Posted on 02/03/2005 5:53:21 PM PST by Ender Wiggin
Recently, a group of Hudson High School students and parents have charged that some teachers at HHHS, specifically in the Social Studies department, are teaching with a liberal bias and stifling the conservative students' opinions. In addition, these students have criticized the administration for violating their commitment to allow students their First Amendment rights.
This issue began with the creation of a Conservative Club at Hudson High School. The co-presidents of the new club, Chris Bowler and James Mellilo, hung posters around the school associating themselves with the High School Conservative Clubs of America (HSCCA), and included the Web site, www.hscca.orgon the posters.
School officials promptly removed the posters from the walls after discovering what they saw as violent material on the site. Bowler and others then began to speak out against the teachers and school administration.
Both Bowler and the Metrowest Daily News editor charge that teachers used the Web site as a means to tear down the posters because, supposedly, the teachers are trying to suppress the conservative viewpoint.
In an interview with Metrowest Daily News reporter Carolyn Kessel Stewart, Bowler is quoted as saying "I believe the teachers used (the Web site) as a red herring to tear down our posters."
Seemingly agreeing with Bowler, Editor Richard Lodge on the Opinion page of the MetroWest Daily News stated in his Dec. 12 commentary titled Hudson High Conservatives: "Educators (should not) be picking through political Web sites for statements they find offensive. That gives the impression that they are looking for reasons to stop the conservative students from meeting."
In reality, it was not only teachers who expressed concern over the Web site and its content. The principal of Hudson High, John Stapelfeld, noted that although some teachers approached him about the Web site, he received most of the complaints from concerned parents and other community members.
"Some publicity that got to the press didn't reflect the fact that what is my concern is the violence associated with the Web site that the Conservative Club chose to advertise," said Stapelfeld.
He also feels that the "Conservative Club does have a right to exist."
Hudson High School teachers were first attacked in a Dec. 9 letter to the HSCCA Web site written by Chris Bowler. Bowler made claims that his Advanced Placement American Studies class "turned out to be largely anti-American studies."
Bowler is also said to oppose a poster hung in the classroom of Social Studies teacher Beth Ferns. The poster is filled with quotes that negatively portray President George W. Bush. Ferns encourages her students to bring in other political posters and says that the poster is "basically to spark discussion."
Lodge wrote in his editorial that "if she really wanted to encourage free debate and make every student feel welcome to participate, she'd hang up a pro-Bush poster on her own instead of waiting for a gusty student to force the issue."
An important point that has not been raised in the letters and editorials in the MetroWest Daily News is that not all students agree with Bowler and the Conservative Club's view of teachers.
After accusations were made by Bowler in his letter to the HSCCA that teachers are biased because they are showing "Fahrenheit 9/11" to their classes, junior Roseanne LeBlanc, who took the Social Justice class at Hudson High, commented that she did not feel that her teacher, Caitlin Murphy, was biased. LeBlanc pointed out that they did not only watch "Fahrenheit 9/11" in Murphy's class, but also viewed a pro-Bush film called "Faith in the White House."
During a discussion in an American Studies class, Ashley Fitzpatrick, also a junior at Hudson High, said "that just because you feel discomfort doesn't mean your opinion is being threatened."
Her statement came after teacher Katy Field explained that "as social studies teachers, part of our job is to question students' ideas in order to force them to support their claims with evidence."
Field went on to say that some students may have misinterpreted these questions as threats to their opinions, and that students may have misconstrued the teachers' efforts to encourage critical thinking as attempts to suppress the students' ideas.
These Conservative students are raising serious questions over the professionalism of teachers without any real evidence to support that teachers are biased in their classroom. Although teachers may be openly liberal, that does not mean that they will judge students based on their opinions or that they will promote a liberal agenda in their classroom.
It's unfortunate that the only views expressed recently in the media are those of a small group of people. This is especially troubling considering that many students do not agree with the accusations this group has made against the teachers.
While the First Amendment must be protected, it's disappointing that it is being used by a minority group to bring into question the professionalism of Hudson High's teachers.
This is true.
Just the basic techniques to suppress dissent shows the communist outlook and methodology.
Let alone using Zinn's book and showing Michael Moore films.
