Posted on 08/31/2012 1:13:24 PM PDT by Kaslin
What happens when progressives run government schools? They judge teachers based upon their own socio-political values.
They don’t care if Billy or Suzie can read or write very well. But they want to make sure the kids are aware of all the social injustice plaguing the United States of America.
That’s the only possible explanation for Denver Public Schools’ new teacher evaluation system .
The system will rate teachers as “distinguished” – the highest rating – when they (among other things):
Encourage students to “challenge and question the dominant culture.”“What exactly does this language mean?” said Pam Benigno, director of the Independence Institute’s Education Policy Center, in a news release “Will 4th graders be taking field trips to Occupy Denver for extra credit?”Encourage students to take social action to change/ improve society or work for social justice.
Use Visuals and artifacts to represent various cultures/world groups.
Perhaps not “extra credit.” That may be their main assignment for the semester.
This is not the first time such an ideological litmus test has been placed on government school teachers.
The University of Minnesota College of Education took a lot of heat a few years ago, when it was revealed that students had to demonstrate they had “cultural competence” in order to receive their teaching degree.
That meant prospective teachers were required to “accept theories of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression’ develop a positive sense of racial/cultural identity, and recognize that schools are socially constructed systems that are susceptible to racism … but are also critical sites for social and cultural transformation.”
And what do these types of policies lead to? Check out the following story from MinnPost.com:
“A month or so ago, Sarah Skahan let herself get knocked off her game by a 10-year-old boy.
“The boy, who is African-American, spends time with Skahan, the speech language pathologist at Westview Elementary in Apple Valley, to get support for his learning disability.
“On this particular day he was shading in parts of a map, finishing a geography assignment.
“’Man, I’m never going there,” he snorted as he started coloring Florida.
“Skahan stopped what she was doing and asked him what he knew about Trayvon Martin. Quite a lot, as it turned out. The shooting was a topic of frequent conversation in the boy’s home.
“The two spent time every day for the rest of the week working on a letter to Florida’s attorney general, urging him to prosecute Martin’s killer. When George Zimmerman was taken into custody, the student came to tell Skahan.”
Never mind that Florida’s attorney general is a woman. How does this language pathologist have the right to suggest to a student that a defendant in a criminal case is innocent or guilty? Shouldn’t an educator encourage an interested student to look closely at the case and carefully form an intelligent opinion, instead of clinging to a heated, kneejerk response?
But of course most extreme leftists convicted Zimmerman in their minds within minutes of the shooting, purely based on racial considerations. An alarming number of government school teachers are quite liberal, and they’re becoming a lot less shy about sharing their views with students.
But why should they be shy, when they are encouraged by their employers (and official evaluation systems) to push their views on students?
Who’s willing to bet that Skahan has been evaluated and determined to be a “distinguished” educator?
Poisoning the well
Meanwhile, the state of AZ banned all ethnic studies classes in high schools, or any course that promoted racial division, or one race over another. In other words, no revisionist history.
>>Encourage students to “challenge and question the dominant culture.”
In public schools, the dominant culture is baggy pants, leftist teachers, promiscuity, drug use, and utter failure. Is that the culture they want challenged??
(That was rhetorical, of course.) We all know what that means: “Kill whitey!!”
But the dominant culture, at least in the Denver public schools, is progressivism
Postmodernism rejects the notion that the purpose of education is primarily to train a child's cognitive capacity for reason in order to produce an adult capable of functioning independently in the world.That view of education is replaced with the view that education is to take an essentially indeterminate being and give it a social identity. Education's method of molding is linguistic, and so the language to be used is that which will create a human being sensitive to its racial, sexual, and class identity, and to the oppression of all minorities by evil white, middle-aged, Christian, heterosexual, rich males of European descent.
Among many other aware Americans, I was deeply disturbed that Obama was – and still is – unqualified to serve as POTUS under Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution. I was even more disturbed that the wimps in Congress and others in alleged positions of authority failed in their duty to enforce the document they swore an oath to “…protect and defend…”
As we approach the end of the error of allowing a usurper to serve as POTUS, it occurred to me that unless the government school system here is not cleaned up and purged of anti-American, one world, PC correctness propagandists formerly called “teachers,” in one or two generations they will accept another flaming Marxist or a Martian as POTUS.
I am glad someone is pointing this out, but it has been going on for at least 30 years. This is why there are so many morons out there demonstrating, occupying and having to be taught everything from scratch if they manage to get a job. They are being indoctrinated and dumbed down at the same time. We have allowed the Left to take over higher education as well as K-12. Anyone who questions or opposes this is a “bigot.”
Denver started moving hard-green left in the Nixon years, and nothing ever changes there. People still believe in government.
I didn’t know AZ did that, and I suspect John McPain was not pleased about it either.
“We have allowed the left to take over higher education...”
The left has engaged in an aggressive, Alinsky-like, steady, dogged campaign to acquire positions in higher and basic education and have succeeded.
All of those brilliant, intellectual(sarc) Occupiers are the result of their efforts.
IMHO
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.