Will Fitzhugh, the peerless founder of The Concord Review, sent me this astonishing article. The Concord Review is a marvelous journal that publishes the original research papers of high school students. If anyone happens to know a hedge fund manager or philanthropist or billionaire in search of a worthy cause, tell him or her to contact Will Fitzhugh so that our great high school students who love history continue to have a journal to display their work.
Let’s Have Middle-Schoolers Debate Whether the Holocaust Happened!
May 7, 2014 by EducationViews.org; Houston, Texas
Scott Shackford –
A group of eighth-grade teachers in the Rialto Unified School District (that’s east of Los Angeles in the Inland Empire of Southern California) decided that a good way to teach their students effective debate skills in writing is to ask them to take a side on whether the Holocaust happened and back up their arguments with facts. You don’t need an Upworthy-style headline to figure out what happened after news got out about the students’ assignment. Outrage! Death threats! And so the school district will not repeat the assignment. From The Sun of San Bernardino, California:
Throughout the day Monday, the district fielded angry calls from parents, a death threat and a flurry of media inquiries over the assignment, which district officials initially defended as an effort to teach students to think critically. Ultimately, however, administrators acknowledged the assignment was in poor taste and promised it would not be given again.
“Our interim superintendent will be talking with our Educational Services Department to assure that any references to the Holocaust ‘not occurring’ will be stricken on any current or future Argumentative Research projects,” district spokeswoman Syeda Jafri said in a prepared statement late Sunday.
Initially, seconds before it turned into a massive public relations disaster, the school district was defending the assignment to The Sun as part of Common Core requirements to teach critical thinking. In an early response, one school board member said, “Current events are part of the basis for measuring IQ. The Middle East, Israel, Palestine and the Holocaust are on newscasts discussing current events. Teaching how to come to your own conclusion based on the facts, test your position, be able to articulate that position, then defend your belief with a lucid argument is essential to good citizenship.”
The Holocaust is a current event? Anyway, I can see both where this bus was going and why it was never going to get there. What if dozens of students decided to argue that the Holocaust didn’t happen, given the small amount of information provided by the writing assignment? Even though I believe the slaughter obviously did happen, I could easily see the argumentative eighth grade version of me trying to argue the other side just to prove I was clever. Imagine the kind of public relations disaster it would have been if it got out that a bunch of Rialto students wrote that the Holocaust didn’t happen in a school assignment. Imagine being those kids’ parents.
This is not to say engaging in a look at Holocaust denial theories should be beyond the bounds of education, but perhaps not in 8th grade and not as a homework assignment on writing skills?
Also, the controversy is a good reminder that even when they’re actually trying to teach critical thinking skills instead of suppressing them, public schools sometimes struggle with doing so in a sensible way. If I were a parent, I’d be more concerned about how quickly the school district Godwinned itself by selecting a subject with such an obvious desired outcome and not something that would actually lead to diverse answers and debate. Will they replace the assignment with a debate over whether man actually landed on the moon next? Or whether the world is round or flat? Or maybe this is the public school version of teaching critical skills—only tackling obvious cases where determining the “right” answer is a breeze.
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The Common Core Marches Deeply On, Building Skills—Content and Knowledge-free!!
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TCR Institute [2002]
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
What an obscenity. The blood of millions of children cries out against it. Never forget them.
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Do the CCSS use this as an example assignment, did the district buy materials that included this assignment from a CC compliant company or did the teachers develop this assignment?
Unless the CCSS specially gives this as a debate topic, is it fair to blame the standards for the content of this assignment? There are many debate topics that could have been used, I would like to know who picked the topic.
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Please page through the CCSS appendices and find me one sample performance task or one text that supports this kind of assignment.
This is inflammatory nonsense; this is worse than the “nobody published a crappy worksheet before CCSS” meme.
The worst part about this is that I KNOW Diane Ravitch is too smart to believe that this woefully-misguided teacher’s assignment is truly reflective of the intent of the CCSS speaking and listening standards. What she’s counting on is that her average reader is willing to eat up whatever she’s serving–anything that fits the anti-CCSS narrative, logically-sound or otherwise.
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Where, Anthony, in the post above did Diane Ravitch claim that this assignment was reflective of the intent of the CCSS standards? She did not. Why the attack on a straw man?
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@Bob Shepherd
Title of this blog post: “A Common Core Disaster: Did the Holocaust Actually Happen?”
How am I attacking a straw man? It’s literally the headline.
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The only mention in the post, above, of the Common Core is a reference to the district’s defending this assignment as part of its teaching of those standards. So, nowhere did Diane Ravitch make the claim that this assignment is reflective of the intent of those standards. She didn’t even remotely hint that it might be.
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To say that this is “a Common Core disaste”r is not to say that the assignment is reflective of the intent of the standards. The post clearly says that it was the district that was putting forward the absurd defense of the assignment as being in some way connected with the Common Core. So, while the headline does not clarify that, it does not suggest that the standards themselves invite the creation of such ridiculous assignments. I interpreted the headline to mean, “this is an example of a disaster that occurred in the name of the Common Core,” and I do not see the justification for reading more into it. I am no fan of these puerile standards, but in comparison to this assignment, the standards are brilliance exemplified.
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No woman, or man, would crank out over 300 posts a month, even while in the hospital having surgery, if she, or he, had a selfish agenda. It is obvious this woman cares. I care a GREAT deal, and I’m lucky to put out a blog a week. Stop thinking about Common Core and start considering the agenda. Start thinking about what the future will look like for our children. Diane Ravitch is quite obviously an intelligent woman – she sees this future. Putting our children in the hands of greed is, without a doubt, the wrong hands. This isn’t about Common Core; this is about the agenda. Leadership starts from the bottom and works its way up. That which begins at the top and asserts itself downward is not leadership, it’s dictatorship. A dictator is a great king – on a one man island.
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@ Robert,
If saying that this assignment is “a common core disaster” does not mean that “the assignment is reflective of the intent of the standards”, what exactly does it mean?
How about an alternative headline: “A Teacher Education Disaster: Did the Holocaust actually happen?” That is not to say that teacher education actually had anything to do with the assignment, just that teachers made the assignment, and, of course they were educated.
I would just move on here. It is pretty clear that that headline was misleading.
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Out of the 136 million (25,000 US middle schools x 5 history classes a day x 285 school days) daily 8th grade history lesson plans given this year (give or take), this particular lesson will be seared into the Common Core brand for all posterity.
Diane’s sensational blog title, by virtue of direct association between “Common Core” and “disaster” and “holocaust” helps fuel the frenzy. I adore her and respect her work but it was a cheap, Fox News Corp-like shot.
Can you imagine when every lesson plan that is not planned right will be a CC disaster? If we are going to be screaming this way for every teacher faux pas working in states that receive common core funding, so will the forces who want to teach the impossibility of evolution, a 6,000 year old Earth, is torture, assassinations, or executions justified, or anything else that is perceived a war on god.
Testing fever and VAM junk science aside, Common Core is essentially the formal questioning the validity of what people like Sarah Palin spouts off when the lights are on and the cameras are rolling. I didn’t think that was the end-game in this particular blog. Furthermore, I think the battles waged at this site should be chosen a little more carefully. If poorly planned lessons are going to be the judge of Common Core standards, than Diane may as well provide a link to Fox News to cross reference these bomb-shell stories. I really expected better.
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From the district’s response:
“Our interim superintendent will be talking with our Educational Services Department to assure that any references to the Holocaust ‘not occurring’ will be stricken on any current or future Argumentative Research projects,” district spokeswoman Syeda Jafri said in a prepared statement late Sunday.
That would be “ensure” not “assure.”
It is suggested in the article on this assignment in Reason that the assignment should have been to research Holocaust Denial and to present analysis of that phenomenon. See here:
http://reason.com/blog/2014/05/06/lets-have-middle-schoolers-debate-whethe
“This is not to say engaging in a look at Holocaust denial theories should be beyond the bounds of education,” the article says.
Yes, much, much could be learned from “engaging in a look at Holocaust denial theories.” Students could learn much from that about the dynamics of radicalization and brainwashing and prejudice and about fallacies of reasoning and rhetoric. But it would be CRAZY to give either the original assignment or any alternative assignment involving having the students do original research. Why? Because researching this topic would send students to websites belonging to very dangerous Holocaust denial groups–jihadists and skinheads and white power groups other dangerously lunatic organizations of various other stripes.
