As stories like my previous post and this one keep coming out, one has to be thinking: What the heck is the School Board members thinking? Where is their oversight over what is being taught?
Related: “Here’s How Your Children Are Getting Indoctrinated by Leftist Ideology.”
I really do believe, unless someone tells me otherwise, that School Board members are concerned with budgets, with policies, with personnel, and a bit when new curriculum are asked for by “the professionals”. As I’ve written about before, not even “the professionals” even know what’s inside new curriculum and my personal history is that they certainly have no clue as to how to actually test curriculum to see if it is a “fad” or serious – no metrics are set for baselines and then to measure the deltas between the current. Superintendent Kirk Beitler “KNEW” that the new 5th grade math curriculum would have higher graduation rates in 7 years. The curriculum director at the time is now the Laconia school district Superintendent. Talk about failing upward
This is the rigor our educational system possesses. And they have your children. So, here we go again – and the title tells you pretty much what is going on!
Fourth Grade Teacher Details How Schools Push Ban History And Leftist Agendas
‘The parents don’t even know what’s going on because it’s all at school,’ says a fourth grade teacher in an interview. ‘The parents question very little and they just assume the teacher knows what they’re doing.’
Indeed, the teacher(s) know EXACTLY what they are doing – and are counting on the fact that most parents, having outsourced their responsibility for their kids to complete strangers, figuratively walk away until it is too late. Boy oh boy, are the Grandson’s teachers in for a surprise! But I digress (with that certain look in my eye) (reformatted, emphasis mine):
A world without textbooks or homework and where getting the wrong answer is celebrated may sound like an elementary student’s dream, but if such a fantasy becomes a reality, it would damage a generation of young minds. That is, however, exactly what is happening in many public elementary schools. Recently, I spoke with a fourth-grade teacher from the midwest, who shared her experience witnessing the shifting of curriculum from history and science towards overt political indoctrination, all to the detriment of students’ learning. To protect this person’s privacy, she will remain nameless.
In supervising fourth grade, she teaches a little bit of everything: math, reading, language arts, social studies, and science. Recently, her school district, like many others, switched to an “integrated curriculum.” On paper, an integrated curriculum sounds like a fair idea. Students learn subjects by exploring their intersections to deepen understanding. In practice, however, the curriculum all but eradicates history while working to push politics on impressionable children.
And we should be surprised by this. Again, it is the New Left that infiltrated the educational system (Italian socialist theorist Antonia Gramsci smiles) – with them, it is ALL about politics. After all, from Michelle Obama: it is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives. There, she said it out loud.
As the teacher reports, “It says ‘integrated curriculum,’ and some of its science, and some of its social studies but it really isn’t. It’s more of a push for the progressive movement.” Indeed, it’s a movement that has fundamentally altered her curriculum. As the school district’s new curricula are online, outsiders have the ability to dictate curriculum to teachers. The result? This teacher’s science and history classes were gutted.
History Deemed Expendable
In history classes, she taught things like U.S. government, the explorers, and the Civil War from a nuanced perspective that is still accessible to her young students. She told me:I used to do a whole unit an Abraham Lincoln, and for some reason, it’s just all of that is gone, based on an integrated curriculum. When you look at our curriculum, they’ve removed everything that was in the textbook. They say, ‘Don’t use the textbook, and you don’t need to teach that anymore.’
The kids are missing out on learning why there was a civil war in the first place. They don’t learn the true meaning of slavery and how it got resolved because it’s just disappeared from the curriculum. The only thing I can teach in social studies was a little bit of government. There wasn’t anything anymore about the Civil War; that was completely gone. I felt bad about that.
I spoke to a friend, who’s a fifth-grade teacher, and her Revolutionary War unit was gone. She used to do a great job on the colonists of America.
If the purpose of education is to mold informed Citizens, able to think for themselves and analyze new data bits from current events against a solid knowledgebase of History, American political philosophy, we’re doomed. And we are seeing that today – who really knows the underpinnings of what Black Lives Matter is other than a cutesy marketing phrase
Science Replaced With Propaganda
Before the integrated curriculum began, this teacher engaged her students in an array of scientific studies. In the new curriculum, however:My last unit of teaching was just a long unit on petroleum and how bad it was. It would talk about oil spills. We’d have an experiment that kids have to mix tempera paint and oil to simulate an oil spill, so when that happened, the kids would see how awful it was on plants and animals.
