DOWNLOADS: (122)

PLAYS: (1621)

Embed

Oh, Texas. You never fail to reach a new height of strangeness, especially when it comes to your own schools.

On its face, this story appears to look like some librul doofus snuck Commie curriculum into their state-approved materials for online learning. Fox leads off with a big intro from AFP's Texas Director Peggy Venable, and segues into an interview with Texas senator Dan Patrick about horrible, awful, un-American, dirty commie hippie freak progressive lesson plans.

In the clips of testimony shown, one teacher is horrified that students are asked to design a flag for a newly-created socialist state. Damned radical commie lesson, it is! Another teacher testified that being forced to teach the CSCOPE curriculum is like being a surgeon using a dirty scalpel because he has to teach students about socialism. Damn.

The CSCOPE curriculum was created by a consortium of teachers from public and charter schools within the Texas School System known as the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative (TESCCC). It was designed by Texas teachers for Texas teachers to use.

Anyone who paid close attention to the Texas State Board of Education process for adopting new, very conservative curriculum standards in 2010 would know that something seems off about the claims of Americans for Prosperity and others about how terribly awful this curriculum is.

TESCCC has published a statement defending the lessons under fire, which clearly outlines what I recall from those contentious 2010 arguments, where standards about teaching free enterprise systems and capitalism were inserted into their core standards. Here's an excerpt:

CSCOPE strongly believes in the greatness of the free enterprise system and how it has helped build our country into the envy of all other nations. Free markets are a critical part of our American way of life. It is important to note that the activity in question is in a high school course and not in a grade 6 lesson. This twenty-minute activity is part of a six-day lesson on various economic systems at the high school level that are state required teaching standards set forth by the State Board of Education.

Oh, wait! This is an econ class for seniors in high school? This is what the freakout is about?

Continue reading »

DOWNLOADS: (223)

PLAYS: (1227)

Embed

Tucker Carlson is all ablaze with a neon-green tie and red-hot fury over the California Senate's passage of a bill requiring California curriculum to include instruction regarding gays and Muslims. In fact, he's so outraged over it that he calls it "propaganda", with some strange reasoning attached.

The purpose of the bill is to raise awareness of the place gays and Muslims take in history in an effort to raise awareness and hopefully, tolerance. This isn't a bad thing, despite Tucker's worrying over it. After all, it wasn't all that long ago that a 15-year old with access to a gun shot another student at point-blank range just up the street from where I live because the other student was struggling with his sexual identity. This is the state where Harvey Milk was assassinated, after all. Should teachers teach that lesson in California history while failing to mention why Harvey Milk was assassinated? This is the state that just passed the odious Proposition 8 after an even more odious ad campaign. Should teachers simply ignore the reasons why our state constitution now actually defines marriage?

To Fox Talkers, the answer to all of those questions is yes. Led by Tucker Carlson, they want California schoolchildren to learn about the Catholic priests who came and built missions, and about the gold in them thar hills, but gays and Muslims? Strictly off-limits.

And just to pile on a little more, Carlson completely dodges the question of what age group will have this instruction in their curriculum, so of course he makes it sound like all the little kindergartners are going to have a lesson and coloring worksheet on Jane and Judy in the mosque.

Here's Carlson's reasoning behind why he believes it to be propaganda:

Second, it's propaganda. It's lying. Whenever a school system is mandated by law to teach happy news, non-controversial, complimentary facts about a group of people they are by definition excluding the unhappy facts. And they are therefore, lying. That's propaganda.

His reference to "happy news" stems from this:

The measure further would prohibit the adoption of any materials that "reflect adversely" on gays or particular religions. School districts would have flexibility in deciding what to include in the lessons and at what grades students would receive them.

Gretchen Carlson tries to get him to specify the age group to receive this instruction, to which he replies:

Look, it doesn't matter, because at any age teaching propaganda is wrong. No one is suggesting -- and as far as I know has ever suggested -- that people who are gay not be included in history.

While that may be true, it's also true that kids are not informed as to whether they were gay or not. Earlier in his diatribe, Carlson goes on about how Trotsky is a historical figure, but not because he's gay. Perhaps not. But should that be ignored?

The central question here is whether or not we teach all of history or just the parts some people like. It would be nice not to have a law mandating curriculum that teaches these sorts of facts, but they have for too long been buried and swept under the rug. Yes, it does matter, because homosexuality isn't something that just burst onto the scene 3 years ago. It should be taught as a fact and historical figures should not have relevant facts omitted simply because they make the Tucker Carlsons of the world squirm.

Today was the first day of the Texas State Board of Education meeting to approve the modified curriculum standards for Social Studies. (See backstory here and here). Over 200 people have stepped up to testify before the final vote begins. Texas Freedom Network's live blog of the meeting has some interesting tidbits to share.

From LiveBlog 1:

• Former Bush education secretary Rod Paige urges a delay on the vote.

  9:27 – Paige: “We have allowed ideology to drive and define the standards of our curriculum in Texas. It has swung from liberal to conservative.” (We’re waiting for evidence that the Republican-dominated board and then-Gov. Bush’s education commissioner in 1998 adopted “liberal” curriculum standards.) The swing has been too broad, Paige says.

