Pledge to Teach the Truth, Despite New State Bills Against It (Tennessee bans public schools from teaching critical race theory) | Zinn Education Project

Pledge to Teach the Truth, Despite New State Bills Against It | Zinn Education Project

Pledge to Teach the Truth, Despite New State Bills Against It

Tennessee bans public schools from teaching critical race theory amid national debate

The Tennessee General Assembly has banned the teaching of critical race theory, passing a law at the very end of the legislative session to withhold funding from public schools that teach about white privilege.

Republicans in the House made the legislation a last-minute priority, introducing provisions that ban schools from instructing students that one race bears responsibility for the past actions against another, that the United States is fundamentally racist or that a person is inherently privileged or oppressive due to their race.

Similar proposals surfaced in other states this year, including one in Idaho that has been signed into law by the governor. Texas Republicans are also pushing a proposal to ban CRT in schools.

Lawmakers in at least 12 states are attempting to pass legislation that would require teachers to lie to students about the role of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and oppression throughout U.S. history.

A recent bill introduced in the Missouri legislature exemplifies a rash of similar bills — in Texas, Idaho, Arkansas, Iowa, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Arizona, and North Carolina — that aim to prohibit teachers from teaching the truth about this country: It was founded on dispossession of Native Americans, slavery, structural racism and oppression; and structural racism is a defining characteristic of our society today.

Specifically, the Missouri bill bans teaching that:

identifies people or groups of people, entities, or institutions in the United States as inherently, immutably, or systemically sexist, racist, anti-LGBT, bigoted, biased, privileged, or oppressed.

But how can one teach honestly about the nature of our society without examining how today’s racial inequality is a systemic legacy of this country’s history?

From police violence, to the prison system, to the wealth gap, to maternal mortality rates, to housing, to education and beyond, the major institutions and systems of our country are deeply infected with anti-Blackness and its intersection with other forms of oppression. To not acknowledge this and help students understand the roots of U.S. racism is to deceive them — not educate them. This history helps students understand the roots of inequality today and gives them the tools to shape a just future. It is not just a history of oppression, but also a history of how people have organized and created coalitions across race, class, and gender.

The Missouri bill names these leading social justice education groups as those whose curricula would be banned:

1619 Project initiative of the New York Times, the Learning for Justice Curriculum of the Southern Poverty Law Center, We Stories, programs of Educational Equity Consultants, BLM at School, Teaching for Change, Zinn Education Project, and any other similar, predecessor, or successor curricula.

The proposed legislation fails to name a single lesson that is inaccurate or that misleads CONTINUE READING: Pledge to Teach the Truth, Despite New State Bills Against It | Zinn Education Project

Students deserve an explanation for the origins of the Electoral College

Students deserve an explanation for the origins of the Electoral College

TEACHER VOICE: The United States is not a democracy. Stop telling students that it is

“Students are commanded to vote, but not to judge the fundamental questions of governance not on the ballot — like the legitimacy of the Electoral College”

When U.S. voters recently cast their ballots, an unchecked pandemic raged through the nation, uprisings against racism and police violence stretched into their eighth month, and new climate change-intensified storms formed in the Atlantic.

The reactionary and undemocratic system by which we select our president was an insult to the urgency of the moment. Although millions more people voted for Joe Biden than for Donald Trump — the difference is now 5.4 million — it took several days to learn who won, thanks to the Electoral College. To the relief of many, it appears that this time — unlike in 2000 and 2016 — the candidate who got the most votes nationwide also won the presidential election.

If our students only learn about this exceptionally strange system from their corporate-produced history and government textbooks, they will have no clue why this is how we choose our president. More importantly, they will have a stunted sense of their own power — and little reason to believe they might have the potential to create something better.

To review: A voter in Montana gets 31 times the electoral bang for their presidential ballot than a voter in New York. A voter in Wyoming has 70 times the representation in the U.S. Senate as a voter in California, while citizens in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. have none. The Republican Senate majority that recently confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court was elected by 14 million fewer votes than the 47 senators who voted against her confirmation.

Yet politicians and pundits regularly pronounce the United States a “democracy,” as if that designation is self-evident and incontrovertible. Textbooks and mainstream civics curricula make the same mistake, CONTINUE READING: Students deserve an explanation for the origins of the Electoral College

CURMUDGUCATION: Trump's Executive Order for 1776 Commission

CURMUDGUCATION: Trump's Executive Order for 1776 Commission

Trump's Executive Order for 1776 Commission

Like many of you, I'm hoping that Trump's Executive Order establishing a 1776 Commission will be rendered moot sometime within the next 12-2,215 hours. But because, like many of you, I need something to distract me from doomscrolling (and the board of directors is napping), I'm going to go ahead and look at this damn fool executive order. The short form is that this is all empty political hooey, but I'm trying to kill time here.

First, it has to be said that somebody at the White House has a real gift for hamfisted baloney writing. Right of the bat we get the purpose of this EO-- "to better enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776, and, through this, form a more perfect Union." Because he's sure he heard that "more perfect union" thingy in some patriotic program once. 

Let's go.

Section 1. Purpose.

