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TEACHERS' UNION USES KIDS AS PAWNS

Exclusive: Tom Tancredo explains nature of 'censorship' protests over AP History

The progressives’ planned subversion of the American history curriculum in our nation’s schools through the College Board’s new Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) exam has hit a speed bump in a suburban Denver school district.

The elected Jefferson County, Colorado, School Board, which has a new three-to-two conservative majority, is considering a proposal to set up a curriculum committee to review the APUSH curriculum for accuracy and completeness. Unfortunately, that proposal was first considered (and tabled) at the same board meeting where a new merit-based teacher salary plan was adopted.

The teachers’ union saw an opening and flew a 747 through it: They immediately began describing the issue to their students as one issue, not two – as teachers-versus-board. The students were provoked into protesting the curriculum committee proposal as “censorship,” with a support for teacher’s salary increases as logical corollary.

This manipulation of natural student idealism and love for their teachers has to be a new low point in teacher union politics. The teachers’ union wants to cower the board by teaching the new board majority a lesson. The message is: Students are our soldiers; leave our salaries and our prerogatives alone, or you will have nothing but distraction and discord for the next year!

So far, their plan is working wonderfully, thanks to the help of the liberal news media.

For six straight days, the protest has continued. Over 1,000 students have left classes to proclaim their opposition to “censorship” and their love for their teachers. The “student protest” is now front page news across Colorado, and the Associated Press has told the world that the “Student Education Protest Grows.” Predictably, when an enterprising reporter does bother to ask a student protester what exactly he or she is protesting, few have any answer beyond “censorship!”

On cue, the liberal news media have swallowed the union’s bait-and-switch game plan. The Denver Post has been providing daily coverage of idealistic students waiving signs on street corners proclaiming their love for their teachers and pleading against censorship. “Don’t make history a mystery!” demanded one student-held placard. Another student warned, “It’s our history!” “End censorship!” was the theme of many of the signs and banners.

It hardly needs to be said that students would be justified in protesting censorship if that were the real issue, if there were a sinister plan being imposed on classroom teachers. But that is not what is happening. In fact, the only real censorship in this picture is found in the highly controversial APUSH curriculum itself.

Missing from the newly revamped, politically correct APUSH curriculum is any mention of Martin Luther King Jr., any mention of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Ford, or Thomas Edison. Missing also is any concept of American Exceptionalism, or that we are the only nation in the history of mankind founded on an idea, not mere conquest or violent insurrection. Any censorship in this picture is the censorship from the left, the insistence that America be judged only by its faults, not by its achievements.

Traditionally, classroom teachers have great latitude in how they teach any subject. Curriculum standards and guidelines are exactly that – guidelines. I know this to be true because before running for public office in 1976, I was a high school social studies teacher in this same Jefferson County school system.

There is more at stake in this controversy than one proposal in one Colorado school district. What is at stake is the right and duty of local school boards to control classroom curriculum, a duty imposed by the Colorado Constitution.

This controversy over the adoption of the APUSH curriculum is not part of the Common Core State Standards controversy, although they are related. APUSH is an example of what you get when you relinquish control over curriculum standards to an elitist national body run by progressives with an ideological agenda.

Advanced Placement courses, whether in English, history or whatever, are elective and not part of the core curriculum. Yet, because AP courses are elected by many of the top students heading for our top universities, the history of America they are taught in those AP courses will be one of the cornerstones of their understanding of our country—not only our past, but our values, our institutions, our ideals, our heroes. If they do not learn that despite our weaknesses and failures, the United States remains the “last best hope for freedom” in the world, then we have failed them and we have squandered our inheritance.

Yes, our history courses should also teach students about our warts, our mistakes and our shortcomings, and the critics of the APUSH curriculum have not suggested whitewashing American history to teach only the good things. It’s all a matter of balance and context and respect for the facts of history over ideological constructs. Unfortunately, the APUSH curriculum fails the tests of balance and context in its rush to impart a politically correct framework for our history.

What we are witnessing now in this Jefferson County, Colorado, eruption is only the Battle of Lexington and Concord, not Bunker Hill or the Battle of Trenton. But it is nonetheless important that this local school board defend and assert its constitutional authority over curriculum, and it is important that the board have broad public support in doing so.

This struggle to protect and preserve citizens’ control over school curriculum is just as important as the political struggles to protect our energy economy, the struggle to defend our Second Amendment rights, or the fight for expanded school choice. Parents, school boards and patriots everywhere must begin to engage this issue in hundreds of communities across the nation.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/09/teachers-union-uses-kids-as-pawns/#5ywfiKA5GO7Udxbf.99

My comments: The godless, Secular Humanists are Ruthless and Relentless. They want Absolute Control of Public Education and they will us ANY MEANS to obtain it. And they want to be paid like kings and queens.