School Leader

Kentucky teachers are being encouraged to use "inquiry methods" to indoctrinate students in Leftist attitudes

In my previous post I discussed inadequacies in Kentucky's education standards for social studies. These are standards that, as a former member of the Kentucky Board of Education, I supported and helped to approve. But since then I've become convinced that these standards need more work, especially making them more content specific, a process that should involve teachers, parents, civics advocates, and lawmakers. The standards include much to admire and I believe their deficiencies can be addressed.

What is far more problematic, however, are some of the training materials that were developed by the Kentucky Department of Education to help teachers understand and implement the standards. These "Inquiry Ready" modules are accessed via the Kentucky Department of Education's Social Studies Professional Learning Modules page, but are not available to parents or community members, although I was able to get access through my university credentials. Videos associated with the modules are on YouTube, but are not easily searchable without information directly from modules themselves. It is extremely concerning that these materials, funded by tax payers, are essentially hidden from the general public.

It’s important to keep in mind that these are training materials. They do not appear in the standards themselves, and to my knowledge were never vetted by KBE (if a reader can correct me on that I'd welcome it). I do not believe schools are bound to use these materials or the inquiry design model itself. But this is the way KDE is attempting to train teachers in the new social studies standards, and it figures as a method for "taking [standards implementation] to the next level" in the KDE Standards Implementation Guidance Document for Social Studies. According to KDE, as of today 750 teachers across the state have completed these modules.

Unfortunately, these Inquiry Ready modules provide enormous potential for abuse, and especially for students to be indoctrinated in leftist ideology. I recently wrote about how critical theory is seeping into our schools and the larger culture, and why that is so dangerous.

The Inquiry Design Model being promoted by KDE is explicitly founded on critical theory assumptions.

The inquiry design model is based on posing “compelling questions” to motivate student interest and exploration of content topics through critical-thinking tasks that require immersion in many primary and secondary historical sources. Sounds fine, at least in theory, although I think the approach puts too much emphasis on what kinds of topics (questions) are relevant to students.

One of the early videos says that students care about “fairness, relationships, conflicts, norms, and power relationships.”

Well, they do. But that’s not all students are interested in. Good teachers can inspire student interest in a very wide variety of topics. Using such a narrow list, though, sets the stage for how the Inquiry Ready modules introduce critical theory as the lens through which it expects teachers to teach.

Still, the first module on The Big Ideas of Social Studies is fairly innocuous. In the second module, however, teachers are fully introduced to a method of inquiry learning that is custom-designed to lead students toward progressive-liberal conclusions. In a discussion of possible compelling questions, the following are given as examples:

• Does GDP tell the right story?
• How can the US reduce income inequality?
• Do people around the world care about children’s rights?
• Did the attack on Pearl Harbor unify Americans?

These questions are extremely problematic because they seem to have the answer the question designer is hoping the students come up with built into them.

In the first example, GDP (gross domestic product) definitely tells a story about a nation’s economic well-being. Of course, it doesn’t tell the whole story. But the question, especially framed in a yes-no structure, leads students directly to conclude that GDP does NOT tell the “right” story, and other metrics, I suppose, do.

Likewise, the second question assumes income inequality is a problem and should be reduced. Will students introduced to this “compelling” question be exposed to sources that suggest that income inequality is not, in fact, a problem? Or that efforts to reduce it might have negative consequences? Or how income inequality is an inevitable feature of a market economy? Or how other metrics like social mobility might be better ways of understanding the problems posed by differences in economic outcome? If the question is framed as written, it seems highly unlikely.

Kentucky's social studies standards need more work

Headlines from the summer of 2020 show cities burning from riots and looting, statues and the reputations of American heroes being defaced and torn down, and a ferociously intolerant ideology in full operation within the ranks of the media, academia, and politics. These events are not emerging spontaneously and are only tangentially motivated by specific incidents like the death of George Floyd. Instead, they are part of a larger, long-term effort to overthrow the core values and institutions of the United States. And part of that effort has been a concerted war on America's history, a systematic attempt to inaccurately portray America and its founding as irredeemably and uniquely hateful, racist, and broken.