Do I think that the free speech of these teachers is being violated by forbidding these teachers to give such an assignment again? No, I emphatically do not. Here’s why: We do not give students assignments to research whether the Civil War happened or whether slavery occurred in the United States because doing so would be absurd. This assignment was precisely that absurd. It is no less absurd because there are a few complete lunatics who believe the absurdity. And in this case, the absurdity is compounded because those lunatics also happen to be hate groups would would happily repeat the horror that they deny.
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You don’t think that, especially with guidance, kids are capable of recognizing the rantings of jihadists, skinheads and other white power groups for what they are?
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I do, of course, think that this is possible with guidance. But I’m sure that you would not want to send all kids, whatever their abilities or understandings, into the clutches of such hate groups. You wouldn’t want them clicking on the “Join to learn more” button, I assume. I certainly do not. And who would be present to explain that this or that statement on the website is a complete fabrication? Again, having kids do independent research on such a topic is exceedingly dangerous. I do not myself visit such websites and would not. For one thing, such sites and the traffic to them is routinely monitored by various national security and police organizations, and persons visiting such sites commonly have their computers compromised by those groups. I would not relish the thought of making my students “persons of interest” to the Department of Homeland Security!!!
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I’m sorry, this may not be a popular position, but I really don’t see the problem with this assignment. It doesn’t seem any different than having students debate climate change or evolution. There is massive evidence to support that the Holocaust did in fact happen. What scant “evidence” there is against it comes from very wild conspiracy theories. I would trust students (even mere eighth graders) to look at that evidence and come to the right conclusion. If nothing else, an exercise like this gives kids practice in distinguishing reliable information from the type of wild, speculative nonsense that makes up Holocaust denial. The evidence for one side of the debate would come from first-person accounts, photographs, official records, reputable historians, etc. The “evidence” for the other side would come from Norman Finkelstein. I wouldn’t be surprised if the students on the denial side ended up throwing in the towel – not a bad end to such an exercise.
When I was in school we debated the pros and cons of slavery. As the author of this piece mentions, my smark-alec contrarian little self wanted to do the “pro” side even though I was most definitely not pro-slavery – I figured it would be the more challenging argument. Apparently there were quite a number of contrarians, though, so I got assigned to the con side. We destroyed them in the debate and it just served to highlight that, unless one is a raving racist, there is not (and never was) any justification for slavery. I guess parents would be having fits over that exercise too.
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Dienne, there is an enormous amount of Holocaust Denial literature. It’s really pernicious, hate-filled stuff, full of fabrications and lies. But there is a lot of it.
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I hesitate to wade into this bog, but I don’t recall Norman Finkelstein being a “Holocaust denier.”
[Ducks]
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You’re correct, but he gets labeled as a Holocaust denialist because of his criticisms of Israel and accusations that Israel/the Jews have exploited the Holocaust for their own gains.
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There’s a good topic for investigation too. How the Holocaust and false accusations of anti-semitism are used to paint any criticism of Israel as unwarranted and hateful…Norman Finkelstein wrote an excellent book on that.
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Holocaust denial is much more pernicious and prevalent than you may think. The entire basis for Holocaust denial is antisemitism, which is present in the actual writing prompt that came from this district. Here is part of the prompt:
“write an argumentative essay, utilizing cited textual evidence, in which you explain whether or not you believe the Holocaust was an actual event in history, or merely a political scheme created to influence public emotion and gain.”
THAT is antisemitism disguised as a “debate,” pure and simple. As a Holocaust educator, I am really upset that it seems that no teacher spoke out against this assignment. While I value my job, I would gladly get fired to stand up against an assignment like this.
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“While I value my job, I would gladly get fired to stand up against an assignment like this.”
Are you willing to stand up against and “gladly get fired” a practice that is known to cause harm to and discriminate against students?
The practice of high-stakes standardized testing, that is.
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The spin on this debate topic is quite insensitive to me, considering that many other “inferior races” were targeted during WWII’s European Theater and that Jews were about a third of the civilian extermination total, according to academic research. A wide variety of racial and social undesirables and political dissenters were targeted during the Holocaust. Basically, Gypsies, Jews, Blacks, Poles, criminals, prostitutes, homosexuals, mentally-challenged, Socialists, Communists, pacifists, non-sympathizing refugees and those in exile were all targeted by the Nazis. And then there was the Russian extermination of millions of Ukranians during that time.
The Jews weren’t the only ones that experienced a holocaust in those incredibly dark years on this earth.
Fortunately there is lots of credible and empirical information to address this topic, to which I believe the teachers were leading the children to distinguish from hateful garbage. Yes, to ask a child to prove that something happened can be taken as a denial to its existence…yet, how can this pernicious and prevalent fringe element be addressed?
Have you heard the US lawmakers publicly questioning that multi-culturalism is un-American? How does that differ from what the Nazi’s were saying? “Maybe slavery wasn’t so bad”…is in the public forum of TODAY. It’s crazy! The lawmakers are putting these issues, the ones that the intellectuals resolved years ago, back in our laps and those of the next generation of voters. Yet how many voters still check the box knowing that their chosen candidate believes the earth is 6,000 years old, that God sanctions righteous massacres, assassinations, or torture, either because they actually agree or it is a non-issue for them?
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Debating the merits of climate change or evolution, as theories based on xyz meteorological or geological evidence, could be useful – students ‘against’ would be required to come up with alternate theories. This is not parallel.
Nor do I see the parallel to the pro- & con- slavery debate, which seems a fruitful exercise; there’s no suggestion that slavery never happened. Perhaps a parallel would be ‘debate the pro’s and con’s of ethnic purging’ – could be enlightening.
I see a problem with requesting students to defend the position that a historical event in living memory, supported by myriad photos, eye-witness accounts & the Nazis’ own ledgers ‘never happened’. The deck is stacked against students attempting to prove a negative.
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Spanish and French,
You seem to have confused theory (as used in science) and hypothesis.
Neither evolution nor climate change are hypothesis.
There is no scientific debate here.
“I see a problem with requesting students to defend the position that a historical event in living memory, supported by myriad photos, eye-witness accounts & the Nazis’ own ledgers ‘never happened’. The deck is stacked against students attempting to prove a negative.”
agree.
Same with science issues.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx @Ang: I stand corrected, & glad to see Obama using his bully pulpit today to put climate change in the ‘theory’ column. Have to admit it’s stretching the point to ask students to debate evolution as a hypothesis (indeed, we may be placing ‘con’ students in the position of proving a negative, & finding research among non-scientific screeds)– but w/climate change data so recently acquired, it still might be a good exercise to ask students to find alternate theories for the data…
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Children are just that, children. As a high school teacher who has taught freshmen through seniors, children, even young adults, are impressionable. They look to adults for guidance, for support, and for leadership. They believe us, even when we are wrong. They are strong minded, but when they look up to adults in a position of authority, and value their opinion, adults are in the position to take advantage of this authority. That is exactly what happened in this case.
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Some more Common Core debate topics for a post-literate, post public school America:
– Gravity, fact or liberal theory?
– Toilet seats can give you AIDS: true or false?
– Are sugar, salt and fat really the three major food groups?
– Is there intelligent life in the US?
– America is in decline, and teachers are to blame: correct or true?
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Exactly, Michael. This assignment was both extremely morally repugnant AND completely idiotic. I mean, seriously, the people who cooked this up were imbeciles.
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Gravity. It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law.
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Exactly!
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To answer your questions:
Both
Both
Why not?
No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (including myself)
Both
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As much as I hate Common Core, I think it is unfair to blame it for this assignment. This is just another instance of public school officials being stupid, like the Detroit assignment on DNA that asked students to figure out who the baby daddy was.
Also, note the names of the administrators — pure coincidence? Sorry, but I can’t bring myself to believe it is.
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Wow, racist much?
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Um, no. In denial of reality much?
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Or perhaps you didn’t get my point. Hint: The two administrators mentioned have Muslim names. There is no denying that there is a strong current of Holocaust denial in the Muslim community.