Hudson High School is a First Amendment School!
http://www.firstamendmentschools.org/
Location: Hudson, MA
Enrollment: 980
Grades: 8-12
Type of School: Public
Hudson High School is a large suburban public school that began its work as a First Amendment project school by launching an innovative experiment in school governance. This past year, says school Principal John Stapelfeld, the entire Hudson High School community implemented a new governance model based on democratic town meetings.
To facilitate the meetings, Hudson first unveiled a new school building, the design of which reflects the school communitys belief in two concepts: First, that a cluster model of organization (approximately 125-150 students per cluster) will engender closer connections among both the students and the staff; and second, that the cluster model will provide an ideal democratic governance structure, and involve more students in the daily life of the schools operation.
How does it work? The clusters are organized thematically around broad areas of student academic interest. Clusters do not restrict students academically and students still have full access to the schools curriculum. Weekly cluster meetings, however, provide time for students to develop service projects, hear from guest speakers, attend workshops relative to their cluster themes, and participate in school-wide governance meetings. At the same time, the clusters are meant to be places where a real democratic community can be built, one that affirms First Amendment rights within the context of a larger, expanding school population.
And how has it worked? Teacher Brian Daniels admits that at times its been hard, but its hard to be counter-cultural. At first, the kids didnt really know how to act, and neither did the teachers.
Student Rita Paulino agreed. A part of the reason for this is our conditioning in school up to this point, she said. Weve always been taught that what the teachers says goes so when youre suddenly given power, you dont really know what to do with it.
But as the year progressed, Hudsons experiment in liberty started to yield some positive results. And, Brian added, the growth of the leadership among students has been amazing. Kids who would have never done so in the past have stepped forward. And four of the six clusters decided on their own to take the time to build in some leadership training.
The process of democratizing a whole school carries with it the requisite time required for real change to occur, Daniels added. And our community is committed to do exactly that.
Learn more about Hudson High School:
Visit their Web site.
Read this recent article about the school.
Here's a quote from a class in Service Learning (a new way to teach in Massachusetts, one pionnered at HHS). The section is about the responsibilities of citizenship and it's taught by an HHS teacher, whose course is mentioned in the thread article (Todd Wallingford):
UNIT 13 RESPONSIBILITIES OF CITIZENSHIP 148
This unit is aligned with the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks. ...
Ninth-grade students in Hudson High Schools integrated Civics-English course learn that democracy is an ongoing struggle, kept alive by an active and informed citizenry who recognize the rights of others and are empowered to affect change. Through community service-learning projects, the students discover first hand the value of civic engagement. In networking and advocating for themselves and their fellow citizens, they learn about the structure and dynamics of their community and gain concrete experience in their investigation of the abstract concepts raised by their Civics-English course.
...snip..
The Need
At Hudson High School, every freshman takes an integrated Civics-English course that engages students in actively exploring the question, What are the rights and responsibilities of a citizen in a just society? During the first half of the year students study the structure and rationale of our democratic form of government. The second semester finds them exploring the conditions that gave rise to the Holocaust. The juxtaposition of these two themes allows students to weigh the benefits of our system of limited government and the value of freedom. At the same time, students recognize that a just society can easily be lost, but never fully won. Democracy, students learn, is an ongoing struggle, kept alive by an active and informed citizenry who recognize the rights of others and are empowered to affect change. The courses community service-learning component allows students to explore their role as responsible citizens.
...snip...
From
http://www.doe.mass.edu/csl/comlesson.pdf
From what I've been told by a reliable source. most of Wallingford's course is Holocaust related.
Note also that he thinks the USA is a democracy!
These are the teachers who are teaching civic to the future leaders of the republic?
This is so vaugue that this teachers bias is exposed by her incompetence as a teacher. She does not understand the difference between teaching argumentation and enforcing indoctrination.
And Service Learning? Being required to perform certain "service projects" to earn a grade, like volunteering in a dog shelter is a better use of time than learning that we don't really live in a democracy, or learning basic math.
Pioneered at HHS by Berman and Stapelfeld, where all the teachers are fair and unbiased.
PING
Yeah, I went to Hudson High School. This really ticks me off. Not that the school was great by any standard, but they did try to do their job without this kind of BS.
I have not yet formed an opinion on whether the links to those web sites with beheading videos should be up there or not.
