NCBT Teacher Justin Parmenter writes here about the reaction of the Republican-controlled Legislature to their rampant fear that teachers might try to indoctrinate students into radical views of American history and society, like discussing shameful episodes in the past. The legislators want patriotic history that makes students proud to be Americans.
First they passed a law requiring teachers to make public their lesson plans to prove that they are not “indoctrinating” students.
Parmenter begins:
Last month the NC House of Representatives passed a law entitled “An Act to Ensure Academic Transparency” which would require teachers to post their lesson plans and details about all instructional materials online for public review.
In defense of their support for the new legislation, which passed almost entirely along partisan lines, some Republican legislators cited the need to prevent indoctrination of North Carolina students.
Iredell County Representative Jeffrey McNeely said, “Hopefully we’re just gonna teach the kids. We’re not gonna try to indoctrinate ’em or teach ’em in a certain way to make ’em believe something other than the facts.”
At its meeting today, the North Carolina State Board of Education reviewed glossaries and unpacking documents related to new state social studies standards which will be implemented in school year 2021-22. (Unpacking documents are overarching documents intended to help teachers understand how the standards should be taught).
During the discussion, board member Amy White expressed her view that the standards unpacking documents needed to ensure North Carolina teachers are teaching their students that America is a great nation.
Is that true? Is it indoctrination?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What these people fear more than anything else is the chance that someday others will treat them the way they have treated others.
beautifully said, Jon
Right wing hysteria is on display in red led states. The “boogeyman” belief is that teachers are “indoctrinating” students. This is another way for red states to put public educators on the defensive and overburden them with having to defend their teaching. These laws are an attack on academic freedom. Teachers are very busy people that are accountable to their students and administrators. Requiring that teachers post their plans online daily in addition to all the other daily obligations, is cumbersome and burdensome. It would give parents the right to pick apart any item is a teacher’s plan in which they could nitpick and challenge. These laws are yet another attempt to muzzle and control teachers while charters and voucher schools march along with little to no accountability.
Well said, I agree. As if teachers don’t have enough to do, burdening them with making their lesson plans public is INSANE. Lesson plans are often a guide for what will be taught during the day because the classroom is such a dynamic and fluid situation. Some lessons end up taking up a longer period of time than anticipated and so other planned lessons may become postponed until the next day. Publicizing lesson plans are an extra onerous task for the teacher in a long list of extra busy work-type tasks. What’s next, making teachers’ medical conditions public?
True enough. Add to this the myriad ways lesson plans are supposed to look. I have found general planning productive but many of the templates rather burdensome.
RepubiQans sound more like the North Korean government with each passing day.. “You will present nothing but shopworn hagiography that lionizes the nation or you will be publicly shunned as an enemy of the state”….
“Academic freedom” is a term lost on those so unamerican and atavistic.
They do, don’t they.
My last school required something like this. People worked around it be not being fully transparent–I know that I, for one, did.
These morons are making teaching less and less possible and less and less attractive. Callisto nailed it above. North Carolina is looking more and more like North Korea.
Unfortunately, the right wants to discourage anyone from becoming a teacher by undermining the benefits and overburdening them with bureaucratic nonsense and testing.
I taught at the beginning and at the end of my career, but as much as I love teaching, I would not advise those close to me to go into the profession today. I spent almost all my time doing ridiculous administrative crap that had nothing to do with actually teaching students–hours and hours and hours of crap like posting everything so that parents could see it, preparing two-page lesson plans for the 22 separate classes I taught each week, filling white boards with required info about the lessons (standard, bellwork, homework, blah, blah, blah), and other such administrative bs.
Every one of these requirements was well-intentioned, but the net effect was that there was very little time left over for actually doing the job. The admin burden was INSANE. Much worse than anything I ever encountered in industry.
These people have declared war on teachers.
Here’s the solution: Give them what they most fear. Teach their children to detest everything their parents stand for.
I worked in the textbook industry for many, many years. One of the reasons why textbooks in K-12 are so insipid is that they have to pass muster by EVERYONE. Diane writes about this in her superb book The Language Police.
When I was at McDougal, Littell, we had a health text not adopted in Texas because we had included the line, “Humans and other mammals lactate.” They were bothered by the reference to lactation, but what really disturbed them was the reference to humans as mammals. LOL.
Surely this doesn’t mean that Texans are other than mammalian. I would say that maybe Texans are, instead, shape-shifting Reptilians from Alpha Draconis, but out of respect for our esteemed blog host. . . .
Various states put out lists of topics not allowed in state-adopted textbooks. These included, at various times, alcohol and tobacco and drugs (no Sherlock Holmes, no 1984), no references to genetics (no Brave New World) or evolution (no The Time Machine), and a lot of other utter nonsense.
I had a superintendent in Missouri return a huge order of lit textbooks because one of them contained a story by James Thurber with this line in it:
“They are so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty.”
I could go on and on and on with lists of examples of stupid reasons given by states and localities for not adopting texts. I once wrote a textbook series that had a critical thinking strand. It was rejected by a state because it did not “contain exercises on making inferences as required by state standards.” It contained lots of exercises on deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning, but evidently, the state committee members didn’t know that these are varieties of inference.
In other case, I included in a textbook the breathtakingly superb translation of Beowulf by the great medievalist E. Talbot Donaldson. His prose translation is renowned for its accuracy. One state didn’t adopt this series because “Beowulf is a poem, and the book should include a poetic version of Beowulf, such as Burton Raffel’s.” The Raffel translation is just awful, in my estimation. It’s replete with stuff entirely foreign to Anglo-Saxon ways of life and thought. It’s laughably bad, but hey, it is broken up into lines. . . .
LOL
I guess it was the use of the word damned.
Nope, not that that put the comment in moderation. Was it lactation?
Evidently, the 11th-grade students of the state of Missouri had never heard the word “damn” before.
It’s both serious and amusing that Rs say you must stick to the facts. The facts support most of critical race theory.
No matter how many times we hear or read that America is a Great Nation, that doesn’t make America a Great Nation.
When tyrants, fascists, kleptocrats, autocrats, Traitor Trump, and his mindless MAGA minions repeat America is a Great Nation without providing evidence-based on all the facts, all they are doing is repeating slogan like Make America Great Again.
When was America ever great except for waging endless wars? If anyone reading this thinks America is a Great Nation, please provide facts to support your allegations.
The U.S. Has Been At War 225 out of 243 years since 1776.
https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/595752-the-us-has-been-at-war-225-out-of-243-years-since-1776
Most if not all of the National Debt may be traced back to all those wars. The U.S. does not have a revenue source that pays for defense/war.
U.S. tax revenue for 2020 was $3.71 Trillion. The U.S, budget in 2020 was $4.79 Trillion
In 2020, the U.S. spent $714 billion on what’s called defense.
What federal programs get most if not all of the blame for the deficit? You already know that answer and it isn’t the DOD.
Did you know that the Department of Defense (DOD) was once called the Department of War?
“With World War II over, the United Nations was taking steps towards what it hoped would be a lasting peace. In its Charter, the UN outlawed wars of aggression (wars which aren’t fought in defense), and as a result, top US military brass felt the American bureau needed a name, if only for PR reasons.”
https://forgottenhistoryblog.com/before-rebranding-the-us-dept-of-defense-was-called-the-department-of-war/
A war by any other name is still a war.
Those who criticize CRT are primarily concerned with diverting attention from the fact that they want to divert us from the corruption dominated on society by those who want to steal from it.
Government X tries to control what teachers teach. Red flag.
North Carolina has been killing teaching since Republicans took over in 2010. The gerrymandering is so thorough that this will not change.
Great read thaanks