State Senator Lincoln Fillmore is very worried about the teaching of “critical race theory,” although there is no evidence that anyone is teaching it in Utah schools. He is calling for a law requiring social studies teachers to post their daily lesson plans online, so parents and other concerned members of the community can scrutinize them. Teachers are rightly furious.
A Utah lawmaker wants to require that all materials for social science classes in K-12 be vetted and posted online for parents to review in advance — and teachers are pushing back.
Educators say the proposal shows a lack of trust in their judgment. They call it micromanaging. Some argue that it will hamper their ability to teach students about what’s happening in the world in real time. One called it a “classic witch hunt.”
“The ‘witches’ are social studies teachers who dare discuss current events,” said Deborah Gatrell, a teacher at Hunter High in Granite School District, in a post about her concerns.
The controversial idea comes Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, R-South Jordan, as a continuation of the effort by conservative Utah leaders to control what’s being taught about history in the classroom. Fillmore was also the Senate sponsor on the bill last session that banned discussion of critical race theory in public schools in the state.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This ridiculous idea is going to spread like wildfire. Every lunatic parent is going to demand changes in teachers plans to suit whatever crazy beliefs they have.
yup
Yup.
Just more ed reform initiatives to “improve” public education!
As long as public schools continue to follow a “movement” that doesn’t value public education and sees it as a consumer choice public schools will continue to run into this.
Public schools have a fundamentally different mission that the ed reform movement has- the two things cannot be reconciled.
It’s always been incoherent. The ed reform movement has no committment to the basic promise or values of public education. Public education cannot be a consumer service.
It is almost hilarious that high stakes literacy testing has reduced elementary social studies to an afterthought while social studies curriculum gets such scrutiny from the right. Critical Race Theory? Most elementary teachers don’t know what this is. What this really exposes is that educators have done a terrible job communicating or justifying curriculum practices to parents and greater communities. The Republican Party sees this and ruthlessly acts to exploit this lack of transparency. Ignorance is not bliss.
“What this really exposes is that educators have done a terrible job communicating or justifying curriculum practices to parents and greater communities.”
Hello Paul,
Are these the same parents who never before thought to ask teachers what they were teaching in class? Are these the same parents who never thought to flip through their children’s Social Studies binder to see what they were learning?
seems logical that teachers could send home materials rather than posting: if kids are using a text, send it home and ask for the parent’s response. We KNOW that few would participate if they honestly had to read…
“Are these the same parents who never before thought to ask teachers what they were teaching in class? ”
The whole proposal makes no sense: teachers nowadays have no freedom whatsoever and so they have to teach what’s in the textbooks. So parents who are interested in the curriculum, simply can open their kids’ textbooks and start reading.
I doubt that most of the parents who are complaining would be able to understand the textbooks, especially not the biology text, in which they would not be able to get past the word “evolution” on the first page.
I heard a university history professor from Tennessee on one of the Sunday news shows yesterday. She said scholars agree on the causes of the Civil War, what happened after emancipation and during reconstruction. It is fact, but some students are shocked when they are confronted with the some of the material that they didn’t learn in K-12. All of these facts can be verified in primary source material from the Library of Congress. Sometimes the truth makes us uncomfortable, and it is part of being educated.
Paul– I agree with Mamie, and would add textbooks, quizzes & exams. What could be more transparent than children’s homework/ class binders, which are available for parent scrutiny any old time? Why should teachers be spending one minute of their precious time “communicating/ justifying” curriculum practices to parents, except in the rare case when a student’s parent asks them? As for the greater community, let an admin trained to tapdance in public respond to those who don’t trust their teachers and elected BofEd members.
My experience in North Carolina and Alabama is that the education establishment spends far too much time trying to enforce test taking while refusing to help parents understand why we test. Yes, parents could do a better job learning about what is taught, but we don’t do enough help parents know who is covered. Parents are busy and in many cases overwhelmed. I know many who want to keep up with what their children are learning, but they simply struggle to keep up. The right has exploited this effectively and used school boards as a bully pulpit that creates confusion. We can’t see parents as the enemy.
P Bonner “Parents are busy and in many cases overwhelmed. ”
So are teachers. Still, they don’t demand from parents to give regular accounts of how they raise their children, what they feed them, etc.
