Puerto Rico Report has been watching classroom instruction in the states for more than a decade and we have consistently seen that Puerto Rico is not covered in state or national standards or in most classrooms. Have things improved? Are mainland schools studying Puerto Rico?
State standards
Under the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, the states rather than the federal government will set the standards for education and make decisions about what is studied in local schools.
We tried to find state standards requiring the study of Puerto Rico’s history or geography. We discovered an Arkansas requirement to study American expansionism in 8th grade. It includes Puerto Rico’s annexation under the Treaty of Paris.
A similar standard is included in the Texas Grade 11 curriculum. Puerto Rico is an optional example.
Louisiana doesn’t include Puerto Rico in its standards, but it does discuss the Spanish-American War, along with Puerto Rico, in a related reference document provided in its teaching materials.
In fact, what we found in 2025 was much the same as what we saw in previous years: most states don’t require any study of Puerto Rico, and those that do normally mention only the acquisition of Puerto Rico from Spain following the Spanish-American War.
Hispanic Heritage Month: An Update on Puerto Rico in Stateside Classrooms
History textbooks
A recent study from Johns Hopkins and Unidos US found that coverage of Puerto Rico even in AP U.S. History textbooks was minimal. They analyzed U.S. history textbooks looking for mention not only of Spain’s cession of Puerto Rico to the United States, but also of the Foraker Act, the Jones-Shafroth Act, Operation Bootstrap, and “commonwealth” status. Most were in their red zone of essentially no coverage and none made the green zone.
This squares with our experience. As it happens, school history textbooks are typically kept and used in schools for a decade or even longer, so it is no surprise that this has not improved.
Online resources
The internet is certainly more up to date than either school standards or textbooks, and teachers have a lot of flexibility in their classrooms (depending on their community and school). So maybe the internet has more resources for studying Puerto Rico than we found in the past?
The Library of Congress offers a lesson from 1900, the National Council for Social Studies has one from 1999, and the Census Bureau offers lessons in Spanish to be used in Puerto Rico. Otherwise, the landscape hasn’t changed much since the last time we reported on the subject.
Consequences
Ignorance about Puerto Rico has consequences for U.S. citizens living in Puerto Rico or U.S. citizens from Puerto Rico living in states. That ignorance increases the chances of these citizens being detained, having their licenses or passports rejected as evidence of citizenship, or otherwise facing discrimination. It also interferes with Puerto Rico’s ability to gain a permanent political status, a responsibility that Congress can overlook more easily when most of their constituents don’t realize it’s a problem.
This Hispanic Heritage Month, let’s remember that Puerto Rico, a territory of the United States and a source of one of the largest Hispanic populations in the U.S., still needs recognition in mainland classrooms.