The American founding envisioned a political order in harmony with the design of “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” seeing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as embodied in and sanctioned by natural law and its traditions.

I'm not sure a "founding" can "envision" anything. Nor am I sure about "natural law" and its traditions. So much about this EO sets off a long-time English teachers detector for "this student does not understand the words and phrases that he has copied from some other source." 

It goes on to note that the formation of a republic (notice-- not a democracy, but a republic, as all CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Trump's Executive Order for 1776 Commission

Trump creates 1776 Commission to promote 'patriotic education' - POLITICO

Trump creates 1776 Commission to promote 'patriotic education' - POLITICO

Trump creates 1776 Commission to promote 'patriotic education'

The president has attacked lessons that emphasize the role of slavery in American history and Black Americans' contributions to the U.S.

President Donald Trump on Monday created a “1776 Commission” to promote "patriotic education” and counter lessons that he says divide Americans on race and slavery and teach students to “hate their own country."

On the eve of Election Day, Trump directed the commission’s creation, via executive order, to “better enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776 and to strive to form a more perfect Union.”

The order follows Trump’s recent attacks on critical race theory and the 1619 Project, directed by The New York Times Magazine, which revisits the country’s history with a focus on slavery and Black Americans’ contributions.

Racial justice issues have been at the center of this election following protests this summer and fall over the police killings of Black men and women. Trump has repeatedly lashed out at protesters, positioning himself as the "law and order" candidate.

His order blasts historical accounts that he says have “vilified” the nation’s founders.

“This radicalized view of American history lacks perspective, obscures virtues, twists motives, ignores or distorts facts, and magnifies flaws, resulting in the truth being concealed and history disfigured,” the order states. “Failing to identify, challenge, and correct this distorted perspective could fray and ultimately erase the bonds that knit our country and culture together.”

He blames “one-sided and divisive accounts” on race for failing to recognize the country’s “successful effort to shake off the curse of slavery and to use the lessons of that struggle to guide our work toward equal rights for all citizens in the present.”

The commission’s 20 members will be appointed by the president and serve for CONTINUE READING: Trump creates 1776 Commission to promote 'patriotic education' - POLITICO

Sam Wineburg on Teaching History | Diane Ravitch's blog

Sam Wineburg on Teaching History | Diane Ravitch's blog

Sam Wineburg on Teaching History

The Silence of the Ellipses: 

Or Why History Can’t Be About Telling Our Children Lies

Sam Wineburg is the Margaret Jacks Professor of Education & (by courtesy) History at Stanford University. His most recent book is Why Learn History (When It is Already on Your Phone), University of Chicago Press, 2018. He tweets at @samwineburg.

Aware his days were numbered, a tuberculosis-stricken George Orwell raced to finish the book that would make his name an adjective. Holed away in a remote cottage on the Isle of Jura off the Scottish coast, he left the island for the last time in 1949, the same year his novel appeared. He died a year later.

I read 1984 in my 11^th-grade English class in the weary rustbelt town of Utica, New York, at a time when Russia was still the USSR and the “focus of evil in the modern world.” With Cliff Notes at my side, I decodedthe book’s more obscure allusions (2 + 2 = 5, I learned, conjured up Stalin’s claim that his five-year plan had been completed in four). But you didn’t need a study aid to get the main point. We lived in a free society; they in a tyrannical one. We respected truth; they disfigured it. Russian-speaking Winston CONTINUE READING: Sam Wineburg on Teaching History | Diane Ravitch's blog

A patriotic education should include Black history

A patriotic education should include Black history

Here is what patriotic education should look like

resident Donald Trump recently announced his intention to create a 1776 Commission, charged with restoring patriotic, “pro-America” education to public schools.

Trump pointed to The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which explored the legacy of slavery in modern America and has been adopted by many districts across the country, as an example of framing America’s founding around “the principle of oppression, not freedom.”

The president fails to understand that acknowledging our shortcomings doesn’t mean perpetuating a story of oppression. We can admit our mistakes while also celebrating the heroes of our history — which must include Black history.

A truly patriotic education should inspire our students to reach their greatest potential — to lead movements, solve unsolvable problems, create new enterprises and fight for freedom. And to do that, we must build an education system that embraces Black history and cultures for the sake of all our children. 

A patriotic education should include the contribution of a Black doctor named Dr. Charles Drew, who developed techniques for preserving blood plasma — the very techniques that are showing promise in treatments for Covid-19 today. 

A patriotic education should include the story of  Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, the first doctor to perform open-heart surgery and a Black man who graduated from medical school just 18 years after the abolition of slavery. And it should include Gladys West, a Black mathematician whose work CONTINUE READING: A patriotic education should include Black history

CURMUDGUCATION: Trump’s Patriot History Lessons Or Critical Thinking: You Can’t Have Both

CURMUDGUCATION: Trump’s Patriot History Lessons Or Critical Thinking: You Can’t Have Both

Trump’s Patriot History Lessons Or Critical Thinking: You Can’t Have Both

Donald Trump wants to sweep away the “web of lies in our schools and classrooms” and replace them with the “magnificent truth” about the US, “the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.” This country, he asserts, is the “most fair, equal, and prosperous nation in human history.”