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Hi Jack, I understand your thinking — but consider this: Jay P. Greene (his blog anyway, guest post by Greg Forster) has explained this correctly. Because of the way CC was promoted (states had their arms twisted by USDOE), and because of the propaganda CC proponents push out (if you like your curriculum, you can keep it), this sort of thing is certain to happen. People will do what they want anyway, and blame it on the Core. This, ultimately, is probably the best reason why none of us should ever agree to top-down reform. It’s human nature, folks! So, although it’s unlikely that Bill Gates really intended for schools to open the doors for accepting the theories of Holocaust deniers, meaning this is not what Bill Gates and his buds actually wanted, it also is not something they didn’t want, either, in the sense that THEY DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO PREVENT THIS SORT OF THING FROM HAPPENING, whereas they did choose to implement CC the way that they did.
Conclusion: blaming this fiasco on Common Core itself is completely fair and appropriate. http://jaypgreene.com/2014/05/06/common-core-and-the-back-door/
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx OR… we could put the ‘blame’ (if it’s our business to assign blame) where it belongs, on the local district. Here’s to letting the local districts make their own mistakes!! Huzzah.
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This has to me the single most idiotic, morally repulsive assignment that I have ever heard of any teacher giving. The equivalent assignments that I can think of are almost all too objectionable even to post in a public forum like this. This is like giving kids an assignment to investigate the merits of treating cancer by sitting under pyramids or to investigate the power of The Secret. It encourages them to spend a lot of time reading compelling nonsense when they haven’t the tools, yet, many of them, to recognize it as nonsense. If a child knows very little of history and standards of evidence and goes to one of these jihadist websites and is told that all those pictures from the Holocaust are fakes, how is he or she to know that this is not so, especially if the kid lives in some redneck town in California where the closest Jewish or Gipsy person is a hundred miles away?
Again, we would never give an assignment to investigate whether the Civil War happened. That would just be incredibly STUPID.
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Refusing to allow utter stupidity into our classrooms is not censorship. Education is about fighting ignorance, not inviting it in for tea and giving it a forum.
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AMEN!
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AMEN! REPULSIVE.
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cx: It encourages them to spend a lot of time reading what might well be, for them, compelling nonsense because they haven’t the tools, yet, many of them, to recognize it as nonsense. I
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Exactly, and for most students middle school is the first time they are exposed to topics dealing with the Holocaust. We spend a fair amount of time teaching background knowledge and using primary sources
related to the Holocaust. Students read personal accounts and usually ask,”Did this really happen?” They have a difficult time rationalizing the horrors. We explain that the liberators photographed the horrors because they did not want future generations to forget or DENY what occurred. We bring in Holocaust survivors ,when we can,to retell their story. It would be inappropriate to tarnish this unit with what Bob referenced as nonsense. I would see no educational value in this debate. I am sickened that someone believed this assignment had educational value.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Let’s remember that in recent memory (my ed), the holocaust (like the Vale of Tears et al purging of native americans) was not taught at all, or perhaps was alluded to in high school history simply in terms of numbers of various ethnic groups killed in WWII. Boomers not already enlightened by relatives began to learn details in books & movies that did not even begin to flow until a quarter-century after the fact.
Always Learning, I believe you make the most compelling argument, that this is a difficult subject for 13yo’s which may best be broached historically with some facts & evidence. I do not believe students are ready to approach the psychology of those who would deny historical evidence until late high school.
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Next week’s debate topic: Do you exist?
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🙂
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I do, but I am not sure about the rest of you.
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Ang, you better hope we do, or you are in big trouble. How long have you been writing to this imaginary blog?
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Bob, as always, you get to the heart of the problem:
“It encourages them to spend a lot of time reading compelling nonsense when they haven’t the tools, yet, many of them, to recognize it as nonsense. If a child knows very little of history and standards of evidence and goes to one of these jihadist websites and is told that all those pictures from the Holocaust are fakes, how is he or she to know that this is not so…”
At this age, they simply don’t have the tools to discern properly. Heck, I know a few adults who aren’t there yet.
It’s not the same, as some have suggested, as a debate about the views of slavery in the North and South. It’s equal to asking kids to consider that slavery didn’t actually exist in America.
This assignment is simply indefensible.
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Some students are just plain angry, and all they need is a site like one of these to have an excuse to hate someone.
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California has introduced a law prohibiting replications of the Confederate iconography while some organizations in the south freely give out post-humous Confederate Medals of Valor. Yet we can recognize both impulses as being the same and civil, at that? To what extent should the Confederacy be celebrated is part and parcel in current events to how we remember the Civil war…what and how it actually happened. Revisionist history is a powerful weapon, my friend.
One solution would be to call this moral dilemma STUPID and bury your head in the sand. That doesn’t strike me as critical thinking. It’s not simple and it never will be–there is no consensus what end of the political spectrum is even behind these attempts of having each generation get farther from the truth.
Food for thought: If I have a book of Stonewall Jackson on my bookshelf does it make me a proponent of slavery of American citizens? A biography of Erwin Rommel: does that make me a Nazi sympathizerDoes it make me anti-Semitic? What about having a book about Sitting Bull or Crazy horse…I guess that must make me a modern day savage or, worse, a terrorist.
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Years ago, I pulled from my bookshelves a copy of Chairman Mao’s little red book. I showed it to my kids and said, “You see this book? It calls for the violent overthrow of the United States and all countries like it. And I can have this book on my shelves and not have the gestapo knock down my door and haul me off to jail because I live in the United States, and that’s what freedom means.” I believe, deeply, in freedom of speech and of thought. These are among my most strongly held values. I do not believe in putting Nazi propaganda before children with no filtering and no context as though it were just another selection to be read. These are entirely unrelated issues.
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I vehemently oppose laws like the California one, BTW. I’m with Milton on this,
“Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” –Aereopagitica
What that has to do with putting unfiltered, unframed anti-Semitic hate speech in front of little children and telling them that it’s acceptable to side with that view based on the “evidence in the selection” I’m not quite getting.
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Maybe they could debate if the American schools are really failing as claimed by a pack of billionaire oligarchs and the White House and if school reform has worked for the last generation to graduate from high school in 2013.
The kids who graduated last year were stating kindergarten in 2001. And last year was the highest on time, national, high school graduation rate in history for every racial group and more Americans are going to college out of high school too.
Since school reform launched, we’ve had one generation go through the schools from k to 12. Where were we with all the numbers in 2000 and what were the results in 2013?
There’s lots of data for an honest debate where logical fallacies are not allowed.
Just to check, let’s see, in 1940 1 in 20 Americans had a college degree. In 2000, that number changed to 1 of every 4 or 25%
High school graduation also shows dramatic results. In 1940 only 24% of the population (or less than 1 of 4) had completed high school. By 2000, that number was 4 of every 5 adults 25 and over.
Click to access c2kbr-24.pdf
What about today, thirteen years later?
In 2013, 41.50% of age 25 and over held an Associate and/or Bachelors degree and 88.15% had earned a high school diploma.
In one generation, the ratio of high school graduates improved by more than 8% and college graduates by 16.5% and the White House calls that a failure?
I think the failures may be found in Congress and the White house and not our public schools.
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Public schools are not a failure – I see student success everyday. It’s our government that is failing right now. What they are showing the public is clearly propaganda. I agree with you Lloyd.
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What’s happening to the public schools is a failure of leadership and the leadership starts at the White House.
In public education, the troops are teachers, parents and children. They don’t make the decisions. The decisions are made by state legislatures, judges, governors, Congress and the president.
Was General Lee, who gave the orders, to blame for losing the battle of Gettysburg or his troops? If a general gives orders that are impossible to carry out, the troops are not to blame. Even Sun Tzu who wrote the “Art of War’ said as much.
Obama’s Race to the Top and Common Core Standards demand that 100% of 17/18 year olds graduate from high school on time college and/or career ready but Obama did nothing but give the order and expected it to be carried out in less than five years while wrapping everything to do with the test in secrecy from everyone.
It was almost as if Obama sent his troops into battle without direction, weapons or supplies expecting them to win by doing something that no other country has ever accomplished.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Lloyd, I’m going to make the leap between your comment and the subject at hand. When times are hard for middle & working classes, & there seems no light at the end of the tunnel, political power-mongers find the time ripe for distracting the public from the failures of government– rounding up the anger & pointing a finger of blame at the politically vulnerable.