Yep. Parenting and teaching are each more than full time jobs. It is impossible for parents and teachers to try to do each others’ jobs for them.
“What this really exposes is that educators have done a terrible job communicating or justifying curriculum practices to parents and greater communities. ”
Ah yeah, this is yet another thing teachers have been terrible at. What else? Do you have a webpage with the list? Should teachers babysit the siblings of their students to improve their terrible record?
I have an idea: why not have lawyers communicate better with the public about the laws and what they do with it to improve their terrible record? We all could use better explanation of the laws. How about docs? I think they should post monthly accounts about what they did, how they did it and what they plan to do till Xmas. I certainly would like to be better educated about diseases. How about construction workers? I think they should communicate better about how they break and mix concrete, how they make various chimneys and how long it took for them to finish the last house they built.
Come to think of it, this project is really urgent or the conservatives will exploit our lack of knowledge. Thx for proposing a long overdue progressive defense strategy. I finally see light at the end of the tunnel.
While we’re at it, Mate, we should ofc create a state Board of Business that publishes standards for employee effectiveness for all employees at all businesses (Lord David Coleman could write those under a grant from the Bill and His Ex Foundation; one set of standards would be just peachy for every employee in every job).
Said Board could then take billiond from businesses’ budgets to contract with Pear$on and hotAIR for standardized tests of employee effectiveness, and we should rate businesses and evaluate managers and employees on those scores, tying their pay to the “data outcomes.” And every manager would be required, of course, to post “data walls” containing stats from practice tests for those standardized tests and hold “data chats” with their employees about their results on the practice tests. This would doubtless ensure that our doctors and French fry cooks and stone masons won’t fall behind internationally and solve the problem of economic disparity among racial groups by driving improvement. Wouldn’t be at all disruptive or consume ridiculous amounts of time, resources, and money.
Yes, Bob, work without data driven accountability accomplishes nothing. Let’s VAM the economy! Let’s call it vamnomy. SDP may then write about the venomous vamnomy, but we can ignore that since he is a socialist.
Vamnomy!!! Oh Lord, that’s good! Falling off my chair laughing.
That darned Socialist SomeDAM. He wants to take your cows.
No, Bob, anything but my cows. I cannot let a socialist misguide my unsuspecting cattles. We need to VAMDAM him asap.
I say we organize a daily two-minute hate directed at Socialist SomeDAM, that tool of Emmanuel Goldstein!
Bob, we need to keep it professional; we do not hate anybody. Like teachers are not hated, they just need an appropriate dose of VAM. We are not in 1984 anymore, we have 21st century science and vocabulary at our disposal to guide people and prevent harmful rebellion.
I am looking forward to reading about the weekly plan for our vamnomy in the papers—the same way I was looking forward to reading about the 5-7-10 year economic plans on the front pages during Communism. Back then, workers were evaluated and judged using the scientific method of Marx and Lenin—they were vammed, using the modern terminology.
vammed if you do, vammed if you don’t
And now, the glorious numbers on production of pig iron!
You bring up an important point.
We need VAM for construction workers.
I should have been more specific. By educators I meant district and administrative apparatus, not teachers. Too often parents, particularly those who would be our allies and believe in the public schools, feel cut off by district offices and even principals who avoid interacting with their public. As I wrote, the Republican Party is banking on opaque approaches to the communities we serve as a way to reinforce the misinformation that is being used to assault the public schools. Too often school leadership gives them the ammunition. I agree that teachers are under fire and should be allowed to focus on what they teach without interference.
Never mind, Paul, your post triggered an outpouring of comedic creativity, & we all need a chuckle!
Paul,
Your comment implies that teachers are to blame for not explaining to parents and the larger community what they teach. Most states have curriculum standards and framework, none of which is controversial. Parents can ask the teacher about the plan for the year. Districts can and do hold open houses and parent meetings. Often, these meetings are not well attended. I’d be willing to bet that not a single state mentions “critical race theory” as part of its curriculum standards.
Thank you.
I don’t think this is a new concept. This may be why many history books are filled with the point of view of the rich and powerful.