Over the last two months I've been writing about how Americans must resist this war on history, especially as it is being waged in our P-12 schools (see related links below). We must take a much greater role in understanding what is being taught about America's past and assuring that our students understand the rich complexity of our national story - both the good and the bad of our past - and develop the capacity to both appreciate the goodness of America and to critique her flaws in ways that lead us toward an ever-fuller realization of our founding principles.

We must not be afraid to set a goal that our education system should produce patriots. That doesn't mean creating unthinking, xenophobic automatons, of course, which is what the enemies of patriotic education will tell you. It means citizens who can productively criticize their country because they love her and the ideals she stands for.

As a Kentucky educator, of course my greatest interest is how history - and the social studies in general - are being taught here in the Commonwealth. And one of the first places we need to look is in Kentucky's academic standards for social studies. While the latest version of the standards, adopted in 2019, is a vast improvement from what came before, I have come to believe that they are woefully inadequate in terms of the specific knowledge, skills, and dispositions we should expect of our graduates. And as I will point out in a follow up post, some of the supporting materials around the standards are extremely problematic and promote a terribly inadequate understanding of America's past.

As I wrote previously, this topic is deeply personal to me as a former social studies teacher with a Master's degree in history. During my tenure on the Kentucky Board of Education from 2016-2019 I served as chair of the Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment Committee and was responsible for helping shepherd the latest standards to their ultimate approval.

I am generally pleased that the standards are organized into grade-specific bands. This shows that teachers, especially in grades K-8, are not off the hook for teaching social studies even though the topic may not be assessed every year. The level of detail in the standards, compared to what preceded them, is much improved. And there's even some rich language in the introduction about the kind of person we want students to become as a result of their learning:

Democracy’s survival depends upon the generational transmission of the political vision of liberty and equality that makes and unites Americans. The preservation of this American vision is dependent upon the willingness and ability of its citizens to collaboratively and deliberately address problems, defend their own rights and the rights of others and balance personal interests with the general welfare of society. It also depends on a loyalty to the political institutions the founders created. Devotion to human dignity and freedom, equal rights, justice, the rule of law, tolerance of diversity, mutual assistance, personal and civic responsibility, self-restraint and self-respect must be learned and practiced. The preparation of young people for participation in America’s democratic society is vital. The progress of communities and the state, nation and world rests upon the preparation of young people to collaboratively balance personal interest with the public good.

The standards themselves, though improved, do not provide a great deal of detail, however, about what students are supposed to know and be able to do to achieve the goals described in the above paragraph. Consider the following kindergarten standard (K.C.RR.1): "Identify roles and responsibilities of self and others at home, in school, and in neighborhood settings." What exactly would those roles and responsibilities be? 

Similarly, the next standard (K.C.RR.2) says, "Identify symbols and events that represent American patriotism." Which symbols and events? How is a teacher to know what to teach here?

Thankfully, the standards come with a set of "Disciplinary Clarifications" that provide examples. These Disciplinary Clarifications were in development and in draft form for grades K-8 at the time of the standards' approval by KBE. The high school clarifications just emerged in December 2019. 

The Discipilinary Clarifications are somewhat helpful - up to a point. So for the first standard we find, "The roles and responsibilities of being a responsible citizen in the school, home and neighborhood may include, but are not limited to, being helpful to and respectful of others and volunteering for and carrying out tasks beneficial to the community, such as helping a classmate with a difficult math problem, putting away the dishes at home or volunteering to clean up a local park."

Governor Beshear needs to stop bullying school districts over COVID shutdowns

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear announced on Monday that because of lingering concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic he was "recommending" all schools remain closed to in-person learning until September 28. According to former Kentucky School Boards Association spokesperson and education media watcher Brad Hughes, as of 10 p.m. on Tuesday night 48 of Kentucky's school districts had already announced they would comply with the Governor's "request."

Many parents, educators, and others have been shocked by this latest news given the massive efforts undertaken by districts to accommodate families who wanted in-person learning (with extremely complicated COVID precautions) and others who wanted a virtual option. They were also dismayed by the speed at which districts quickly agreed to the Governor's recommendation.

But in truth Governor Beshear was not making a recommendation at all. Superintendents had received the clear message from the Kentucky Department of Education that they better do as the Governor says - or else. In public webcast calls with Interim Commissioner Kevin Brown on Tuesday, August 4 and again on Tuesday, August 11 (watch starting around 15;20 for the next 8 minutes), Brown said that he and the Governor prided themselves on the fact that every single school district had bowed to previous requests to close to in person instruction.