But I am offended by this teacher Beth Ferns, a self-proclaimed liberal Democrat teacher who, in the words of the article, had "a poster that drew Bowler's ire. In her classroom hangs a poster of President George W. Bush quotes such as, "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier -- just so long as I'm the dictator."
Yeah, right. It is just my job to teach kids who are impressionable how to think for themselves. Don't pay any attention to that inflammatory poster at the front. That isn't inflammatory, it's the truth. It is the same crap seen on campuses everywhere in this country. Kids are unable to speak out because they are vulnerable. They cannot risk poor grades as a result of an unscrupulous educator, and they do exist. This really raises my ire.
You can be sure I am going to write the principal, school board and teacher on that one. I am also going to find others to do the same. I will get the information and post it here as well.
I went to this high school, see my remarks below. Thanks for posting this.
No problem, rlmorel, when I read the article I thought more people should see it.
Let us know what you get in response to your letter, OK?
The psychological blocks, I believe, are erected through years of being brainwashed by liberal public schools and liberal mainstream media.
Thus, in high school, one is observing behaviors which have already been molded years before that time, on almost all sides.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1332291/posts
Related thread PING
I've heard this from various radical leftist college profs: if you give them a liberally slanted opinion, almost no matter how ill-justified, they will give you a pass. However, if you give them a well-supported conservatively slanted opinion, they will hand it back to you with a poor grade and questions up the wazoo, such as "what is the defininition of this?" (for some number of common terms) and so on, until you give up and change your opinion, or take the flunking grade.
In other words, the proper job of a radical leftist teacher is to harass any conservative students and modify their behavior to that of an incipient radical leftist. Only incipient radical leftists-- or those who behave like incipient radical leftists-- are permitted to graduate from these kinds of classes.
Of course, Skinnerian behavior modification is frowned upon as being obsolete in regards to any other educational context (eg, science and math "drill and kill"). And of course, the US as shown by TIMSS has fallen to 12th place or worse in math and science among the industrialized countries of the world when ed school research is actually put into practice in these subjects in today's US public schools. (But that's OK, since many US public school teachers and education researchers have science-phobia and math-phobia to begin with, and could not affect this particular side effect even if they wanted to...)
Social justice defined
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1294646/posts
Social justice has proven indispensable to its proponents because of its ambiguity. If it could generally be understood to mean something like, the equal protection of the laws, it would perhaps be tolerable, but the left rarely uses it in that context. They use it because it is much easier to run on a platform of social justice, than on the more accurate description: social-ism.
This seems to be code for:
The radical leftist nexus of HHS Social Studies and English teachers who dominate the high school system want to re-educate the 9th grade students and help to shape their opinions into the correct mold: society is comprised of two differing viewpoints, that representable by the concepts of capitalism, meritocracy, and individualism, and that representable by the concepts of community, ethnic-cultural-political divisions within the community, and collectivism. Students will be "encouraged" (in other words, required) to struggle with the latter against the former. Technical subjects such as math and science are deemed less relevant to a student's learning (from a societal-change point of view) than encouraging students to prepare for or find productive jobs in the international technological marketplace.
This fulfills the view of Paolo Freire in his 1970 text (so favored among and adopted in whole by contemporary US education researchers), "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" (see http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0826412769/102-7970999-6338548) in which the viewpoint is expressed that education is a subversive force. In particular education is both subversive and real when it is liberating, and that schools maximize their effectiveness when students are led to become political activists, to transform the society in which they are presumed to be oppressed along class, ethic, race, gender, and sexual preference lines.
Teaching math and science is counterproductive for the left.
First, it teaches that there are absolutes, and measurements, and limits to measurements.
Second, teaching the scientific method teaches critical thinking tools; "if this is true, then this should be true, and I can check that by..." ("Bush tripled the National Debt" becomes a testable hypothesis rather than accepted fact).
Third, it calls into question Gloobal Worming, which is not to be questioned!
"Ongoing struggle" sounds so Maoist, so revolutionary.
I'd expect that from the Sensero Luminoso, not a high school teacher in Hudson, Massachusetts.
And how cynical to bring up an "active and informed citizenry" when the teacher himself believes that we live in a democracy (not a republic).
Civic engagement obviously does not include teachers being questioned by students- that results in a half-page article explaining how wrong the students are.
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