In reality, these are few and far between, where we have oil spills and causing great damage. But they take something that was awful that happened back in history, we’ll take that and say, ‘This is why no one should never use oil or gas.’
They’re trying to tell the kids that you are bad if you think that you should drive a car or a school bus without it being with renewable energy. I’m teaching renewable energy in the 4th grade and feeling that is there should be a debate on it, and it should be taught both ways.
Instead, it’s video after video after video how we killed animals, how it’s bad for the environment. It’s one-sided education instead of the time for debate. That is what it’s really changed in the elementary school year. It’s a one-sided script.
I’m sorry/horrified that the Left has taken over almost completely. I realize that most School Boards have either gone Left, made up of members who are Left innately, don’t realize that it is within their Powers AND responsibilities to know what is being taught under their noses, or all of the above. I have to wonder how many School Boards in NH actually KNOW what is being taught in their classes – academic topics taught straight up or “integrated” with Social Justice Warrior / Eco-Socialism from the get go?
And given that many school systems are doing away with textbooks (switching to Chromebooks has been going on for a while and the WuFlu lockdowns have only pushed shoved that along faster, how can parents really get the idea of what is being taught IN CLASS in ad hoc ways? I know that if I knew about this, you all know EXACTLY what I’d be doing…but would most parents? And for those that would, how many are too intimidated?
Science class under this curriculum mandate is not science, but political propaganda. Students have lost out on foundational skills that would benefit them greatly in middle and high school. They don’t give you the base level of what these little students need, and so these younger kids are not experiencing what the past children learn, which was things like: how does the machine work?
Baseline knowledgebases need not apply.
They’re not looking at the different levels of electricity. They’re not looking at anything about the water cycle. It’s all in the electronics area or it’s always on the Internet. Nothing is about reading a book and learning about following directions anymore. It goes backward.
Science is taught in a very progressive manner. No longer the kids ever going to see a textbook in schools. It’s called ’21st-century learning’ so therefore without a textbook now. I go to the Internet to get the curriculum guide and it’s about computers and making robots work. They’re just kind of step by step guides. Instead of learning where the energy comes from, we go right to the Internet and we just build a robot, but they don’t even know what’s going on. They don’t learn how the robot works.
Beloved Projects on the Chopping Block
In a tragic bit of irony, even the beneficial use of an integrated curriculum was taken from students. Every year, this teacher would allow each student to research a state and give a presentation and report about it. The kids really had a great understanding of states, regions, and the economic reasons for them why you might want to grow up and go somewhere else based on temperature, based on jobs, based on the natural resources of each state…It was so much fun doing state reports. Now, sadly to say, I’m told not to, because there’s no time for it. That it would be a waste of time. It was probably the best thing about 4th grade.
They say, ‘What are you doing, teaching states? Why are you letting the kids do a state report?’ I said, ‘It’s reading, it’s writing, it’s research.’ There is so much to learn, and now I’m not allowed to do that because of the integrated curriculum. These state projects were not just social studies. They taught kids valuable research and communication skills. The cross-section of skills that coalesced into a beloved annual tradition is how an integrated curriculum should function. Now it’s gone, and so is the teacher’s ability to be creative in working with her students.
So, REAL critical thinking is dead and gone. No knowledgebase and no chance to practice how to integrate those data elements into a whole. Different skill sets, entire sections of the world – gone. And given that it is online – what may be present today is gone tomorrow. Where is the chain of custody, where is the ability to look backwards for that piece of information that has now been “designed out”?
Nothing is stable in this system from this aspect.
Throwing Out Textbooks
This teacher’s district, like many others, has not just done away with history and science, but also textbooks in general.The frustrating part of being a teacher in elementary grades is that they have no foundational skills. The textbooks that were used went through the different states and regions, the government, Abraham Lincoln… As far as studying history, we kind of lost all of that because I was told, ‘Please discard all of your textbooks.’ That was frustrating, and I asked why over and over and over again and was told that we now have an integrated curriculum, so do not use textbooks.
Ditching all books for computers teaches students to disregard the information that can be found in books, the teacher noted. Instead, they are being taught that everything can and should be learned online. Despite this push towards the internet, the students are not taught how to evaluate online sources for accuracy. In youth and inexperience, it can be easy to mistake a valid source of historical or scientific facts with a poor alternative. This is a recipe for ill-prepared children armed with a legion of bad facts.