Yes, post-2008 is milder than post-1929, but the paradigm’s the same: let’s find a suitable scapegoat– another middle-class group that seems better off (teachers with cheap health benefits & tenure). Different in scale, but logic’s the same, as the Nazi gov’t propagandized that middle-class German Jews had a leg up on ethnic Germans, what with the connections among banking, loans, & private businesses.
Once upon a time I had German friends of that generation (Hitler Youth, then Luftwaffen). They were decent folk with morals, who never would have sanctioned mass murder. But they were persuaded in a youth darkened by a lack of opportunity– middle class suddenly hungry, w/a gov’t so weak it could not even maintain the trains.
These people became Holocaust-deniers in the late ’60’s, because they couldn’t countenance the fact that during the war, victims were run through their town on cattle-cars to the gas-chambers up the line at Bergen-Belsen.
That’s a very dark story for sure, but different only by a magnitude from today’s union-hating un- & underemployed, who imagine that by crushing teacher unions & placing their kids, via their taxes, in sub-par privatized schools, they are somehow getting even– ‘getting theirs’– most especially if they are among those folk who have felt that their evangelical culture has been trampled by an alien culture.
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Othering.
Worked then
Works now.
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This has happened before in the United States.
There was the Chinese exclusion act of 1882 and when any Asians arrived in the United States, they went through Angel Island in SF Bay where there were armed guards and barbed wire. Some Asian immigrants stayed inside the wire for months.
How were European immigrants treated as they were processed through NY’s Ellis Island?
Then there was World War II and the Japanese-American prison camps.
Did we lock up the German-Americans and take away everything they owned?
Then came McCarthyism’s Red Scare from 1950 to 1956.
This is only a brief sample. If we go back to the early 19th century and move forward, we’ll find more—much more.
http://civilliberty.about.com/od/raceequalopportunity/tp/supreme_racism.htm
Starting in the 1980s, this American mania to always have someone to bully, to pick on and use as a scapegoat turned on public school teachers.
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Now this really makes me PUKE! Amazingly stupid. Guess the yahoos want to teach kids to ignore and rewrite history.
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And what grade were you in when your debate over slavery happened?
in what year was that? Was the internet the library of first choice for research back then?
And where did you live–region of country, suburb or rural, deep South or elsewhere?
and what class was this…history or ELA or civics or perhaps a debate club?
Were any of your peers descendants of slaves, or was that even considered?
Did participants in either side of the debate offer up displays, films, or videos of lynchings; or images of hooded KKK vigilantes burning crosses, then the homes, and churches of African American families, or the conditions of work and life among slaves laboring in cotton fields or sugar plantations? What was counted as “evidence?”
You certainly have more confidence in the wisdom of students in grade 8, and their research skills, and the ability of teachers to guide such a debate than I do, especially since the proponents of the CCSS insist on “close reading” of every “text” and now “media image” under conditions unfavorable to critical thinking: specifically without paying attention to contexts outside of the texts/images, without drawing upon any information linked to students’ personal experience, without contextual information about the author or image-maker, and without questioning the author’s/ image-maker’s intent.
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It was in eighth grade. Northern Indiana, rural-small town, 1983. It was an integrated project between the social studies and English departments. At the time, the area was all-white except for a couple Vietnamese families, so I’m pretty sure there were no descendants of slaves. I don’t think any visuals were used, except maybe pictures out of books, but, yes, we (the con side) did talk about lynchings, beatings, working conditions, etc. Don’t remember what exactly the standards were for “evidence”, but we did have to turn in a source list.
I would agree that the Internet creates a whole new dimension which did not exist in my day, and, yes, ELA “reforms” have done a number on students’ reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. Certainly factors to consider.
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I am a retired teacher from the Rialto Unified Public School District. For 18 years, I taught 8th grade English. Anne Frank was the most engaging unit by far for my students. While I think this prompt was poorly constructed with clumsy wording, its intent is widely misunderstood. It was never intended to be a “debate” about whether or not the Holocaust happened. Historically speaking, it is too well documented. It was designed to take an issue where empathy is for Anne Frank and the others in hiding with her, and expose fallacies of Holocaust Denial. By including Denial sites, students were expected to extract quotes to set up a counter argument.
I think drafters of this prompt were attempting to capitalize on student interest in the plight of a young teenage girl during German Nazi occupation throughout much of Europe. I also believe it stems from a problem directly related to Common Core. Normal genre no longer have sufficient “rigor”. Students need to be writing far above their developmental level, therefore educators must design prompts to lead step-by-step, which in this case has led to disaster.
This essay in previous lifetimes was considered “persuasive”. Notice that wording has changed to argumentative. With the persuasive essay, topics have at least 2 sides. Students start by constructing T-charts listing points on both sides of a topic. I think the argumentative intends to assist students in spotting propagandistic argumentation, setting up with quotes, and then demolishing opponents with facts points.
Eighth graders would be far better served being permitted to think and express themselves like 13 year olds, rather than being led by the nose into “higher level thinking”. What has made this a greater calamity for Rialto, is the rest of the world is interpreting this as a debate between two sides. RUSD including leadership, for all its faults, is not anti-Semitic. It has been politically maladroit.
While I think teaching students to identify different types of fallacious and manipulative reasoning is a good idea, I’d stick to the basic traditional persuasive form for a formal writing assignment. High level students will make connections on their own, and many others will catch up as they mature. But the point here is, writing needs to reflect students own thinking at appropriate developmental stages.
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Totally agree. Why can’t children learn pros/cons of age-appropriate topics?
IMO Common Core and the push for the opinion straight into argumentative writing does not differentiate for all kids. Not all kids even want to argue or debate; who decided that is a skill that all kids must now have to be college and career ready? Some kids won’t be engaged by this at all.
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Your point, Ms. Higgans, about the problem in the CCSS for ELA in the emphasis on argument as opposed to persuasion is well taken.
One way in which the Common Core differs from previous textbooks and many previously existing state standards is in its promotion of Argument over Persuasion. In the past, most basal composition texts in the United States had separate units on each of three modes: narrative writing, informational or expository writing, and persuasive writing. The authors of the Common Core opted, instead, to label these modes narrative writing, informative writing, and argument because they wanted to de-emphasize appeals to emotion and appeals to authority.
I suspect that what’s behind that switch from Persuasion to Argument, ultimately, is authoritarian presumptions. It’s as though the authors of these “standards” said to themselves: “These poor fools–these teachers and students–they do not understand, as we do, the difference between reason and emotion. It’s time we gave them some rules to follow there.”
Now, the traditional title for the third mode made more sense, as Ms. Higgans says, because persuasion involves making a case that is BOTH appealing and reasonable, and often reasonable BECAUSE it is appealing. Many matters about which people argue–arguably, all the really important ones–deal with topics for which what matters to people—what they care about/what has emotional meaning to them—is precisely what is at issue, and it is those matters—people’s emotional responses–that are relevant as evidence. The authors of the Common Core make the case that the switch from persuasion to argument is important because “college is an argument culture” (Appendix A). They therefore show themselves entirely ignorant of (or on the troglodyte side of) a debate that has raged in the humanities departments of our universities over the past half century over precisely this issue—whether we can and should treat the curriculum in isolation from its human meaning as mattering and the extent to which those facts that we attend to and how we frame them are power plays with meaning as mattering.
When Coleman stands before a crowd and tells the assembled people that “No one gives a $#&*&*$#*&#$!!! what you feel” and then goes on to explain that people are looking, instead, for evidence, he fails to recognize that how people feel is, quite frequently, THE VERY EVIDENCE THAT IS RELEVANT. It’s peculiar that he doesn’t recognize this, for he studied philosophy, and philosophers have almost all long rejected logical positivism, verificationism, and behaviorism on logical, empirical, and ethical grounds, and as a student of philosophy, he should know this, and he should be familiar with the powerful and compelling objections to those discredited positions. Instead, he spouts antiquated, simple-minded nonsense as current REVELATION. I would even go so far as to say that one can, in fact, derive Ought from Is because what matters to people—people’s “oughts”—are themselves observable, demonstrable facts about the world. In fact, one can apply to those “oughts” the same sort of inductive reasoning that one applies to scientific questions. I find that I don’t like to have sticks poked into my eye and that I feel that people shouldn’t do that to me. I make a generalization: People don’t like to have sticks poked into their eyes, and people shouldn’t do that to one another. And the former part of the generalization proves to be repeatedly verified, and the latter part of it follows logically from the first by a simple consistency criterion. Perhaps David should go back and take an introductory ethics class before he spouts such hoary, discredited nonsense. Of course people give a $@#*$*(*@$!! how you feel and how they feel, and almost no human interaction is free from such concern, including, ironically, his attempt to make his case, which is highly emotion-laden.
