Grooms Gets an A for AP History Analysis

When the College Board first instituted the Advanced Placement American History curriculum, a five-page guide was enough direction for its small cadre of teachers.

Flash forward thirty years or so to the spread of AP classes to the masses and the problems the CB faces with teachers not fully prepared to teach them, perhaps not even capable of making a "3" on the test itself. Of course, through AP conferences and training many not-so-well educated teachers have become adept at challenging their students. However, recently the College Board decided that the younger teachers now taking over needed more guidance.

Hence, the genesis of the 142-page guide ,or "framework," provided to today's history teachers. The necessity for such a guide reflects the dumbing down of American high schools over the last thirty years. The America-bashing of the guide merely reflects the liberalism of today's educational establishment. The furor has occurred because they put it in writing. The College Board is surprised at the controversy because it doesn't know anyone who doesn't think the way it does.

Larry Grooms's op-ed in Tuesday's paper, a reasoned analysis of the fuss over the framework, bears reprinting:

There was a time when American exceptionalism was as much a part of a student's education as Jamestown, Manifest Destiny, and the Wright brothers. In his 1989 farewell speech, Ronald Reagan described America as a "shining city upon a hill... a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds ... a city that hummed with commerce and creativity."

The American experience is not this tidy. Our history includes plenty of mistakes, but we've overcome plenty, too. As Bill Clinton observed, there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.

This highly American ideology - the can-do spirit, the casting aside of differences when history demands - does not resonate with the historians who recently rewrote the College Board's Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum. The College Board is a nonprofit that helps students prepare for college through programs such as the SAT and the Advanced Placement Program.

Claiming that the existing five-page guide prevents students from studying "the main events of U.S. history," the board's scholars poured out their collective genius, releasing a new 142-page curriculum they call a "framework." Their self-proclaimed landmark project presents a consistently negative view of America. It also reveals a left-wing, radically flawed reinterpretation of history.

The framework does not include questions about the Mayflower Compact, Thomas Jefferson, the Gettysburg Address or the Truman Doctrine. Neither are students asked about Dwight Eisenhower, Jonas Salk or Martin Luther King, Jr. The valor of our soldiers who ended Nazi oppression in World War II and the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust are omitted. Instead of focusing on resilient personalities and extraordinary achievements - the history most of us learned - the framework centers on controversy. Identity group grievances, conflict, exploitation, oppression, unresolved social movements - these are presented as our nation's foundation.

We do a great disservice when we gloss over these injustices. But while America's means haven't always been laudable, our ends most often are. As Churchill observed: "The United States invariably does the right thing - after exhausting every other alternative."

It is this uniquely American approach that the framework ignores. Students should be taught facts - triumphs and tragedies. Instead, the framework consistently focuses on all that was ever wrong with this, the most generous and progressive people in the history of mankind.

Now that commonsense folks are calling them out, the test's writers are falling all over themselves to defend their work. They say that teachers are free to discuss George Washington, the role of capitalism, the Holocaust and other topics that may be required by a particular state's standards. South Carolina's education officials also assure us that our state's standards will safeguard students from negative biases.

Both assurances ignore page 2 of the framework: "Beginning with the May 2015 AP U.S. History Exam, no AP U.S. History Exam questions will require students to know historical content that falls outside this concept outline." Teachers face the difficult, if not impossible, task of finding time to teach both the state standards and the framework. Why teach topics that are not on the test?

The College Board knows this. Its stated goal is to "train a generation of students" to become "apprentice historians." The hope is that these apprentices in turn inculcate another generation. This is the same strategy used to promote controversial Common Core state standards. It is no coincidence that David Coleman, chief architect of Common Core, is also president of the College Board.

In the same remarkably prescient speech, Reagan warned of such schemes, cautioning that "we've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important. ... If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit."
Reagan concluded with a challenge to students: "... if your parents haven't been teaching you what it means to be an American, let 'em know and nail 'em on it. That would be a very American thing to do."

These historians are not teaching what it means to be an American. They are teaching victimization and social politics.

It is time we call them out on it. That would be a very American thing to do.

Larry Grooms, a Republican, represents Berkeley and Charleston counties in the S.C. Senate.

Respect Teachers' Labor, Too!

While the rest of the world seems to have decided that what's wrong with education is its teachers, teachers, unionized or not, are not at rest on this Labor Day.