If any district "chose" to open this time, they could expect a call from Commissioner Brown, the Kentucky Board of Education chair, the Governor, and state health officials who would try to change their minds - and perhaps the districts should have their attorneys there too. "My goal would be to have a different outcome at the end of the conversation and that would be a goal that would be achieveable," Brown said.

If districts continue to resist the recommendations, Brown said the Governor could issue executive orders to force their compliance, or public health officials could shut down their buildings or the KBE could issue an emergency regulation forcing them to do so. But it's all going to start with "a very intimate discussion if your district is one that decides to defy the recommendation." 

Kentucky educators decried former Governor Matt Bevin's "bullying" when he said mean things about their resistance to his ideas for pension reform. Where is the outcry when the Beshear administration tries to coerce districts into closing statewide, especially when many rural districts have had extremely few cases, and when data suggests (especially young) children are at low risk for getting or transmitting the virus?

Why is Commissioner Brown doing this at the behest of Beshear? Why has no member of the Kentucky Board of Education challenged these heavy handed tactics on the part of the Commissioner? Is it because Governor Beshear fired board members the last time they took positions at odds with him and had new members fire the previous Commissioner, effectively destroying the independence of KBE, an illegal power grab that the state legislature refused to stop or repudiate? 

Why are superintendents and educators not screaming in protest over Beshear's disingenuous use of the word "recommendation" and his annhilation of local autonomy? Had former Governor Bevin or former Commissioner Wayne Lewis done these things superintendents would have lit up the media with their complaints and educators would have marched on Frankfort.

So what is different? Is it because educators used their considerable political influence to get Beshar elected? Is it because the Kentucky Education Association, which last week demanded a statewide closure of schools if test rates stay above 5 percent, donated over a million dollars to Beshear's election campaign?

Andy Beshear is the governor the education establishment wanted. And now he's proving himself even more of a "bully" than his predecessor when it comes to forcing his views on our schools and districts. 

But it's not too late for educators to stand up for the students they serve. As of today over 120 school districts are still waiting to decide how to respond to Beshear's "recommendation." Will any of them have the courage to tell him no and fight for their local communities and local autonomy?

Fighting racism; rejecting critical theory

Update, 10/1/20: A revised version of this essay has been published by The Imaginative Conservative.

Most Americans are largely unfamiliar with critical theory (also sometimes referred to as critical race theory or critical social justice theory), but this philosophical perspective is now part of the professional, cultural, and political air we breathe. And it is doing terrible damage to social cohesion, and particularly to meaningful efforts to address racial disparities in education, policing, and social mobility. Especially in education, we need now more than ever to understand and respond to issues of racial and socio-economic equity. But doing so actually requires us to reject critical theory and replace it with more constructive, unifying, and inquiry-driven approaches.

What is critical theory?

Critical theory emerged out of the postmodern intellectual movement of the mid-twentieth century that rejected core ideas of the Enlightenment and posits that truth, rather than being something that can be discerned via reason (or religious revelation), is in fact entirely a social construction. Post-modernism was eventually wed to Marxist theory through the work of scholars like Herbert Marcuse, and stakes the claim that, rather than objective truth, there are only stories that we tell ourselves. And those stories generally are designed to justify or perpetuate power structures between oppressor and oppressed. 

Journalist Andrew Sullivan, in summarizing the arguments of Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay's new book, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity, explains it this way:

Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning—from Christianity to Marxism—postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture. The entire concept of reason—whether the Enlightenment version or even the ancient Socratic understanding—is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power, and therefore deserves to be undermined and “problematized” whenever possible. Postmodern theory does so mischievously and irreverently—even as it leaves nothing in reason’s place. The idea of objective truth—even if it is viewed as always somewhat beyond our reach—is abandoned. All we have are narratives, stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional, and can in turn be subverted or problematized.

Analyzing how truth was a mere function of power, and then seeing that power used against distinct and oppressed identity groups, led to an understandable desire to do something about it, and to turn this critique into a form of activism...After all, the core truth of our condition, this theory argues, is that we live in a system of interlocking oppressions that penalize various identity groups in a society. And all power is zero-sum: you either have power over others or they have power over you. To the extent that men exercise power, for example, women don’t; in so far as straight people wield power, gays don’t; and so on. There is no mutually beneficial, non-zero-sum advancement in this worldview. All power is gained only through some other group’s loss. And so the point became not simply to interpret the world, but to change it, to coin a phrase, an imperative which explains why some critics call this theory a form of neo-Marxism.

