Please watch this video from Prager U. Competition and choice are the only two things that can improve education for our children. Competition ALWAYS leads to better performance.
https://www.prageru.com/video/fund-the-children-not-the-schools
If you’re not using Prager U as a valuable resource for information and direction you are spinning your wheels.
Contributed by Brent Rains
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently issued a report that grades every state based on the quality of the social studies standards teachers are supposed to use to guide instruction in K-12 schools. Sadly, Kentucky’s social studies standards earned a “C,” with significant revisions strongly recommended.
Fordham rated each state’s standards in two areas: civics and history, identifying strengths and weaknesses in both domains. For both areas, Kentucky earned a C.
In terms of civics, reviewers found that many of Kentucky’s civics standards were too vaguely written to provide useful guidance to teachers, especially at the high school level, and that the coverage of critical topics like the Bill of Rights, the electoral process, and federalism were “inexplicably cursory.” In other words, it was astounding to the reviewers how little Kentucky’s standards expected students to learn about these crucial topics.
Kentucky’s history standards suffered in many of the same ways. Fordham found that content coverage in the history standards was “erratic” because the standards place an excessive focus on skills without giving students adequate, factual background knowledge about history. The history standards were also criticized for their overly thematic organization, which undermines students’ sense of a clear historical sequence of the past.
Fordham’s reviewers recommended that Kentucky’s standards be significantly revised to offer much more specific guidance to teachers, especially at the high school level. Fordham suggests Kentucky’s standards should provide more detail about the powers, organization, and functions of the three branches of government, the Bill of Rights, elections, and federalism. Historical content should be organized chronologically, and students deserve a full introduction to U.S. history at the elementary level.
These findings from the Fordham report line up exactly with my own concerns about Kentucky’s social studies standards. I’ve written previously about how Kentucky’s standards are unhelpfully vague and light on content, and how this opens the door for all manner of problems, and not just to students not knowing enough about our nation’s history.
This is a topic that is especially personal to me, both because I started my career as a middle school social studies teacher and because I served on the Kentucky Board of Education from 2016-2019 and chaired the board’s Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Committee that was responsible for reviewing and approving the standards. I provided extensive feedback on these standards and helped shepherd them through the approval process. In fact, the Kentucky Council for the Social Studies recognized me in 2019 with an award for my efforts to get these social studies standards approved.
So why do I now feel like the Fordham Institute may have been too generous in giving these standards a grade of “C?”
At the time I supported these standards mostly because they were infinitely superior to the even vaguer social studies standards that came before them and that went for many years without review or revision. I trusted the teachers who developed these standards using the process developed by the Kentucky Department of Education, and that guidance documents that were still in development would give educators more assistance in how to use them.
And I recognized – and still do – that standards represent a bare minimum expectation of what teachers should present their students. Standards must be supplemented with many curriculum decisions that spell out in far greater detail what students will read, learn, and do, and most of those decisions need to be made at the local level.
But the last year has made me realize that many of the critics of these new standards had it right all along: the standards themselves, while better than before, are still way too vague. There are essential concepts, historical figures, events, and ideas that get no mention at all in Kentucky’s standards.
Meanwhile we have an all-out war on American history underway in K12 education, and it started long before people took notice of the role critical theory was playing in the decisions teachers make about what students get taught and how. We saw the fruits of it on display in the media and in America’s streets over the last year, with statues of abolitionists like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant being torn down by mobs while authorities did nothing, and ideologically driven pseudo-history like the 1619 Project widely promoting the idea that America’s founding principles are illegitimate and its institutions irredeemably racist.
America is so deeply divided, in part, because American civics and history has been poorly taught and because, in some cases, it is being deliberately mis-taught to indoctrinate students in radical, inaccurate, and negative attitudes toward our country for the express purpose of promoting a Marxist transformation of our economy, politics, and culture.
Improving state social studies standards will not, by itself, fix this problem. In the long run, we need far more transparency about what is being taught in our schools and how, and for parents and the public to be far more engaged with educators in discussions about those topics. But as a bare minimum, Kentuckians should insist core concepts like the Bill of Rights – and essential figures like Abraham Lincoln, should have a place in our classrooms.