I taught English for 20 years using two units built around Civil Rights and the Holocaust. These right wing legislators are going to have to police every teacher’s subject area if they want to be sure students are not infected by ideas they find so worrisome. Good luck with that!
yes, imagine teachers who are told to teach “both sides” actually doing that with all of the information NOT included in national textbooks…
Oh my, the fireworks THAT would create!
What we really need is teachers who can talk out of both sides of their mouth , simultaneously espousing the opposite sides of each issue.
Our teacher colleges should get busy developing this skill.
As if teachers don’t already have enough responsibilities and “busy-work” requirements imposed on their busy day. How does this improve education in any way? It doesn’t, it’s just grand standing by some GOP political hack, a Trump clone.
yup
I teach social studies in Utah. The hours this requirement would add to my already huge workload (I have 225 students) is pushing me close to a breakdown.
Poor TOW (I mean it!).
225!!!! I thought I had it bad with my 180!!!!
Thanks. It’s hard some days. This is my 21st year teaching, so I’m more used to it. But to write a really good lesson plan (I have written curricula for several museums) takes HOURS per plan. I have NO desire to do that for 180 days and multiple preps.
That’s what I was going to say. Writing out lesson plans a couple times a year when we’re being evaluated is wasteful enough. Lesson plans every day? Not feasible. How much money is this Utah legislator/clown going to budget to pay teachers for all the overtime? What a fool.
In my last job, I had to complete a 2 1/2-page lesson plan form for every class that included the topic, essential question, standard(s) addressed, materials used, bellwork, multiple intelligences addressed, vocabulary for the lesson, homework, and detailed notes (with student names) on accommodations in the lesson for ESL students and ones with 504 plans or IEPs. These plans had to be emailed to admin by 8:00 Monday morning for the entire week, and they had to be photocopied, punched, and put into a three-ring binder so that any administrator who wandered into class could pick it up and see what was being done. This was ridiculous. Took me all day and much of the night every Saturday and often part of Sunday as well. The same stuff had to be listed on the white board for each class as well. One year, I had FIVE different preps! I had to come in an hour and a half early each day just to write this stuff all out on the white boards. Insane. Of course, there was ZERO time set aside during the work week in which to do this junk, aside from one prep period a day, which was often taken by subbing in another teacher’s class or doing test prep for individual students who hadn’t passed the FCAT and weren’t going to graduate as a result.
When I started teaching back in the 1980s, we also had to submit weekly lesson plans. These included, for each day, the topic and a behavioral objective: “At the end of this lesson, the student will be able to. . . .” After planning my lessons for the week, this part took perhaps 15 minutes.
At the university, I cannot tell what I will be able to accomplish till the end of the class. It dpends on the students’ understanding, their questions, etc. I cannot tell when they will have their tests, either, for the same reason. I imagine, in highschool or before, unpredictability in a classroom is even greater.
Yes! Of course!
Bob, that is perfectly apropos for this Halloween week because it’s a horror story.
Máté, yes, good teachers at every level adjust flexibly to the needs of students during class. It’s what I was trained to do in teacher college. One of the difficulties of teaching online was needing to post assignments before they were due, making any adjustments challenges.
The Utah sledgislature (whose primary instrument is a sledgehammer) includes some of the stupidest people on the planet at any given time.
Every time a parent or legislator tries to insist that they should be the ones controlling what their children learn in public schools, journalists should be ask them the following questions:
Which candidate rightfully won the 2020 election, Trump or Biden? Do you believe that voter fraud or other illegal means were used to defeat Trump? Do you believe that the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6 to prevent Biden from being recognized as president were admirable heroes or criminals?
The framing is always wrong in these articles. The “parents” who are concerned about what their kids are being taught usually also believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
When the framing of every article about this is “parents who believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump want to control what their children are being taught in public schools”, the narrative is very different.
My [engineer] husband saw Diane’s headline over my shoulder and proposed that you should have to teach for five years before you can become a state senator.
Would that in any way be fair to those poor students?
Good point.
If people had to teach before running for the legislature, there would be fewer mandates for teachers and more financial support for kids
Amen
Very true. If people had to teach before running for legislative office, legislators would be more generally responsible, respectful, and competent, but there would be fewer of them. Not everyone can handle teaching for longer than a TFA stint.
