniversary of the attack. The guide tells teachers not to “center the extremists or the acts of the extremists,” and to “let students’ questions guide what additional information you share.” Who did it, and why, is left for a child to ask.
Former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares put it this way: it is like teaching Pearl Harbor and leaving out the Japanese Empire (WJLA, Sept. 11, 2026). The guide does name al-Qaeda, so the analogy is not exact. Closer to the mark: it is like naming the Japanese navy in one sentence of a suggested script and forbidding any discussion of why the planes came.
Add to that what the guide leaves out entirely. The 200 who jumped are not even mentioned. The firefighters, police, and medical workers who “arrived at the scene” appear in a single clause, without a number. Flight 93 gets two sentences for teenagers and none for younger children. Instead, half the document is a manual for managing one group of students’ feelings, and the rest is a manual for managing everyone else’s emotional response to a lesson that never quite says what it is about.
Nothing in the guide mentions the attackers’ motives. It says not one word about the anti-Western, anti-Christian, and anti-Jewish convictions of the men who financed, planned, and carried out an attack on people whose only act that morning was traveling on a plane or going to work. What it offers instead is a written protocol for the feelings of one group of students, the group the attackers claimed to be killing for, and a generic trauma tip sheet for everyone else: the children of the firefighters, the military families next door to the Pentagon, the Christian and Jewish students who are told that men who declared a holy war against “Jews and Crusaders” must not be connected to any belief at all.
Why?
Where this comes from
The Fairfax guide did not originate in Fairfax, and it did not begin this year.
It began in August 2021, on the eve of the 20th anniversary, when the Virginia Department of Education‘s Office of Equity and Community Engagement hosted a webinar for teachers titled Teaching 9/11. The presenter was Amaarah DeCuir, who teaches in the School of Education at American University in Washington. From 2008 to 2015, she was principal of Al Fatih Academy, a private Islamic school in Reston, in Fairfax County (International Institute of Islamic Thought, faculty profile).
She told Virginia’s teachers to call the hijackers “extremists” rather than “terrorists,” to avoid any “false assumption of Muslim responsibility for 9/11,” and to treat the anniversary as the most difficult school day of the year for Muslim students. She cited a survey finding that two in five Muslim families report their children were bullied at school and that in one of four cases a teacher or administrator was involved. The state posted the recording on August 27, 2021, with the EdEquityVA logo on every slide (Fox News, Sept. 2021). When the department took it down after the outcry, DeCuir wrote in the American Association of University Professors’ Journal of Academic Freedom that Virginia had engaged in “state-sanctioned censorship.”
Who paid for the material she presented is a matter of record. The resource set she compiled with a graduate student at American University, dated August 25, 2021, is hosted on the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World website, which states that the resources “are made available by a generous grant from the Center for Islam in the Contemporary World.” DeCuir is on the Center’s executive board.
The Center is not what its address suggests. It occupies offices at Shenandoah University‘s campus in Leesburg. It calls itself “CICW at Shenandoah University,” but it is a private foundation, incorporated in Virginia in 2018 and filing with the IRS as such. Its own annual reports say its trustees “raise and contribute funds to the Center,” and its tax filings show contributions supplying 97 to 100 percent of its revenue every year, about $987,000 in 2024.
Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s current prime minister, is its honorary chairman. Its executive director came from the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Herndon. Its founder, the late M. Yaqub Mirza, ran an investment firm in Herndon and sat on Shenandoah University’s board of trustees. At the same time, his foundation signed an affiliation agreement with the university. The foundation’s flagship program is teacher training for Islamic schools. Its 9/11 materials for public schools are the exception.
The Center’s 2024 annual report states that a grant from the Center “made possible” DeCuir’s six-month appointment as an advisor in the Office of the Secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, where her responsibilities included “the development and implementation of the National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia and Anti-Arab Hate,” the Biden administration’s 100-point plan released in December 2024.
A Department of Education transcript from December 11, 2024, has her describing herself, in her own words, as an advisor in the Secretary’s office “on loan from my full-time position at American University.” A private foundation whose stated purpose is countering Islamophobia paid to place its own board member with the federal office charged with creating the national strategy on countering Islamophobia.