It’s time for Kentucky’s lawmakers to heed the kind of feedback the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has provided in their new report and insist that improvements be made.
Update: A posted a video on this topic as an abbreviated presentation of this topic:
Evidently the crowd at last night’s meeting of the Jefferson County Public Schools Board of Education got rowdy, with many attendees showing up to voice their concerns about how critical race theory (CRT) is being presented in the district’s schools.
The board was meeting in a work session to discuss development of the district’s strategic plan, slated for approval this December. CRT wasn’t specifically on the agenda, but the strategic plan does include “racial equity” as a key component. This led some members of the media, who have persistently misrepresented parent concerns about CRT, to insist yet again that opposition to critical race theory is really just opposition to diversity and equity efforts in schools. JCPS Superintendent Marty Pollio seemed to share or reinforce this view when he told the media, “We are looking at racial equity, which essentially means what does a kid need to be successful and providing that to them. It’s not about holding anyone else back.”
I wasn’t at the meeting and I haven’t talked to any of the parents in attendance, but as an educator who has been writing about this issue for nearly a year, I can say emphatically that concerns about how CRT is being presented are perfectly legitimate. A focus on equity is good and appropriate – as long as it doesn’t take the assumptions of critical race theory as fact.
What is equity?
In one of my first essays on this topic, I wrote about how I approach the issue of equity in my own teaching. (As always, when I write or speak on current events or public policy issues, I am speaking strictly for myself and not WKU or anyone affiliated with the university). Equity is one of the major themes of WKU’s school principal certification program. The way I frame it to my students (all of them adult teachers who are training to become administrators) is this: “For every decision we make or policy we implement, how is this decision or policy impacting our most vulnerable students?”
This is an extremely important lens because of our long-standing pattern of achievement gaps between white and minority students, students with and without disabilities, students from low-income households and those who are not, and so on. We educators have a moral imperative to confront these historical differences in student achievement and ask ourselves how we got here. To some extent, implicit biases about how students learn and what they are capable of may be at work, and in that regard we need to confront whether our expectations differ and how we are delivering resources and instructional quality to students. Equity means setting a high bar for every student and then providing the instruction and support each student needs to meet those expectations.
In my experience I have never met a single educator who resisted or rejected that goal. They might wonder how we can effectively achieve it. They might struggle over the appropriate strategies to pursue. They might quibble over whether proficiency is ever possible for every student – largely because of factors that are out of the control of educators (and often the students themselves), like disabilities and the immense learning barriers posed by poverty. They may be unaware of their own low expectations toward students. But they readily agree that we need to do better by all of our students and are eager to work together to figure out how.
I sometimes have my students read authors who operate from a critical theory lens to help them consider these issues from a different perspective. But that’s the key – CRT in my classes is a perspective on the issue of equity. Not the only perspective and certainly not one that I treat as a given fact.
How CRT actually undermines equity efforts
And this is exactly why so many people are concerned about how CRT is working its way into our schools. It’s not so much that CRT is being taught. It’s that some of the key assumptions of CRT are being regarded by educators as facts and that the lens of CRT is shaping the way they select instructional materials and how they are being presented in classrooms.
These problematic assumptions include CRT’s tendency to view every group outcome difference as the result of racism (with no other options permitted to be considered), to reduce individuals to their membership in racial or social groups and assign oppressor or victim status accordingly, and to view every institution of American society – in fact to view the entire American experiment – as irredeemingly racist.
This is not a caricature of critical race theory. These are core assumptions of the theory itself and explicitly shape the way it is presented in various equity and diversity training sessions to educators and in how it is presented to children in classrooms.
Last summer I wrote (here and here) about the Kentucky Department of Education’s new training materials, designed to help teachers implement the state’s social studies standards using an “inquiry” design. Many of the examples of “guiding questions” provided in these materials reveal a deeply biased political and ideological perspective. These guiding questions are presented to students in ways that implicitly limit the range of views students can consider about complex social problems and guide them toward specific conclusions – ones that often align with a critical theory perspective.
JCPS leaders can say “we aren’t teaching critical race theory in our schools” but that doesn’t mean these kinds of biases aren’t seeping into classrooms in various ways, and parents have every right to be upset about it.
