Post by addisona on Feb 23, 2022 10:50:14 GMT
They fought critical race theory. Now they’re focusing on ‘curriculum transparency.’
As state legislatures kick into gear this month, Republican governors and lawmakers who have fought to limit discussions of race in public schools are lining up to support a new aim: curriculum transparency.
Lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation to require schools to post lists of all of their teaching materials online, including books, articles and videos. The governors of Arizona, Florida and Iowa, who have previously raised concerns about how teachers discuss racism’s impact on politics and society, called for curriculum transparency laws in speeches to their legislatures this month.
“Florida law should provide parents with the right to review the curriculum used in their children’s schools,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said in his State of the State address last week.
Some conservative activists say the effort — which has come under fire from Democrats, teachers and civil liberties advocates — is a potent strategic move to expose and root out progressive ideas from schools. It’s the next move in a fight over critical race theory, the academic concept typically taught in college courses to examine how laws and institutions perpetuate racism, which some conservatives have used to describe ideas and books that they believe are too progressive or political for the classroom.
In a series of tweets this month, Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who has been instrumental in drawing opposition to racial sensitivity training, said shifting from pushing bans on teaching critical race theory to pushing curriculum transparency bills is a “rhetorically-advantageous position” that will “bait the Left into opposing ‘transparency.’”
“The strategy here is to use a non-threatening, liberal value — ‘transparency’ — to force ideological actors to undergo public scrutiny,” Rufo said.
The push for curriculum transparency policy emerged after at least seven conservative think tanks publicly called on legislators to enact such laws over the last year. Two of them, the Goldwater Institute and the Manhattan Institute, have published model bills, policies and resolutions for legislators and school boards to use as templates.
“People are going to disagree on a lot of these issues,” said Matt Beienburg, the Goldwater Institute’s director of education policy. “Transparency is something I think that at least allows for that conversation to know what is being taught. Everybody should be able to rally around the fact that we shouldn’t be teaching something in secret.”
But teachers, their unions and free speech advocates say the proposals would excessively scrutinize daily classwork and would lead teachers to pre-emptively pull potentially contentious materials to avoid drawing criticism. Parents and legislators have already started campaigns to remove books dealing with race and gender, citing passages they find obscene, after they found out that the books were available in school libraries and classrooms.
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/critical-race-theory-curriculum-transparency-rcna12809
As state legislatures kick into gear this month, Republican governors and lawmakers who have fought to limit discussions of race in public schools are lining up to support a new aim: curriculum transparency.
Lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation to require schools to post lists of all of their teaching materials online, including books, articles and videos. The governors of Arizona, Florida and Iowa, who have previously raised concerns about how teachers discuss racism’s impact on politics and society, called for curriculum transparency laws in speeches to their legislatures this month.
“Florida law should provide parents with the right to review the curriculum used in their children’s schools,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said in his State of the State address last week.
Some conservative activists say the effort — which has come under fire from Democrats, teachers and civil liberties advocates — is a potent strategic move to expose and root out progressive ideas from schools. It’s the next move in a fight over critical race theory, the academic concept typically taught in college courses to examine how laws and institutions perpetuate racism, which some conservatives have used to describe ideas and books that they believe are too progressive or political for the classroom.
In a series of tweets this month, Christopher Rufo, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who has been instrumental in drawing opposition to racial sensitivity training, said shifting from pushing bans on teaching critical race theory to pushing curriculum transparency bills is a “rhetorically-advantageous position” that will “bait the Left into opposing ‘transparency.’”
“The strategy here is to use a non-threatening, liberal value — ‘transparency’ — to force ideological actors to undergo public scrutiny,” Rufo said.
The push for curriculum transparency policy emerged after at least seven conservative think tanks publicly called on legislators to enact such laws over the last year. Two of them, the Goldwater Institute and the Manhattan Institute, have published model bills, policies and resolutions for legislators and school boards to use as templates.
“People are going to disagree on a lot of these issues,” said Matt Beienburg, the Goldwater Institute’s director of education policy. “Transparency is something I think that at least allows for that conversation to know what is being taught. Everybody should be able to rally around the fact that we shouldn’t be teaching something in secret.”
But teachers, their unions and free speech advocates say the proposals would excessively scrutinize daily classwork and would lead teachers to pre-emptively pull potentially contentious materials to avoid drawing criticism. Parents and legislators have already started campaigns to remove books dealing with race and gender, citing passages they find obscene, after they found out that the books were available in school libraries and classrooms.
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/critical-race-theory-curriculum-transparency-rcna12809