And, of course, appeals to authority are not bad in and of themselves. Looking a word up in a dictionary is an appeal to authority. What matters is not that it’s an appeal to authority but whether the authority can be trusted. But, again and again, one finds this sort of simple mindedness in the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic]. Appeals to authority are appeals to emotion and therefore bad. Well, no. Looking up the proper pitch of a ¼-inch bolt in a United Fine standards table is an appeal to authority– not one to which a lot of emotion is attached, certainly, though there is some—people feel good about going to what they know is a trustworthy source, and they feel good about getting the measurement right, and that’s why they seek such a source, and we cannot, as Coleman tries to do, drive a wedge down the middle of ourselves and divorce our rational being from our emotional being, for these are inseparable. Even the conclusion of a deductive proof that could be arrived at by a machine comes to us because we have chosen to use the deductive method because it has been proven to yield results that satisfy, that matter, that we can depend upon, that we care about.
That’s what it is to be human. That’s what Heidegger said our kind of being, in essence, is. It’s caring. It’s giving a $#&$&*#&*!!!.
So, I would suggest to David Coleman that he go read some Heidegger (who is an existence proof that one can be a terrible writer and a terrible human being and yet have ideas worth thinking about).
Ironically, Coleman studied philosophy, so he should know that verification often fails as a criterion for truth. Almost no professional philosophers these days consider themselves verificationists like the A. J. Ayer of Language, Truth, and Logic. At its most extreme, verificationism treats all statements are neither well-formed formulas in a purely formal system (e.g., arithmetic or logic) nor declarative descriptions of that which is immediately present, including the statements that matter in aesthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics, into nonsense. For example, a verificationist would be forced to say that a statement like “We should not commit genocide” is neither true nor false but meaningless. Debate has always dealt with appeals based on logic (formal reasoning), empirical evidence (reasoning from facts), and rhetorical appeal (reasoning from what matters). Removing the last of these removes from debate WHAT MATTERS!!! Literally. What matters. Like the murdering of children.
Coleman puts forward a discredited, narrow, simple-to-the-point-of-simple-minded view of the difference between argument and persuasion, and much simple-minded confusion results. One expects more of someone who was a Rhodes Scholar and who studied philosophy.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx & here. Bob Shepherd. you demonstrate not only your education, but your depth of thinking. As the incomparable Randy Newman said, “you give me reason to live.”
But let’s not forget: this is not an intellectual battle. It’s political.
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I’m not sure I agree with your analysis of what persuasive writing was/is as opposed to argumentative. When we approached persuasive writing with eighth graders, persuasive did not mean an appeal to emotion. Persuasive really referred to the presentation of a compelling argument. Any claim needed to be supported by evidence. Contrary positions were recognized and rejected through evidence. Terminology began to morph with the introduction of Socratic seminars and a resurgence of interest in debate, but I really did not see a difference in purpose or format. A persuasive essay required a well constructed argument.
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never2old, nowhere in my post did I make the claim that persuasion was only about “appeals to emotion.” I did say that the Common Core State Standards distinguishes between persuasion and argument on the grounds that the former involves appeals to emotion and to authority, and I presented a case AGAINST that view. That is a claim in the CCSS, not my claim. What I said was, that “persuasion involves making a case that is BOTH appealing and reasonable, and often reasonable BECAUSE it is appealing.” I discuss, above, the importance of debate “based on logic (formal reasoning), empirical evidence (reasoning from facts), and rhetorical appeal (reasoning from what matters).” You are calling me to task for having a view that is the very one that I have argued AGAINST.
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cx: distinguish, not distinguishes, of course
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Mr. Shepherd, thank you for your thoughtful response. I’d have written sooner, but like everyone else connected with the RUSD English department, I’ve been too depressed.
Your grasp of Common Core is far greater than mine, and you have helped put this in context. You identified what has made me so uneasy about the foundation for teaching of writing of any genre: authoritarian presumption. In the last few years I taught, we were essentially presented with mad lib type prompts. Students simply filled in blanks–quote, quote, quote, counter argument, point, point, point. Critical thinking meant they weren’t allowed to have their own ideas. They certainly weren’t permitted to sound like 13 year olds.
I fully agree this prompt is as horrible as all the critics say. My reason for writing is that I don’t want the wrong lesson to be learned. Anti-Semitism is not at the root of this debacle. Stupidity masquerading as smart is. Also, in a corrupt, corrosive environment, staff too beaten down to stand up for what they know is right.
Much is being made of the current superintendent’s name, Mohammed Z. Islam and the district spokesperson, Syeda Jafri. Islam is new to the job, and was appointed to clean up previous problems (which are numerous); he probably was not in the job when this prompt was written. Jafri is a spokesperson and has nothing to do with policy. Given the serious, and deep, problems of the district, let’s give this man a chance.
But again, thank you for understanding the complexity of this mess.
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I was horrified that people assumed, simply because of the new Superintendent’s name, that he had anything to do with this. As a new Superintendent dealing with a district in crisis, he has his hands full, and I doubt very seriously that this one writing assignment put together by staffers under a previous administration was on his radar. But it’s obscene and racist to assume that this man, because he happens to have an Islamic name, would support giving such an assignment.
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While I applaud your service, Marian, I cannot agree with your assertion that the intent was misconstrued, when the prompt was phrased in such an antisemitic fashion, and leaves wide latitude open to “debate” that the Holocaust didn’t exist. While I teach my 8th grade students that Holocaust denial exists, I would NEVER expose them to the unfiltered garbage that is spouted by these deniers. I do not think you would, either.
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Now I’m curious to see what one of these essays actually looks like. That would be a depressing sight.
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The students were not only exposed to unfiltered garbage, the garbage was reprinted to look like just another scholarly piece of source material, and the students were encouraged to choose a side based on the “evidence” in these source materials and to look for the best supporting evidence from the other side and then to go off and do research on their own, pro and con, which, of course, would take them to a lot of Holocaust Denial websites.
And these are 13 and 14 year olds.
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Thank you for your reply. I am as appalled by the prompt as you are. The source of my guilt is, I’m no longer there. Four years ago, those of us with seniority and “voice” were offered an extremely attractive buyout by the district. If old timers had been there, we’d have been loud in our denunciation of this prompt, and refused to administer it. Spitting on a very young group of teachers who feel they have no leverage does not help the situation. I retired several year before I intended because I felt staying would not fix what was wrong with the Rialto district. The dysfunction of the district is complex and, no matter how bad the prompt is, anti-Semitism is not the root of the problem. Stupid masquerading as higher level thinking skill is. You are right, giving equal weight to deniers would never have entered my classroom.
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I wondered if the wiser heads had been ushered out of the classroom. I’m glad they at gave you a “golden parachute.” Young teachers bring an energy and enthusiasm to the classroom as well as new ideas, but they do not always have the wisdom that was obviously lacking here. This story won’t be the last fiasco reported if experienced teachers continue leave or are forced out at the current rate.
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The age distribution of teachers has certainly changed, getting slightly younger in recent years but still much older than teachers were as a group in 1996 or earlier.
Here is my source for this: http://www.ncei.com/Profile_Teachers_US_2011.pdf
There are other sources as well.
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I only glanced at the report, but it would seem to support my contention that older teachers are leaving at an increasing rate. It also showed that an increasing number of new teachers are coming in through alternative certification programs. I’m not sure of the implications of that since there are good and bad programs and I am not sure what they consider to be the regular certification process. I will have to read the full report. I will also be interested to see if they disaggregate the data on teacher attrition since I wonder if it is evenly distributed across school systems or if it is concentrated in certain types. Are new teachers even distributed or concentrated in turnarounds? charters? How are older teachers leaving and from where? This report would be an interesting one for Mercedes to examine.
