Idaho issues Cease and Desist order... against Congress

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Boss Out of Town
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Re: Idaho issues Cease and Desist order... against Congress

Post by Boss Out of Town »

Easier than I thought. Here are the reports from the various members of the advisory panel . . .

http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/teks/social/experts.html

. . . and here is the current draft report . . .

http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/teks/soci ... 073109.pdf
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the plowed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of kings’ bastards but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. This is the way of human folly. --- Henry Fabre
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Re: Idaho issues Cease and Desist order... against Congress

Post by Graybeard »

Thanks, Boss; that link was very interesting, and possibly even more interesting is the one reachable at that same site that gives the current version of ALL of the TEKS recommendations, with edits:

http://ritter.tea.state.tx.us/teks/soci ... sTEKS.html (go to the individual links there to see what they're thinking for the various grade levels, subtopics, etc.)

A few things are evident from reading these drafts. First, the mere fact that some whacko espouses a weird view in his or her own recommendations does not mean that that particular weird view appears in the collective document. Clearly there is horse trading going on among the reviewers and authors. Nothing abnormal about that, happens all the time. Personally, I don't feel threatened by the presence of extremist views among those reviewers (and participants in the horse trading); when extremist views of a subject are systematically excluded from the subject's discussion, then moderate views start to look extreme, and that can't be good.

Second, the marginalia in the edited versions are very interesting reading. Many give a distinct sense of "the guy who advocated this particular change is clearly crazy, but in the interests of completeness..."

Third, the importance of state law in generating these things is easy to miss. Many of the stranger propositions result from people saying, in effect, "In order to comply with state law, we must do X and Y and Z in 5th grade in curricula A and B and C." In these cases the reviewers do not assert that the curricula should include those things, rather that they must because of legal requirements. It is not the place of the review to challenge state law, nor to amend it, certainly not to defy it. (In part, of course, this says that the real problem is an overly narrow and prescriptive set of laws -- but that's not the reviewers' fault.)

Finally, it is indeed clear that the newspaper articles have been doing some cherry picking here. For example, the attempt (partly, but not fully, successful) to insert Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly, etc., into the curriculum falls in a different part of the high-school curriculum recommendations than the controversy over Cesar Chavez (whose mention does survive in the current version of the document) and others. I am, to put it mildly, no great fan of Gingrich and Schlafly, but to treat them as forces in what happened during the 1990s strikes me as not only normal but necessary; it's only treating them as paragons that's objectionable. The actual document doesn't do that, but to read the newspaper articles, you'd think it did.

All interesting stuff, anyway.
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