The same holds true for tipping. People who worked as busboys (and girls) and wait staff generally always tip better because they know what it’s like. And if they went on to elective office, minimum wage and health care, to take two obvious issues, wouldn’t be so difficult.
I do not think this kind of education through work makes better leaders. TFA doesn’t produce more enlightened politicians and leaders. Most people work minimum wage jobs in their youth, and politicians often brag about this on their CV. They, in fact, are convinced, only lazy people stay in low paying jobs till adulthood.
Under Communism, white collar people were made to work on the fields and in factories to understand the proletariat better. We spent a week or two harvesting apples, grapes or corn before the beginning of every academic year in college. All it achieved was to avoid these kinds of backbreaking jobs for the rest of our lives.
I think many leaders and politicians simply lack empathy, and empathy cannot be acquired except in rare cases. If we want good leaders, we should explicitly test for empathy, not just for expertise in foreign policy.
In the case of legislators, we should count the neurons in their brains.
It’s hard to make decisions when you only have a single neuron.
They are mononeurons, a mutant species, a result of deevolution. Come to think of it, the whole idea of conservatism is turning the wheels of time backwards, I guess to the age of single cell organisms. Maybe this is why they are prolife and prefer single cells like ovum and sperm to mothers who may be too evolved for them.
“In the case of legislators, we should count the neurons in their brains.”
This is less risky than letting them teach our kids and grandkids.
Ohio had a Republican senate candidate debate yesterday. Just remarkable.
The candidates announced they’ll be getting rid of public schools completely. Just planning on abolishing public schools and replacing them all with vouchers. The “debate” was really shocking- 100% bashing of public schools. Not a single positive idea or statement.
This is mainstream ed reform at this point. Vehemently and passionately opposed to public schools. And they want to run public schools! They want us to put anti-public school ideologues in charge of our schools.
What have any of these folks contributed to public schools since this pandemic started?
Nothing. Not one positive idea or productive work of any kind.
!!!!!!
Josh “strives to be dumb as rock” Mandel even got a little coverage for his stellar pandering to morons: https://crooksandliars.com/2021/10/dummy-josh-mandel-doesnt-believe-church
Destroying public education is on the agenda of most Republicans these days. BTW, Biden was criticized because he “failed” to celebrate Charter Schools Week. Bravo Biden!
There is a huge teacher shortage throughout the country, so by all means, let’s make teachers’ jobs dramatically more onerous than they already are. Utah hasn’t suffered as much from the teacher shortage as other states have–yet, but it’s coming. Many fewer college students in the state are opting for teacher-‘training” (roll over, sit up, good boy) programs.
So, does FIllmore actually believe this nonsense about CRT being taught in K-12 schools, or is this simply red meat for the ignorant voters?
I recently taught in a high school in Flor-uh-duh. While we weren’t required to post our lesson plans per se, we were required to maintain class websites on the school’s LMS, to onboard students parents to those sites, and to post all assignments and homework and test topics and dates, including reading assignments. I also posted on those my study guides and handouts. Doing this was a lot of extra work, and it generated a lot of parent emails, but I’m pretty adept with web stuff, so these requirements were not too terribly onerous for me. However, this attempt to enlist parents to micromanage lesson plans in service of a whitewashed curriculum is really egregious.
Fortunately, the parent emails were usually housekeeping stuff: “There is one day left in the marking period. Can my William turn in this assignment tomorrow, along with the 86 others he has missed?”
In Utah we already have to post everything on Canvas. We’re already pretty dang transparent if any parent wants to actually take the time to look.
Exactly. You go to the heart of the matter!
The angel Moroni recently appeared to me, gave me some spectacles that would automatically translate “Reformed Egyptian” hieroglyphics into English, showed me where to dig, and helped me uncover a golden tablet with the following inscription: “State Senator Fillmore’s brainstorm is ludicrous and offensive.”
Well, at least you got your Mormon references right. For the record, most of we Mormons aren’t that nuts
Bob luckily found the missing plate with the crucial commandment to leave teachers alone in Utah and elsewhere.
Ridiculous, of course. But in my very liberal district, I was recently told an article I used with a lesson “reeked of nationalism and American Exceptionalism” (I thought it was appropriate, but my views don’t matter apparently). Bottom line, the pressure comes from both ends.
In Utah, part of the state curriculum lists as required the teaching of American Exceptionalism. Wish I was making that up.