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It was the percentages in table 1 that i thought you might find interesting. In 2011, 31% of teachers were over 50 years of age. It was higher in 2005 when 44% of teachers were over 50 years of age, but 2011 has a higher proportion of older teachers than in either 1996 (24%), 1990 (13%) and 1986 (22%). Given that older teachers were a far higher percentage of teachers in the middle 2000 than average over the last 30 years, it is not surprising that older teachers would be more likely to leave the teaching profession than younger teachers.
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“The proportion of public school teachers who have five or fewer years of teaching experience increased from 18 percent in 2005 to 26 percent in 2011. At the other end of the spectrum, the proportion of teachers with 25 or more years’ experience dropped from 27 percent in 2005 to 17 percent in 2011. These newer teachers are considerably more open to proposed reforms in the profession and in American education.”
It looks like the argument should be framed around experience as well. Almost 34 percent of experienced teachers left the profession in six years. That is probably the better measure since not all older teachers are career teachers. I fact, that brings up another interesting question. How many older teachers entered teaching after another profession during different time periods? The interest I expressed in other questions that require disaggregation of the data still apply. Our discussion only highlights the necessity to analyze statistics carefully. This report addresses a lot of interesting questions.
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I can’t find the paper, but a while ago I read about the large increase in the number of teachers in the early 1980’s resulted in an unusually young group of teachers. As this group of teachers aged, the median mean teacher age went up with them. It seems to me that the large number of experienced teachers leaving the profession is at least in part do to the unusual large group of experienced teachers currently teaching.
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Click to access Profile_Teachers_US_2011.pdf
If you hit commented after someone’s name, it takes you right to the thread. I just scrolled up to find where you cited it earlier. I couldn’t find it either even though I saved it. My files are messy.
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I think the topic chosen is much too sensitive. I believe all of these objectives could have been met by exploring other topics unrelated to anti-Semitism. Some topics should be left alone for no other reason than out of respect. This is no different than asking students to prove slavery is justifiable when its the most economical means to produce a harvest, or beating women is acceptable because they are weak anyway, or human trafficking is a great way to improve the economy and provide ‘adult entertainment’ – supply and demand.
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Some things are just WRONG!
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Yeah, BUT… in 8th grade, it can be very illuminating to examine ‘bad thinking’…
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I live in an area that has the highest percentage of Holocaust survivors in the country. Our eighth grade social studies and language arts programs included a unit on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism that was developed under knowledgeable leadership. To not talk about anti-Semitism in connection with the Holocaust would have been like talking about the Civil Rights movement without acknowledging racism. How do you read Night without addressing it? I do agree that the prompt that was provided, even when put in context as a response to Ann Frank, was not the best way to address Holocaust denial. I rather suspect the intent was to examine the obvious denial during the war on the part of the United States and many other nations, all of whom had major issues with anti-Semitism themselves. We were horrified afterwards when the camps were exposed, but we closed our eyes to what we didn’t want to believe while these atrocities were occurring. Our forced internment of all Japanese Americans was a topic of discussion as well. Eighth graders can deal with these issues, but definitely not without careful planning and supervision. Blaming CC is a bit of a reach.
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A few days ago, I was at the Florida Holocaust Museum to hear a talk given by a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Before the talk, I had the privilege of viewing the museum’s exhibition of Kaddish in Wood, Woodcarvings by Dr. Herbert Savel. These are painted woodcarvings of portraits of children who were murdered in the Holocaust, each paired with the photograph from which Dr. Savel worked. Row upon row of little faces. Babies. Toddlers. Children of school age. Clutching their dolls. Smiling for the camera in their dress clothes. Beautiful little children. Innocents. Full of dreams and promise. Row upon row upon row of little, loving faces
of murdered children.
This assignment is an unspeakable obscenity, a disgrace to the memory of those little ones.
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Thank you for that, Bob. My father’s family that remained in Russia, were registered, taken to ditches, and shot dead in Brestlitovosk, Russia in 1942. Man’s inhumanity to man is a reality. A better debate would be why humans continue to kill each other.
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I think you nailed it right here – there is a disassociation, an inability to empathize.
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http://www.theonion.com/articles/nadir-of-western-civilization-to-be-reached-this-f,2812/
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It’s tough to get the timing of these things exactly right.
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Yeah, just when I think that the nadir has been reached, Arne Duncan issues another policy statement.
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It’s like trying to call the top on Yahoo! stock in 1999.
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I happen to have been a principal of a school in the very county (San Bernardino) in which this disgraceful assignment was given. This is also the county in which the Parent Trigger Law was first pulled. Is it any wonder? If we don’t clean up our public schools, then more and more parents are going to have such voucher and take-over explanations of why they can’t fight for public schools anymore! Wouldn’t you send your kid to a respected charter school over one that gives horrendous assignments like this and then tries to blame it on the Common Core????
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No. I would never send my kid to a charter school, for the same reason I don’t shop at Wal Mart, or throw garbage out my car window to litter the highways — it’s bad policy. If you don’t like your public school, work to change it. It’s called democracy. Having charters getting public money but not playing by public accountability rules is not democratic, period.
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Of course, the way to improve the quality of the teaching staffs in our schools is not to reduce them to the status of at-will employees delivering prefabricated scripted test prep lessons to get them ready for invalid standardized tests.
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No. This is one teacher, one school, one district. This is not ALL.
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Jay P. Greene (his blog anyway, guest post by Greg Forster) has explained this correctly. Because of the way CC was promoted (states had their arms twisted by USDOE), and because of the propaganda CC proponents push out (if you like your curriculum, you can keep it), this sort of thing is certain to happen. People will do what they want anyway, and blame it on the Core. This, ultimately, is probably the best reason why none of us should ever agree to top-down reform. It’s human nature, folks! So, although it’s unlikely that Bill Gates really intended for schools to open the doors for accepting the theories of Holocaust deniers, meaning this is not what Bill Gates and his buds actually wanted, it also is not something they didn’t want, either, in the sense that THEY DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO PREVENT THIS SORT OF THING FROM HAPPENING, whereas they did choose to implement CC the way that they did.
Conclusion: blaming this fiasco on Common Core itself is completely fair and appropriate. http://jaypgreene.com/2014/05/06/common-core-and-the-back-door/
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If Bill Gates had good intentions, he wouldn’t be shoving his garbage down American throats. He would have gone about this the right way; he would have provided research, and he would have had a dialogue with citizens, educators, and legislators. This would have started at the bottom, not the top.
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It is no secret that I have had issues with the Common Core State Standards. But I do not think that any argument can be made that this obscene assignment is a consequence of the Common Core. It provides, unfortunately, fodder for those who wish to bash teachers and bash public schools. We have 3.5 million public school teachers in the U.S. Those teachers give a hundred million assignments a year. Inevitably, there are going to be a few insane, repulsive assignments. Nothing in the Common Core encourages an assignment like this.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Agree. If this assignment shows anything, it’s insensitivity to the history of a group perhaps not well-represented in the district’s population. You would not see such an assignment in the NYC-metro area. However we in the NYC-metro area might foolishly assign a debate subject insensitive, say, to the 19th-c. persecution of Mormons.
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This is a reply to Bob Shepherd above: Nothing in the Common Core discourages anything like this either. This sort of thing is precisely to be expected when you have something like Common Core — imposed from the top, but without ongoing quality control. Jay P. Greene (his blog anyway, guest post by Greg Forster) has explained this correctly. Because of the way CC was promoted (states had their arms twisted by USDOE), and because of the propaganda CC proponents push out (if you like your curriculum, you can keep it), this sort of thing is certain to happen. People will do what they want anyway, and blame it on the Core. This, ultimately, is probably the best reason why none of us should ever agree to top-down reform. It’s human nature, folks! So, although it’s unlikely that Bill Gates really intended for schools to open the doors for accepting the theories of Holocaust deniers, meaning this is not what Bill Gates and his buds actually wanted, it also is not something they didn’t want, either, in the sense that THEY DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO PREVENT THIS SORT OF THING FROM HAPPENING, whereas they did choose to implement CC the way that they did.