And of course, the kicker that has been designed into the system: parents not included. In fact, in a lot of cases, parents not wanted:
Parents None the Wiser
With the removal of important foundational skills and basic subjects, one would think the school district parents would be up-in-arms about the schools’ curriculum shift. Conservative parents especially should be fighting the school’s attempted indoctrination of their children. However, they are unable to have opinions on their children’s education, because they have no idea what’s happening.The parents don’t even know what’s going on because it’s all at school. We hardly give homework anymore, which is so frustrating. I just disagree with a lot of things, but they keep it in school so that the parents don’t have to worry. The parents question very little and they just assume the teacher knows what they’re doing.
And “hiding” everything in school means no accountability. It’s not so that the parents don’t have to worry, they are kept in the dark on purpose. Parents shouldn’t be worrying – they should be jumping up and down in ANGER as this is yet another example of what I’ve been saying for years – Teachers believe that your children are really theirs and are doing what they want because they know hardly anyone is going to check on them.
When it gets down to fundamentals, they are violating the Trust that you just blithely hand over to them. That has to stop.
With limited homework, parents lack a window into what is being taught to their children. Likewise, the students are losing an important aspect of early education — drilling foundational subjects, like basic math, in order to better understand in the future.
It’s Great to Get the Wrong Answer
Just like an integrated curriculum, a “growth mindset” sounds great in theory. Rather than focus on shame of past mistakes, students can use their errors to learn and grow. Yet often, the in-school application of a so-called “growth mindset” actually keeps students from learning and growing. The teacher explains:The way of teaching is to get them to get the answer first, and then some of the kids won’t know how they got there because they’re always in a group setting. We have to work together. We’re always talking about cooperative learning. I feel that too much cooperative learning now. We don’t have the skill base anymore.
The downside of the philosophy that is being taught to them – Individualism is bad and Collectivism is good. And the latter is good until it isn’t. Groups work successfully when Individuals can take on the loads themselves – groups work to load balance and take advantage of the various skill sets.
Of course, this is of no matter and falls completely apart when there are no skill sets at the Individual level.
We test them, but by the time we’ve tested them, they really have never learned anything in the first place. We know they’re at the bottom and they stay at the bottom because nobody sitting there saying, ‘Well let’s just skill and drill.’ They’ve left out all the basic skills. They left out drills.
No longer can a teacher do things like math flashcards, because that’s not acceptable. Some principals think that that would belittle the children if they see that they’re not getting their math facts fast.
That’s the other stupid thing that has happened – “self-esteem”, keeping “feelings” unhurt, and social learning has become the primary purposes of schools. No one can feel offended and no one’s feelz can hurt. Academics? Not so much.
From what I am seeing, they are barely doing half a job. When 40-odd% of our kids in NH are judged Proficient, everyone goes crazy about it because that’s better than most States.
PEOPLE, that means 60-odd% AREN’T GOOD AT THAT PARTICULAR SKILL. Other than baseball, what other activity in life are the “professionals” judged to be a success less than half the time in doing their jobs???
We’ve changed a lot of ways that used to work in the past by saying, ‘We can’t identify the kids that are low.’ So they try to pretend that that’s why we need cooperative learning. Just give the answer. Don’t let them say the wrong answer and feel bad about it.
And then, they come up with this new math, and just say, ‘Getting the wrong answer is good because that helps your brain grow.’ So we’ve got this growth mindset, which is fine but we’re really allowing kids to get wrong answers and not be curious about how do we get to this right.
The fear of belittling or saddening students is directly keeping them from learning and thriving academically.
The Left is always screaming “People over Profit”. What they are doing here is “Feelings over Learning”. It’s a case of “Close enough for Government work” come true in the most awful way possible – our childrens’ education.
Get in their faces and often. After all, THEY work for YOU – ensure they are accountable to you. Do the same with School Boards. It like bringing your car to the dealer to be fixed and then you have to STILL climb into it to finish the job right. NO, that’s not how it is supposed to work – but it is in education. If you really care about your kids, writ large in this country, either demand excellence (really, is an 85% PROFICIENT mark all that out of reach???) or be prepared to become your kid’s teacher at least on a part time basis.
(H/T: The Federalist)