Teachers, as professionals, do not get overtime pay, yet most of them are at work more than sixty hours per week. Think of the typical high school English teacher, or any teacher, for that matter, who assigns essays and papers to students. Most have student loads of 100 to 150; that's 100 to 150 papers for every assignment. What percentage of those teachers will sit down tonight (if they haven't already done so) and grade papers for hours? A low guess would be half, and the other half are planning their lessons for the coming week.

A creative teacher's mind is always at work figuring out what to do with his or her students on so many levels. And everyone who's ever sat in a classroom thinks he or she can expertly tell a teacher what he or she has done wrong. Baby boomers are retiring in droves, and they are the last generation whose numbers were boosted by the lack of opportunities for college-educated women.

While English teachers work the same long hours as executives for half the pay, if that, and American society gives little respect to any job that doesn't pay well, HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

Who would be a teacher?

Common Core Testing: Edublob at the Trough

Proponents of the Common Core standards initiated by the states and adopted by most of them are fond of stating that the federal government isn't imposing its standards on anyone. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The education "establishment," or edublob, is practically salivating at the funds and promises coming out of Washington. Entire school districts and entire states (except Texas!) are trashing their own standards and textbooks in jockeying for position at the OPM trough.The Charleston County School District is a case in point. South Carolina's adoption of Common Core under the aegis of Democrat State Superintendent Jim Rex allowed the district to receive funds to finance its ill-advised teacher evaluation metrics. The edublob gets a big chunk of the money to devise ways in which student results can be calibrated to factors such as poverty (i.e., expecting the children of the poor to learn less!).

The latest sally in controlling content to issue from the U.S. Department of Education is grants to two edublob entities, Smarter Balanced (http://www.smarterbalanced.org/) and PARCC (http://www.parcconline.org/), to use OPM to develop testing appropriate to the Common Core standards. Out go the tests developed over the years that match previous standards.

Do you realize how many millions, if not billions, of OPM are now being thrown into the trash?

Look at the opportunities for earnings: new curriculum and teacher-training sessions for that curriculum; printing all those documents; developing evaluation standards for teachers and students; selling all those new textbooks. . . . Everybody gets his.

You would suppose that at some point they would exhaust their reservoir of OPM, but that will never happen. After all, all they need is to raise taxes.

Death of Parody in Little Rock School District

We've come a long way since 1957. Then the Little Rock school district became known for Governor Faubus's use of the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the integration of Central High School. Those were serious times. Not any more.

This fall newly-chosen Superintendent Dexter Suggs set a new dress code for district teachers which was so reviled that he has postponed its implementation until next year--to give everyone time to get used to it. Among the usual strictures one was roundly opposed by organized labor: teachers must wear underwear at all times and females must wear bras.

How could anyone parody that?

CCSD Prefers Teach for America over SC Grads

Does it bother you that the Charleston County School District will increase the number of Teach-for-America (TFA) hires in the district next year? It should! This program equates to bringing in an untrained, out-of-state emergency crew to replace local teachers who retire, move, or are "let go" by the district.

Evidently, CCSD prefers these graduates who have no training in the classroom, over certified graduates of our state teacher-education programs at Winthrop, USC, Clemson, the College of Charleston, and Charleston Southern. Many TFA hires will do an enthusiastic and admirable job under those circumstances; however, then they will leave, and schools such as Burke, where many of them work, will be left to the vagaries of chance for the next round.

When founded, TFA touted the ideals of Ivy League graduates who wanted to "give back" to America. It is well past those heady days when it sends graduates of Grove City College. I'm not knocking that particular school; it may provide an excellent education. The point is, why is such a graduate superior to hiring our own state graduates of our taxpayer-supported teacher education programs? Is CCSD saying that these programs are so bad that their graduates are not suitable for the district to hire?

Or, is it that those graduates know what teaching in CCSD means?

At any rate, it is painful that the P&C led its TFA story with a Burke student who cannot understand a seventh-grade math problem.  Was that deliberate?

Why Teachers Hate In-Service Days

Making the rounds is this video of teachers in the Beaufort area complying with asinine preparations for teaching Everyday Math. No matter that the dance has absolutely nothing to do with math. No matter that Everyday Math is hated and reviled in all other parts of the country as being ineffective and detrimental to student math proficiency, these hapless victims of in-service bravely attempt to follow an idiotic dance with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

FYI--almost all teachers have encountered some idiocy like this one on an in-service day. During one particularly inane and demeaning exercise, I walked out, ready to confront anyone who got in my way. Probably the rest thought I was ill or had an emergency. More likely, at least half were wishing they had the nerve to follow.


Thanks to The Palmetto Scoop for the memories!