The history of sex education in U.S. schools is marked by countless twists and turns, and no small amount of controversy. Undoubtedly one of the biggest changes came in the early 1980s, when the federal government started pouring money into programs that focused on abstinence, rather than taking...

By the late ’90s, the debate over whether U.S. public schools should provide sex education classes was over: In every region of the country, more than 90% of the public supported sex ed. But the battle over specific content—especially regarding contraception—raged on. In 1998, as the federal...

Amid the growing AIDS crisis in the 1980s, many state and school sex education policies were vague or nonexistent, and not much was known about the content and quality of sex ed. To address this lack of knowledge, the Guttmacher Institute conducted several large-scale surveys to assess how...

In 2000, Perspectives published an evaluation of Project IMPPACT, a sex ed program in New York City that used small groups to help “build communication skills, support healthy adult-child and peer communications, and...