• Texas State Representatives Dan Flynn and Wayne Christian say "Take a vote."
  

  Flynn and Christian are still at the podium answering various questions from board members. They both continue to call on the board to adopt the standards on Friday and “respect the process.” Their argument is that the process so far has been just fine and that the board should finish its work on schedule. But the process hasn’t been fine. The board has essentially jettisoned the work of educators and scholars who spent a year carefully crafting the new standards. The question is whether standards should be based on the work of educators and academic experts or handful of politicians on the state board.

From LiveBlog #2:

• Accusations fly about "religious cleansing" in public schools.

  11:23 – Kelly Shackelford, head of the Liberty Institute/Free Market Foundation, the Texas affiliate of the far-right Focus on the Family, is up. Shackelford argues that the words “separation of church and state” aren’t in the Constitution. Neither, we might say, is “fair trial,” “separation of powers” “checks and balances” and other basic constitutional principles. Shackelford thinks “separation of church” is being used to “abuse” the freedom of students. He wants students to contrast the intent of the Founders (or what he believes was the intent of the Founders) who wrote the Constitution with the phrase “separation of church and state.”

  11:32 – Board member David Bradley calls separation of church and state a “myth.” He notes that the Ten Commandments adorn federal buildings like the Supreme Court.

  11:34 – Shackelford: There are people who want to engage in a “religious cleansing” in this country. He argues that students are being punished for expressing their faith in public schools.

  I ask myself, what do these claims have to do with teaching Social Studies in public schools?

• Promoting American "exceptionalism"
  

  Moore is arguing about the importance of promoting “American exceptionalism.” He claims that university professors earlier this year were testifying before the board in favor of socialism as the preferred “form of government” for America.

  Does it get any more paranoid than this?

Moving on to LiveBlog #3...

An interesting exchange between a University of Texas professor and Cynthia Dunbar, one of the most conservative members of the board:

5:08 – Prof. Julio Noboa, a social studies professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who served on the high school U.S. history curriculum writing team, is up. He’s very critical of the many changes board members made to the standards his team proposed. In fact, the American history standards have been among the most heavily revised by the board among all social studies classes. Prof. Noboa calls many of the changes a “whitewash” of problems and challenges in American history.

5:30 – Board member Cynthia Dunbar is challenging Prof. Noboa’s contention that the United States is a democracy. America has vastly expanded voting rights, making it far more democratic than in the nation’s early decades, Prof. Noboa says. He notes that Dunbar’s contention that the United States is a republic is too narrow — a republic is simply a nation without a hereditary monarchy and doesn’t truly describe what the United States is today.

From the live blogs, it appears that the number of public comments is definitely slowing things down a bit. According to TFN, about 10% of the people who appeared to testify have been heard. However, a good number of people made their voices heard during the lunch break today, when public education supporters held a "Don't White-Out our History" rally in front of the Texas Education Administration building.

I'll bring more as it rolls in....

On May 19th, the Texas Board of Education will meet to approve the final Social Studies curriculum and textbook changes that caused such a stir back in March.

Since that meeting, even more changes have been proposed which, if adopted, promise to rewrite history for Texas schoolchildren to the conservative narrative. Uber-winger Don McLeroy's proposals:

• Undermine the doctrine of separation of church and state. McLeroy wants to substitute an unintelligible standard asking students to "contrast the Founders' intent relative to the wording of the First Amendment's Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause, with the popular term 'Separation of church and state.'"
• Attacking social programs. McLeroy proposes children "discuss alternatives to long-term entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare" as a solution to the current ratio of workers to retirees. This is a particularly odious theme, given that the ratio will be entirely different by the time these children are at the peak of their careers.
• Skew focus toward conservatives. McLeroy's logic:
  

  "This is relevant to assessing the policies of the various ideologies that have shaped where we are as Americans," said McLeroy, who has joined with other members of his board bloc to put a more conservative slant on the social studies standards.

  For example, high school students will have to learn specifically about leading conservative groups from the 1980s and 1990s in U.S. history, but not about identified liberal or minority rights groups.

• Removal of all references to the terms "justice" and "equality".

Continue reading »

The Flying Spaghetti Monster Flies Again

"Intelligent design" cannot be mentioned in biology classes in a Pennsylvania public school district, a federal judge said Tuesday, ruling in one of the biggest courtroom clashes on evolution since the 1925 Scopes trial. Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they ordered that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said. Several members repeatedly lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs, he said...read on"
The Flying Spaghetti Monster flies again!

Update: Arthur dubbs U.S. District Court Judge John E. Jones III the hero of the year.

TMV joins in the discussion.

Inherit the Wind-Part II

Can I get a cheese steak with that?

Eleven parents of students at a Pennsylvania high school are suing over the school district's decision to include "intelligent design" -- an alternative to evolution that involves a God-like creator -- in the curriculum of ninth-grade biology classes...read on

Circus Clowns are everywhere.