The impetus for the Great Irish Famine Curriculum originated from initiatives that came from both sides of the narrow street in Albany, New York, that separates the chambers of the New York State Legislature from the headquarters of the New York State Education Department. In 1996, the State Education Department began to distribute copies of its new Learning Standards, the performance-based learning criteria designed to improve the quality of education in the State's public schools. A new set of assessments would be designed to ensure that all pupils in grades four, eight and eleven had reached the appropriate standards of competence in each of the middle and secondary school subjects. Because the assessments would be performance based, no curricula were provided for the new standards.

The following year, on the 150th anniversary of the worst year of the Great Irish Famine, Ann Garvey, president of the American Irish Teachers Association, approached Assemblyman Joseph Crowley, a member of the New York State Legislature, to urge that the a study of the Great Irish Famine be a required strand in the State Education Department's Human Rights Curriculum which, at that time, included the Atlantic Slave Trade and the European Holocaust. Crowley introduced the bill and steered it though the legislative process where it had enthusiastic bi-partisan support and was passed after a short debate.