To further that goal, he signed an executive order to create a “1776 Commission,” to promote “patriotic education” in US schools. “The only path to national unity is through our shared identity as Americans. That is why it is so urgent that we finally restore patriotic education to our schools,” Trump said,

announcing a grant to support development of a “pro-American curriculum.”


Reactions to Trump’s proposed patriotic curriculum have been mixed, with some calling it an “overdue effort” and others indicating that with this notion, Trump “joins dictators and demagogues.” The whole issue is further complicated by Trump’s declared intent to punish schools that teach the New York Times 1619 Project, which some conservatives see as illegal. Meanwhile, Trump’s idea of soliciting a $5 billion “contribution” from the Tik-Tok/Oracle/Walmart deal raises the possibility of “patriotic CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Trump’s Patriot History Lessons Or Critical Thinking: You Can’t Have Both

Teachers, Regardless of What Your President Says, Don't Whitewash History - Philly's 7th Ward

Teachers, Regardless of What Your President Says, Don't Whitewash History - Philly's 7th Ward

TEACHERS, REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOUR PRESIDENT SAYS, DON’T WHITEWASH HISTORY

When I was first assigned to teach U.S. history nearly a decade ago during my second year as a social studies teacher, my first stop was to a Black-owned bookstore around the corner from where I taught. A month before the school year began, I had decided that I couldn’t use the old course textbook.

It was the same sort of Eurocentric textbook from which I was taught U.S. history as a student, focusing on the accomplishments of the English-speaking Western world while offering little to no acknowledgment of those oppressed by that same population. That textbook hadn’t reflected my history and heritage as a Black man, nor that of the predominately Black and Latinx students I was preparing to teach.

So at LaUnique African American Books and Culture Center, I purchased Africa’s Gift to America, a text written by historian Joel Augustus Rogers.

It was because of that text that my students learned about Crispus Attucks, the African American man who was the first colonist killed by British forces in the massacre that sparked the American Revolution. It was from this book CONTINUE READING: Teachers, Regardless of What Your President Says, Don't Whitewash History - Philly's 7th Ward

1619 | Teacher in a strange land

1619 | Teacher in a strange land

1619

When I was a junior in HS, my American History teacher was in a serious car accident in the fall, and did not return to teaching. This was 1967, and Social Studies teachers weren’t thick on the ground. The situation was personally worrisome: I had somehow persuaded this history teacher to let me take his required class as an ‘Independent Study’ so I could take both band and choir (which were infinitely more important to me than American History).

As rounds of fill-in teachers appeared, I was basically living in fear that my arrangement with Mr. Gilbert would be uncovered. He apparently left no record that I was even part of his class load. I might have to drop out of the choir—and I loved the choir—being coerced to return to conventional, one-chapter-a-week-test-on-Friday American History. It could go on my permanent record, or something.

Then fate smiled. My school district hired a young, spanking-new graduate of Western Michigan University, in December. She was cool with my studying American History on my own, added my name to the official grade book, and offered me her college history texts. Assignments would be short papers—and conversations with her. She recommended paperbacks I might enjoy.

In one of those conversations, I mentioned that her college Am-Hist textbooks presented things differently from our HS text. Things like the smallpox-infested blankets and how Andrew Jackson might not be a totally upright guy.

She smiled her praise. Good work, she said. You now understand that the people who CONTINUE READING: 1619 | Teacher in a strange land

Breaking News: @AERA_EdResearch weighs in on Censoring attempts from Politicians | Cloaking Inequity

Breaking News: @AERA_EdResearch weighs in on Censoring attempts from Politicians | Cloaking Inequity

BREAKING NEWS: @AERA_EDRESEARCH WEIGHS IN ON CENSORING ATTEMPTS FROM POLITICIANS

President Trump is targeting the 1619 Project. Julian Zelizer writes that The New York Times’ 1619 Project attempts to bring the effects of slavery in American history. Instead of beginning the story of the country with the Revolution against the British Empire, the project pushes the timeline back to 1619, the year enslaved Africans were brought to Jamestown in order to reveal how slavery and racial injustice have been an integral part of American history.

Trump has called this approach “poison.”

In response to the censorship attempts from politicians, I was impressed by the statement today from the American Education Research Association (AERA). Here’s an excerpt:

Just as a democratic society needs to support the production of scientific and scholarly knowledge free of political manipulation or intrusion, we need educational systems that are not politicized and censored, but rather seek the truth by exploring even the most difficult truths. We need to teach students to engage on difficult topics with intellectual integrity and respectful discourse. We are troubled by actions that appear to reject these principles, and especially on topics as salient to U.S. society as equality and justice for all.  We must also respect the rule of law in our educational systems, including Congressional prohibitions of federal government prescriptions and prohibitions of curriculum content in our schools.[2]  

https://www.aera.net/Newsroom/Statement-in-Support-of-Anti-Racist-Education

Glad they weighed in.

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Breaking News: @AERA_EdResearch weighs in on Censoring attempts from Politicians | Cloaking Inequity