!!!!
Easy. The United States is exceptionally racist. And has exceptional economic disparities when compared to other industrialized nations.
I am currently reading Walter Johnson’s The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States, a book that puts to rest any notion of American “exceptionalism” and could, I think, quite literally make a right-winger’s head explode if they were capable of reading more than a billboard. A few examples:
In commenting on the East St. Louis race riots and massacres in 1917, Johnson writes, “It was an attack on the possibility that Black people might have a future in East St. Louis, might have families and leave a legacy for another generation.” Consider the fate of one young boy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time: the “child…hired to go to the butcher was set upon by the mob. He had been riding a bicycle, and the mob knocked him off if and threw it over a fence. He ran into the house of some white people who lived on the street, but the mob threatened to burn the house down if they did not send the child out. ‘The tenants picked him up and threw him out in the street to the mob [w]here he was kicked and stamped on and beaten until they knocked out his teeth from his head and killed him.'”
Or, consider his comment on conspiracy theories in the early 1920s about how Blacks were invading from the South–much like the “border crisis” today, they were “taking jobs away from Whites”–with rumors “based on the hare brained magical thinking that has so often been the hallmark of white supremacy in the United States.”
Or how money interests got poor Whites to blame Blacks “with the promise of a share in the spoils, [based on] the hollowed collegiality of shared skin…”
Or how can one discover lands, as Lewis and Clark were purported to do, when generations of human beings had lived on those lands for millennia?
Try fitting those ideas into the exceptionalism lessons.
What is the origin of exceptionalism? Is there an “original source”, like somebody’s speech or writing?
Mate, good question. I don’t know the answer. From an early age, schoolchildren have it drilled into them that the US is special, exceptional, created by heroic men and a Divine Hand to create the greatest nation on us. From this mindset comes a willingness to act as the World’s Policeman, a readiness to intervene anywhere to save those we think are the good guys and to install democracy. In the aftermath of Vietnam, then Afghanistan, the ideology is shaky if not demolished.
And is Lincoln a descendant of Millard? That would explain the Know-Nothing tree. (will be interesting to see if this goes into moderation)
Writing lesson plans, as Singer pointed out a few posts ago, is a waste in and of itself. Maybe some of those parents would like to come teach their children. They would be amazed to hear their ideas shot down by students who disagreed with them.
This is, ofc, because it’s redundant. There is planning the lesson. Then there is recording the plan, writing it out, in the form that admin wants. Two different tasks.
Utah is a very backward state.
Living there is like going back 100 years.
English teachers are next. They will dare not teach historical fiction or provide any historical context so that students can understand literature and the historical events influencing authors and readers.
Posting daily lesson plans is a bit much. No one subject should be singled out, either the requirement should apply for all the subjects or none of the subjects. However, at the college level faculty are expected to post the course syllabus, including textbook and topics covered for each class before the beginning of the course. Making the choice of textbook publicly available on a district or individual private school website does seem like appropriate transparency.
I have wondered how many of the charter schools in my city do not teach evolution. If the public were able to find the choice of textbooks on a charter school’s website, it would be easier to find this out.
For my high-school classes, I posted the course syllabi on the class websites that we were required to create and maintain by my school. I also gave my students’ parents access to those websites. Not sure that anyone ever looked at the syllabi. Here, an outline based on one of those:
Not that this should surprise anyone, but Lincoln Fillmore runs a bunch of charter schools. He (wrongly) refers to himself as an “educator.”
This will mean boring, vapid, scripted lessons and no social studies in elementary schools, which have been pretty much jettisoned anyway because of the BS Tests.
Ironically, Utah is a state that requires that students pass the US citizenship test in order to graduate from high school.
If that were to happen to my class, I’d just say, “See you in court.” Hopefully several thousand other teachers would follow suit.
oh, that the administrators would say the same thing as they are sued: placing blame on particular teachers when they themselves are in charge reeks of the current micro-managing top-down rot
We would need substantial raises for such a service!
I do not think most teachers would be willing to work 12 hours a day for some extra cash. Teachers should get extra cash for the work they have already been doing.
If no one posts even one lesson, can we all be fired? Think about it. And stop acquiescing into all the threats and stupidity.