Two weeks later, the Fairfax County School Board voted on a resolution honoring the victims of the attacks. One member, Abrar Omeish, voted against it because it did not address what she called “state-sponsored traumas” to Muslims, and she told her colleagues she trusted the district’s equity team would follow up with Dr. DeCuir (Fox News, March 2023). The state pulled the webinar after the backlash. Then, in January 2022, Governor Glenn Youngkin signed Executive Order One and rescinded the entire EdEquityVA program, along with the 9/11 material.
This past April, the legislature reinstated it. House Bill 913, sponsored by Delegate Alfonso Lopez of Arlington, ordered the state superintendent to restore the EdEquityVA website and every resource attached to it. It passed the House of Delegates 62 to 35 on February 17, and the Senate 21 to 19 on March 10, and Governor Abigail Spanberger signed it on April 13 as Chapter 706 of the 2026 Acts of Assembly. It took effect July 1. The Department of Education complied. The restored archive includes a video titled Culturally Responsive 9/11 Teaching Resources.
Eight weeks after the law took effect, Fairfax County’s academic office published its guide to teachers. The document carries the name of an elementary social studies specialist in that office, a publication date of August 27, and an edit on August 31. It repeats DeCuir’s directives: do not center on the extremists, do not build the lesson around an examination of Islam. It cites DeCuir’s statistics and dates the survey to 2021, the year of her webinar, even though the survey itself was published in 2017.
It directs teachers to the Southern Poverty Law Center‘s Speak Up at School Handbook for “concrete strategies” to use with students and colleagues. In short, it is the 2021 state webinar rewritten as a district directive, which is what the statute restoring the 2021 state webinar was intended to produce.
Superintendent Michelle Reid, in a letter to families on the anniversary, wrote that the division’s academic office had provided schools with centrally reviewed materials, that division curriculum staff had reviewed them for historical accuracy and sensitivity, and that the district is now reviewing the materials in light of community feedback. The academic office reports to Chief Academic Officer Sloan Presidio. The guide never went before the school board.
A private foundation paid an academic to write the framing; a state agency broadcast it in 2021; a governor removed it; a legislature restored it by name on a party-line vote; the agency reposted the video; and a district reproduced it in a classroom directive within two months.
This is how Fairfax County Public Schools came to write its curriculum for commemorating the 25th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack in world history, if its teachers choose to commemorate it at all.
But that way of viewing events in American history has a much deeper origin. It also stems from what our colleges of education teach. Daniel Buck of the American Enterprise Institute published a study this month, Pedagogy of the Progressives, reviewing more than 400 assigned readings at eight public graduate schools of education. At one, 90 percent of the readings were critical theory. Across the sample, he found almost no attention to what a teacher actually needs to know, and heavy attention to teaching the teacher to see the classroom as a place to “disrupt” oppressive narratives. The Fairfax guide reads like a graduate seminar paper written by someone who took that instruction to heart.
Illinois is not an idle bystander in this. Since 2021, the state has required every teacher-preparation program to train prospective teachers to “raise consciousness” and to build “student advocacy” into their lessons. A Fairfax-style guide does not need to be imported here. The state has already licensed the people who will write it.
What to do
We need to discover what is being taught in our own schools.
Every school district in Illinois that marked the 25th anniversary sent something to its teachers. Under the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, you have the right to see it. Request the instructional guidance, the source materials it cites, and the name of the office that produced it. If your district has nothing to hide, it will take them five days.
Then read it the way my daughter and I watched as the event unfolded that morning twenty-five years ago. Ask whether a student who finishes the lesson would know that people held hands and jumped, that 343 firefighters walked into a building that was about to fall, that 40 strangers on a plane voted to die so that the Capitol would still be standing, and who did it to them, and why. If the answer is no, go to your school board and read what you found into the record.
Twenty-five years is long enough for memory to become history. It is not long enough for history to become something we are not allowed to say.