Conclusion: blaming this fiasco on Common Core itself is completely fair and appropriate. http://jaypgreene.com/2014/05/06/common-core-and-the-back-door/
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For God’s sake, I should not have looked at this. Now I’m going to have to pull my kids out of public school.
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I am going to puke. Not because of the stupid topic; I’m largely over that. But because of this sad, pre-fab, vacuum-sealed, “Grade 8 ELA Performance Task, Student Booklet” that requires students to read, and uses the word “research” to describe: (1) an “article” from freaking about.com, (2) an “article” from the freaking History Channel’s web site, and (3) and an “article” from an apocalyptic web site called “biblebelievers.org.au” (yes, dot-org, dot-au).
Note: “You will read and discuss multiple, credible articles on this issue.”
Oh, you mean these articles?
Note: “You will now read and annotate the three articles provided.”
I have to annotate “1900shistory.about.com” and biblebelievers.org.au?
I am trying to imagine the world through the eyes of an 8th-grader who is handed this crap by an authority figure and expected to take it seriously. It’s nightmarish.
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“I am trying to imagine the world through the eyes of an 8th-grader who is handed this crap by an authority figure and expected to take it seriously. It’s nightmarish.”
Welcome to the world of a biology teacher.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx details, please! Is this a CCSS booklet!?
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Please don’t pull your kids out of public schools because of the admittedly horrifying actions of a few. There are hundreds of excellent Holocaust educators out there. I have met many and they’re remarkable.
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What upsets me isn’t the possibility that my kids won’t be taught properly about the Holocaust in particular. It’s *my* obligation to make sure that happens, one way or another. What upsets me is that this is more or less what these “Student Packets” are like, no matter what the topic is. That students are reading and annotating sad printouts from random web sites as a “Grade 8 ELA Performance Task.”
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx details pls flerp? what are these booklets, who puts them out?
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My God. This is worse than I could have possibly imagined. These people should not be allowed to continue teaching. The teachers and the administrators who allowed this to go forward should be replaced immediately. They are a real and present danger to children. Unbelievable.
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If you have the stomach for it, read the second of the three “source materials” provided with this assignment. Unbelievably racist, filthy, evil garbage, presented to 8th-grade students (13 or 14 years old) with no framing whatsoever to suggest its nature. The students are asked to look at these sources and decide which side they are on with regard to this “issue.”
The second of these “source materials” says that the Holocaust is a “profitable hoax,” that scientific evidence proves that gassings never occurred, that there are no wartime documents exist that mention “reasons for genocide,” that the Diary of Anne Frank is a hoax, that the Holocaust was made up to bring money into Israel, that Jews refer to this hoax as their “Shoah business,” that when responsible people in the media try to reveal the truth about this, they are called Antisemitic or Skinheads or Nazis even though “those who question the Holocaust are ordinary citizens,” that the media collaborates in the hoax, and that people continue inflating the numbers for this event that “just like out debt/tax money . . . just keep coming out of thin air.”
As part of the assignment, kids are asked to state their position on the issue and then “Based upon the sources,” identify “the best examples of textual evidence . . . that support [sic] a possible counterclaim.”
Some people believe that there is a spaceport under the Vatican and that green lizardlike alien shapeshifters use this port to travel back and forth to Earth and that these shapeshifting aliens are members of the secret committee of the Illuminati that rule the world.
Read the following source materials and decide where you stand on this issue. Now, based upon the sources, identify the best examples of textual evidence that support the counterclaim. Now, have a group discussion. Did you change your mind about the spaceport and the aliens based on this discussion? Why, or why not?
The idiocy of this, and the racism, is just beyond belief. Absolutely, utterly shocking.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx you did not provide a link to what you are reading?
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I do provide the links below, S&F
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Thank you, Flerp for providing that link to the assignment. I cannot believe that they included that Holocaust denial piece as “credible” evidence.
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I find it interesting that the assignment asks for “multiple, credible” sources in one breath and then uses such an unscientific, non-credible source in the next. Those supposed “studies” cited in the article were debunked years ago.
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The multiple, credible sources are three sad printouts from web sites. They all look like sad printouts from web sites. On the one hand, you’ve got about.com and the History Channel. On the other, some other web site. If this were my introduction to the Holocaust, I’ve got to say, it might be a closer call than I’d like to admit. I’d guess I’d have to go with “the Holocaust actually happened,” because I’ve got two of those printouts and only one “the Holocaust is a hoax” printout. Plus I’ve heard of the History Channel, I guess.
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It’s especially sad since there’s a LOT of high-quality information at the United States Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, and others. It looks like it was thrown together. It’s appalling on so many levels.
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These are not just sad printouts from websites. They have been retyped on Rialto School District stationary and have had little text features added (an arrow directing students to go to the next page), and so the racist screed is treated just like any other authoritative text for students to study.
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I’m horrified that 8th graders are being asked to complete this poorly constructed assignment on one of the most horrific incidents in 20th century history. Perhaps I’m cynical, but I see this as exactly the kind of emotionally distant assignment of which David Coleman and CCSS authors would approve. Everything is an exercise in claim and counter claim. Pathos and ethos are unimportant, it appears, based on that telling Coleman video of no one giving a. *** what you think (or feel, can we infer.) Let them state this otherwise. Oh wait, Coleman is busy reinventing the SAT and handing out cow stickers to students who take the PSAT. And the group that copyrighted CCSS, where are they? Making money somewhere else. If teachers are writing such crappy assignments, it’s because administrators have promoted, demanded, or allowed it to meet those CCSS standards. So let’s be clear: Bill Gates paid for this; Arne Duncan demanded it, and every governor, state ed commissioner, legislator, superintendent and school board signed on to THIS. These are what the skeletal standards look like in the flesh.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I have to say you are right, tho i’m still waiting for links to the materials you cite. Coleman’s ELA stds are all about ‘analyze the text’ sans socio-historical context. This becomes truly frightening if the texts to which students are linked are, i.e., anti-Semitic diatribes!
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This crap went out on Rialto School District official stationary, so it appears to be a district-planned lesson. And initially, the superintendent defended the assignment and so was well aware of it. So, it wasn’t just teachers who conceived of and approved of this obscenity. Administrators were also involved.
The lesson looks very much like a bizarre, twisted version of a lot of Common Core modules being created around the country with funding from a few big players in the Education Deform world. Does anyone know under what auspices and with what funding this module was created? That would be very, very interesting to learn.
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Unfortunately, I believe this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Throughout the pages of the Torah and Bible, it is clear that every attack that has come against a nation has NOT come to teach the nation about the attacker, but to teach the nation about God. And, again, throughout history, and biblically, the attack has come upon the Jewish people. There is no question the Holocaust happened – but what we should be concerned about at this point in time, in my humble opinion, is not whether or not it happened; but rather, we should be concerned about what it is we teach our children. The attack on education is an attack against the minds of the malleable – just as in Germany. It’s my faith that Christians should be gearing up to protect the Jewish. The devil hates them because God loves them – they ARE God’s chosen people.
One of my dearest and most respected friends felt that if God loved the Jewish people, He would not have allowed the Jewish people to experience the Holocaust. Another Jewish colleague of mine, who I highly respect, told me the Jewish people have never felt as though they belonged in any country. I can’t speak from the Jewish perspective, but my prayer is that God covers them, and that He covers education, and that He covers this country. The evidence of evil in this world is the proof that evil exists. The evidence of good in this world is the proof that God exists. In both the Torah and Bible, God gave man dominion over the earth. He works through our hearts. My faith is that in Germany, had man opened his heart sooner, the Jewish people would not have suffered – or at least not as much. They are a treasure, and they should be cared for as such. We should make sure our children understand this – always remember, never forget. The Holocaust happened.
Don’t let this be an excuse to turn against public education. One misguided teacher cannot account for all educators. It should be motivation to put our hearts in check. The good news in the Bible is that we know the end from the beginning – WE WIN!
Our foundation was built on, “In God We Trust.” I pray we, as a nation and through God, remember that foundation and hold it dear to our hearts.
