wfudkn
cookout = blabbermouth?
Don't worry, kids are still made to recite the pledge of allegiance.
I kind of thought this was done away with.
Don't worry, kids are still made to recite the pledge of allegiance.
They re-worked the curriculum to put our Nation's history is largely negative light, glossing over the positives and focusing more on the negative aspects of America's founding.
There's plenty of articles w/ a simple google search "AP US History changes"
I kind of thought this was done away with.
My high school was still using books printed during the Cold War. When they showed the "two types of global economies" in a chart, there was the free market economy on one side with a smiling Uncle Sam holding a moneybag, and on the other side, the command economy, a yellow star with red eyes and fangs. Literally.
The textbook inculcation of American children has been propagandist for over a century. It has taken a "leftist turn" to include Japanese internment, to change the concept that maybe Christopher Columbus wasn't a perfect heroic symbol, that maybe even our founding fathers owned slaves.
The honest reckoning with American history is important.
Don't worry, kids are still made to recite the pledge of allegiance.
Unfortunately there are too many idiots who share your thoughts involved in our education system.
What you advocate (a white washing of history to only highlight American exceptionalism) is something right out of the communist propaganda play book, and we all know you wouldn't want that.
I'm not advocating Mr. Jump to Conclusions Mat.
I do not support an entirely AMERICA IS BAD curriculum. There's a healthy medium between talking about the negatives and highlighting the positives.
I mean the new curriculum cuts out MLK and Ben Franklin. Yeah, lets not mention these two guys...can't we put everything on the table?
Common Core, NCLB, and so many other top down school reform methodologies that have failed or succeeded in mediocrity just cement my position that school reform needs to take place from the bottom up. Something nobody really talks about when they talk about school reform failure is when it happens at the individual school level, it's often because of teachers who just don't want to make it work. They know what works and what doesn't with their students, and bureaucrats setting education policy on a macro scale isn't part of what works. I think decentralization is the most commonly successful concept behind turning failing schools into great schools. Let teachers decide on curricula and lesson plans that work with their students, decide policy at the school-wide level instead of the county or statewide level, and leave the teachers the fuck alone. Of course, standards are necessary. Public school teachers shouldn't be teaching creation alongside evolution in the classroom. Test scores, as vile as they are as an indicator of success, are still probably the best measuring stick we have for the future success of kids, but the core competencies that underlie them (critical thinking, reading comprehension, decision making, analytical thinking, memory) don't need to be tied to "teaching to the test" in order to get it right.
So let the teachers implement the cirricula that they think works, so long as you agree with it? I believe in evolution as much as anybody, but some people apparently don't. If your position is to let teachers have freedom, then you need to give them full freedom. Regardless, I don't see decentralization coming to pass any time soon. The rest of our society is moving in the exact opposite direction as we strive for Obama's lowest common denominator utopia (centralized health insurance requirements, centralized interstate licensing requirements, centralized ISP requirements, national marriage standards, etc.), and you think schools would now become decentralized? No way in hell.
When talking about educating kids, what's the difference?
that's the problem, though. people think Common Core is a top-down method directive when that is a small component. it's not "you must teach our kids this way", it's "these are the things that are important and all US kids should know how to do".
obviously, there's a serious debate to be had about the content. everyone flipping the fuck out b/c math-procedures are taught differently (side by side with the other method, btw) is just fucking dumb.