Critical theory, presented this way, doesn’t just leave students with an overly-simplified, biased, and sometimes outright false understanding of American history and its social, political, and economic problems. CRT also makes it harder for adults in schools to have a meaningful conversation about equity issues. By reducing the entire issue to racism, by dividing teachers and students according to their skin color and assigning oppressor and victim status, the kinds of collaborative work meant to help improve learning for all students is actually undermined.
It’s also legitimate to ask JCPS why the focus on equity is strictly about “racial” equity? Obviously the district serves a large percentage of students of color and closing racial achievement gaps should be a top priority. But if equity is really about giving every student what they need to be successful…then shouldn’t that apply to students of every skin color? It’s these ambiguous ways that equity is presented that give parents and ordinary citizens pause about what the district’s agenda really is.
How districts can better address equity and the CRT question
If the leaders of JCPS (or any district) want to reassure parents that critical race theory isn’t being “taught” in the district’s schools, there are some straightforward things they can say (and mean):
Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, recently summed up the core concerns with critical race theory and its proper place within K-12 schools in a comprehensive overview of this topic for Commentary magazine:
Public education succeeds or fails at one principal task: A school either imparts the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to smooth the transition to a responsible and satisfying adult life, or it does not. In concert with other institutions (families, churches, the military, et al.), an American school can consciously inspire children to play a part in building a more perfect union. Or it can say, in effect, don’t bother. Hardened into orthodoxy, critical race theory insists on the latter. When it demands a place of privilege in our schools, it undermines the very purpose of public education. It is the opposite of welcoming children into the civic sphere; it preaches resistance to it and even its destruction.
To be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with ethnic studies, “culturally responsive pedagogy,” or even critical race theory in public schools. No reasonable objection should be made or accepted to the earnest desire for black and brown students—American children—to see their histories and cultures woven firmly into their education. Nor should any excuse be made to elide our country’s painful history of racism and injustices, or to confront places where there remains room for progress. What schools cannot do while maintaining public support and legitimacy is to abide any kind of racial essentialism or insist that children are required to combat “whiteness.” Schools should not seek to impose an ideology that distills all of history and every human endeavor to a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed.
It should be relatively easy for districts to reject the pernicious assumptions of critical race theory and still maintain their commitment to equity – and enjoy broad public support in doing so – unless district leaders really do endorse and want to advance those assumptions.
The national controversy over critical race theory (CRT) and how it is presented in K-12 schools has come to Kentucky. (See my discussion of Bill Request 60, which would prohibit key components of CRT, and why this whole issue is a source of legitimate concern for everyone).
The Gallatin County Board of Education recently became the first district in Kentucky to try to ban the teaching of CRT in its schools. I haven’t been able to obtain the precise wording of the board’s resolution or action, but Superintendent Larry Hammond issued a statement explaining the board’s decision:
Gallatin County Board of Education feels strongly that individual student needs remain a priority in all aspects of planning and service delivery. The Board further expects and promotes student needs being met equitably. Such examples would include contracts to provide increased services to meet mental and behavioral health issues of students without respect of sex, race or socio-economic status. The Board also believes no individual is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive” due to their race or sex, “whether consciously or unconsciously”. Agenda item VI.I. from the June 15 BOE meeting “Discussion/Action to Ban Critical Race Theory in Gallatin County School District” was a statement to affirm the belief and commitment to ensure every child’s needs will be met. Furthermore, the effort was to not create greater divisions among students and staff through the promotion of CRT.
It is not clear to me, however, that a local board of education can legally stop a local school from adopting a curriculum or instructional materials that include CRT’s controversial claims.
This is because Kentucky’s law establishing School Based Decision Making (SBDM) Councils gives SBDM’s near total authority over such decisions.
SBDM Councils are composed of 3 teachers elected by teachers in the school and 2 parents elected by parents of children in the school. If a school has minority students constituting more than 8% of its enrollment and the largest minority group isn’t already represented among the elected SBDM teachers and parents, additional teacher and parent members may be added, but the proportions of teachers to parents must be maintained. The school principal serves as chair of the council, which seeks consensus decisions but may operate by majority vote if consensus cannot be achieved.
