"Colorado school board vote doesn’t appease critics" by Colleen Slevin | Associated Press October 04, 2014
GOLDEN, Colo. — Students, parents, and teachers in suburban Denver are vowing to continue demonstrating against a school board’s new conservative majority after it refused to back off plans to review Advanced Placement US history courses for what some see as anti-American content.
The Jefferson County Board of Education voted Thursday night to lay the groundwork for a review of curriculum, with the AP history course likely the first to get a deeper look.
As far as I am concerned these days, it's all politically-correct dogma meant to inculcate and indoctrinate.
The elective course has been criticized by the Republican National Committee and the Texas State Board of Education, which has told teachers not to teach according to the course’s new framework. Being taught for the first time this year, it gives greater attention to the history of North America and its native people before colonization and their clashes with Europeans, but critics say it downplays the settlers’ success in establishing a new nation.
The Colorado board didn’t vote on its original proposal to review the history course with an eye toward promoting patriotism and downplaying social disorder — language that students have blasted in waves of school-time protests across the district. However, students and other activists say they believe board members will ultimately try to change the history course to suit their views.
Michele Patterson, the head of the district’s parent-teacher association, said she didn’t expect students to keep walking out of class to protest, because parents and administrators don’t want children missing any more school. ‘‘We’re proud of our kids, but we obviously don’t want kids missing school on a regular basis,’’ she said.
It's an excuse to get out of school!
The College Board administers the course and other AP classes, which are meant to prepare students for college and give them a chance at earning college credit. It says the framework — an outline of the course built around themes like ‘‘politics and power’’ and ‘‘environment and geography’’ — isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of everything to be studied, and teachers are always free to add material required by their states.
For example, Martin Luther King Jr. isn’t mentioned in the framework, but the Black Panthers are.
Seems a bit racist. Blacks are violent and militant, not peace-seeking and caring?
Or is that just meant to drive the narrative?
The College Board’s instructions about the new framework say teachers know to include King but asked for help with less obvious examples of people and events to discuss around some of the themes.
History teacher Larry Krieger of Montgomery, N.J., faults the framework for having a global, revisionist view. He said it depicts the United States as going from conquering Native Americans to becoming an imperial power, while downplaying examples of cooperation and unity.
Can we please stop lying to ourselves in classrooms and admit the obvious?
‘‘Native Americans were defeated, wrongs were done, African-Americans were enslaved. However, at the same time this was going on, democratic institutions were being established, there was religious toleration, and a new society was being created,’’ he said.
Yeah, well, we are a far cry from that new society the founders would shutter at, what with the Federal Reserve and King's tyranny.
As for those other ills, I acknowledge the wrongs of the past though I had absolutely nothing to do with them, and resent politicians spewing the conventional myth of AmeriKa during campaigns, 'kay?
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Related: Colorado Classroom Too Politically Correct
So is the whole $y$tem and $ociety these days.