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Here is the second of the three texts that this obscene assignment presented to students as source material:
http://biblebelievers.org.au/holohoax.htm
The amateurish racist screed was reprinted on nice Rialto School district stationary like any other selection for scholarly attention by students:
The site from which this racist screed boasts a lot of other Holocaust denial material, a lot of material about the secret society of the Illuminati who run the world, a defense against claims that Hitler had Jewish ancestry (!!!!), information about how the moon landing was faked, quotations from experts proving that the AIDS virus is harmless, material on the “myth” of global warming, a great deal of anti-Semitic writing (with titles like “The Jews Who Run Bush and the USA” and “Jew Watch”), a defense of the veracity of the infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and a great fest of other absolutely racist, lunatic, evil nonsense.
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Here’s the version from the Rialto School District:
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If you examine the Rialto school district document, you will see that there is NOTHING in it to suggest that the second text is anything but yet another authoritative source.
Well, you know, people have differing views about these matters.
Yes. Some believe in little green aliens who come and go from a spaceport under the Batican, some think that AIDS and the moonlanding are hoaxes, and some think that the Holocaust never happened.
But you don’t present complete lunacy, and especially not racist lunacy, to young children as authoritative source material.
Unbelievable.
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Clearly, the school district sanctioned this. The superintendent first defended the assignment as good Common Core teaching and said that there had been no complaints about it. Then the district issued a statement saying that it was talking to its Educational Services Department to ensure that similar assignments are not given again, which suggests that this was a district-created assignment. Right now, all around the U.S., many districts are creating such Common Core modules with funding from various education deformer groups. This appears to be one of those modules.
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I think it extremely valuable and important to teach children about racism and genocide. In the course of such study, it will be necessary, if that study is to be credible, to present materials that are offensive. I think it entirely appropriate and important to provide older students with examples that illustrate the patterns of thought and techniques used to brainwash people into adopting racist views and committing evil acts.
But it is also very, very important that this material be framed properly–that it be presented, clearly, as the evil, sick, pernicious drek that it is. And it is also extremely important that such materials be presented only when students are old enough and mature enough to view them critically. How well I remember being in middle school and having kids in my class draw swastikas on their notebooks. They had no idea what they were doing–they just thought that that was vaguely taboo–like drawing a skull and crossbones or using a “bad word.” They didn’t have the critical judgment, yet, to think clearly about what such an action meant. These are not kids to whom you hand an unfiltered, unframed, racist screed reworked to appear like just another selection to be read.
In this case, the extremely offensive, racist material WAS presented by the school district as just another selection, presenting just another viewpoint, a viewpoint that students might reasonably adopt and defend. And the assignment invited students to do precisely that–to take one side or the other on this “issue.”
I am completely, utterly appalled at the stupidity and callousness and ignorance of children at this age evidenced by the teachers and by the administrators who sanctioned, distributed, and defended it. These are not people whom I would want to have anywhere near my children.
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cx: I am completely, utterly appalled at the stupidity and callousness and ignorance of children at this age evidenced by the teachers who created this district assignment packet and by the administrators who sanctioned, distributed, and defended it.
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I’ve been involved in creating Common Core modules, but please believe I have seen nothing like this in my district. I’m adamantly opposed to Common Core based primarily on the agenda, but I am trying to take anything good I see in it and make something beneficial for my students: http://gerriksonger.wordpress.com/2014/05/04/teaching-to-the-common-core/
It’s not my ideal way to teach, but I do have concern for my students. I don’t want them at a deficit when it comes to testing based on my personal belief. Standardized testing is a decision I have to leave for parents. I have my education, for better or for worse, but students still have to get through the increasingly weighty educational mandates our society, or test makers, continues to place on them. I refuse to teach something I believe is immoral, but I am trying to implement whatever I perceive could be useful. When it comes to CCSS, PARCC, or even ACT – I’ll fight the policy but do the best I can for students.
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I agree with you, Gerri. As long as a state is using the Common Core, even though I have strong objections to it on many, many levels, I will do my best to work within the confines of those standards to produce the best lessons that I can produce, given them. That’s what a responsible educator does. As long as kids are being forced to take these invalid tests, and as long as these have great consequence for their lives, for their teachers’ lives, and for their schools, then it will be our duty to prepare students to take the tests, however poorly conceived we think them to be. That’s the sad state of affairs, currently. In the meantime, it is also our duty, and one that I take seriously, to be clear about why, exactly, we don’t think these “standards” and these tests acceptable. We owe it to our students to be absolutely honest to our colleagues and superiors about these matters and to express, clearly and forcefully, our considered, professional judgments.
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I agree, thank you, and I am embarrassed as an educator for the topic of this assignment.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx IF this is Common Core — teaching our kids how to think critically– I think the Rialto district essay illustrates Common Core coming up against the internet. Granted, the students are only 13y.o. However, my kids by the early 2000’s (when internet became universally available), had sufficient moral intent, & sufficient computer savvy, to come up with any number of articles to refute the scum-scammy sites recommended to students in the assignment. CCSS hasn’t got a chance against the internet.
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I agree this is a shockingly bad assignment, and I can’t believe it got past even one person. But it does remind me of some of the terrible examples we have of “argumentation” in the media every day such as the idea that all opinions are equal, that every topic has two, equally arguable sides, that all issues can be divided into pro and con, and all “reasons” to support those sides are valid. I think Newsroom even had a rant about this at one point, that journalists are sometimes too simplistic in presenting both sides of an issue when sometimes there are 3 or 4 sides, or even none because it has been proven already. It is why they pull the crackpots out to provide fodder for their screaming, irrational “debates”. Sometimes a panel discussion is more appropriate than a debate, and we have to teach kids how to read sources as well as how to see the nuance in almost any argument. No way is an eighth grader ready to deconstruct these type of sources. Bob’s analysis of why these kinds of topics are dangerous for kids is spot on.
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Yes, we are treated, daily, to the “debate” about global warming, for example. There is no debate. There are a few fringe lunatics and a few interested parties in the fossil fuels business on one side and there’s science on the other. For a time, global warming deniers could evoke the name of Richard A. Muller, the physicist, but Muller undertook a project to do a massive metastudy of the relevant science and, to his eternal credit as a scientist with integrity, completely reversed his former position on this in a New York TImes op-ed in which he reported that the evidence was overwhelming and conclusive that global warming was real and anthropogenic:
Similarly, there is no “debate,” anymore, about the prescientific folk belief that grammar and vocabulary are acquired, for the most part, via explicit instruction.
On the one hand, there is the science, which says, conclusively, based on overwhelming evidence, that they are not, that grammatical and lexical competence and vocabulary are almost entirely acquired via mental processes (now quite well understood) that take place without there being any conscious awareness that the acquisition is occurring.
And, on the other hand, there is the folk mythology stubbornly persisted in by people who haven’t learned the slightest bit of the relevant linguistics–sadly, some of them educators and state and national education policy makers–who think that these are primarily learned via explicit instruction–by memorizing grammar rules and items from vocabulary lists or lists of roots and their meanings or by such explicit means as consciously applying context clues or analyzing words into their parts, for example.
There is absolutely no question but that such explicit learning accounts for far, far less than 1 percent of adult grammatical and lexical competence. The science on these matters has long been settled but is, much to the detriment of our instructional approaches, not widely understood.
Unfortunately, widespread ignorance about this crucial difference between learning and acquisition has really damaging consequences for ELA curricula and pedagogy, especially since such breathtaking ignorance is now enshrined in our national “standards.” This is one reason why I often refer to the CCSS in ELA as “prescientific” or as perpetrating “folk mythologies about language acquisition.”
But idiot pseudo-journalism typically, as you say, takes this tack. Did dinosaurs and humans actually coexist on planet Earth? Stick with us for the debate after this quick word from our sponsor.
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Well, it looks like the Rialto school district is doing a heck of a job overall, too.
http://www.sbsun.com/social-affairs/20140330/exclusive-rialto-unified-shows-history-of-dysfunction
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Since common core has been implemented in my children’s school I’ve never seen such garbage coming home on a consistent basis. The problem IS common core, not just the implementation. I’m afraid for the future of our public schools.
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Yes. When all is said here, the core truth remains that this race to reform, race to adopt new standards (time after time) and the race to test-test-test have all conspired to rush otherwise sensible people into crafting stupid ideas which, in their cumulative effect, are pernicious.
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