You can read the full statute on the SBDM Council’s composition and duties here.
Among the Council’s responsibilities, outlined in section 2(g), is the following:
The school council shall determine which textbooks, instructional materials, and student support services shall be provided in the school. Subject to available resources, the local board shall allocate an appropriation to each school that is adequate to meet the school’s needs related to instructional materials and school-based student support services, as determined by the school council. The school council shall consult with the school media librarian on the maintenance of the school library media center, including the purchase of instructional materials, information technology, and equipment;
The Office of Educational Accountability, charged with enforcement of SBDM law and regulation, has interpreted this to mean that school and district administrators may not usurp the Council’s authority when it comes to choosing curriculum and instructional materials.
In one relevant instance, former Boone County Superintendent Randy Poe and two middle school principals were censured and forced to participate in additional SBDM governance training when several schools in the district adopted the Summit Learning curriculum without the express approval and involvement of the SBDM Council.
While I am not aware of specific instances where local leaders tried to prohibit a school from adopting a curriculum or instructional materials (I’d welcome information on this from readers who might know for sure), the logic would seem to extend in that direction also: a local board of education cannot tell an SBDM Council what curriculum it may or may not have.
[Update, 6/21: I’m not an attorney, but a Kentucky Supreme Court case from 1995, Board of Education of Boone County v. Bushee, seems to make it clear that when there is a conflict between the autonomy of an SBDM and the authority of the local school board, unless the board’s greater authority is explicitly allowed for in state law, the SBDM prevails:
The above examination of these statutes clearly convinces this court that each participating group in the common school system has been delegated its own independent sphere of responsibility. State government is held accountable for providing adequate funding and for the overall success of the common school system. The local boards are responsible for the administrative functions of allocating funding, managing school property, appointing the superintendent, and fixing the compensation of employees. The councils are responsible for the site based issues, including but not limited to, determining curriculum, planning instructional practices, selecting and implementing discipline techniques, determining the composition of the staff at the school, and choosing textbooks and instructional materials.
Emphasis added in the above.]
Under Kentucky law, if parents or citizens want to help shape what gets taught in an individual school, they have to appeal to the SBDM Council.
Most Kentuckians are probably unaware of the work of SBDM Councils and their important responsibilities, which also include hiring school principals (with the superintendent serving as a Council member just for this purpose) and assigning personnel based on the staffing allocation received from the local board of education.
By and large SBDM Council members do their work with no fanfare and little appreciation. In my personal experience the teachers and parents who serve on councils work hard and sincerely want the best for students. In some schools parents have to be actively recruited (begged?) to run for Council.
But in most cases SBDM Councils tend to reinforce the status quo and operate according to the principal’s and teachers’ agendas. Parents, by statute outnumbered on councils, often lack the technical and cultural knowledge about how schools work and defer to teachers on key decisions.
Of greatest concern, non-parents have no representation on councils at all, despite their sizable responsibilities related to the deployment of public resources. They are largely unaccountable to the general public. If an SBDM Council wanted to adopt a controversial curriculum over widespread public opposition, there would be literally nothing the public – or the locally-elected board of education – could do about it.
Authors I greatly admire (see here and here) have argued that, despite the serious flaws in CRT assumptions, state-level bans on teaching critical race theory in schools is a form of big government overreach and sets a dangerous precedent.
I’m sympathetic to those arguments and believe that generally these issues are best handled at a local level. Parents and citizens must be far more aware and involved in SBDM Councils and insist on transparency for what is being taught in local schools.
But the flaws in Kentucky’s unique governance structure raise serious questions about how accountable SBDM Councils really are and what can be done if they override the will of the public. And that’s not to say that a strongly worded resolution from a local board of education wouldn’t carry a lot of weight. But for all these reasons Bill Request 60 and similar measures have started a valuable conversation about this topic.
Of course this also occurs at a time when some Kentucky school districts are suing taxpayers to stop the implementation of the state’s new school choice law. The education establishment can’t have it both ways. You can’t defend a system that isn’t really accountable to the public when it comes to curriculum and instruction and then insist that many families can have no other options.
Personally I’m happy for any school to openly teach anything it wants – as long as every family has the right to choose another school for their children.