The “neo” comes from switching out Marxism’s focus on materialism and class in favor of various oppressed group identities, who are constantly in conflict the way classes were always in conflict. And in this worldview, individuals only exist at all as a place where these group identities intersect.

Critical theory is flawed, on multiple counts

Despite the fact that critical theory has come to utterly dominate the thinking of academic elites and universities, most people are not cultural and moral relativists. Most people - including me - believe there is, in fact, such a thing as objective truth, unchanging and applicable for all times, which is discernible through reason, divine revelation, scientific inquiry, or some combination of all of the above. Oppression is sometimes a real social phenomenon, but just because someone feels oppressed, it is not necessarily true that they are (it is also not necessarily true that they aren't oppressed; the point is that there is an objective reality to the question that is bigger than one's feelings).

And while power dynamics are readily observable in groups of all kinds, humans and their interactions are not reducible to power dynamics alone. As Pluckrose and Lindsay write on the website Aero:

The Critical Social Justice metanarrative (roughly the right side of history) is a ludicrously simplistic framework, centered on a cartoonish understanding of privileged and marginalized identity groups, whose relative statuses are believed to be maintained by the ways in which people talk about things. These group identities are understood to dictate individual members’ experiences, knowledge and relationships to power in predictable ways. However, both individuals and social reality are actually considerably more complicated than this, as most of us know from observing our fellow humans as we go about our normal lives.

One of the biggest problems with critical theory is that, based on the logic of critical theory itself, its assumptions and claims cannot be challenged. If you question a critical theorist, you are merely proving how deeply you are in denial of your own privilege and power. In an essay for New Discourses called, "No, the Woke Won't Debate You - Here's Why," Lindsay elaborates:

Debate and conversation, especially when they rely upon reason, rationality, science, evidence, epistemic adequacy, and other Enlightenment-based tools of persuasion are the very thing they think produced injustice in the world in the first place. Those are not their methods and they reject them. Their methods are, instead, storytelling and counter-storytelling, appealing to emotions and subjectively interpreted lived experience, and problematizing arguments morally, on their moral terms. Because they know the dominant liberal order values those things sense far less than rigor, evidence, and reasoned argument, they believe the whole conversation and debate game is intrinsically rigged against them in a way that not only leads to their certain loss but also that props up the existing system and then further delegitimizes the approaches they advance in their place.

But, at least in my opinion, the single most worrisome aspect of critical theory is where it leads us. If everything is ultimately about exposing power (the bad guys) and giving it to those who are supposedly without power (the good guys), then how is that to be accomplished if the powerful won't simply step aside? Ultimately coercive measures are required to create not just equality of opportunity, but the equality of outcomes, which is the end goal of critical theory. And that portends a massive central power with the authority to silence those who dissent and redistribute wealth and privilege to those it deems worthy - in other words, an Orwellian Marxist regime, which was the ultimate aim of critical theory grandfathers like Marcuse and Michele Foucault. And as history tells us, such regimes murdered over 100 million people in the twentieth century seeking to create their egalitarian utopia.

 

Memory and hope: Restoring temporal continuity in our teaching of American history

Update: I was delighted to have a version of this essay published by The Imaginative Conservative.

In my most recent series of essays (see links below) I've argued for a much more intentional and self-consciously patriotic approach to the teaching of American history and civics. I have repeatedly cited political scientist Eliot A. Cohen's essay, "History, Critical and Patriotic" as a key inspiration. Cohen argues that there is no contradiction between nurturing in students an appreciation for America's past and form of government and also acknowledging the failures of our past and our collective struggle to live up to the core principles of the nation's founding. 

Nevertheless, some social studies educators have reacted to my proposal with deep skepticism, insisting - often in direct contradiction to my own words - that I am seeking to indoctrinate students in some type of blind allegiance to America that denies her complicated and often morally messy past.

What is indoctrination, however, is the approach to American history that has pervaded our schools over the last generation, one that is so common many social studies teachers have taken it for granted as the American story and the way to teach it to students. This approach presents America in the worst possible light, distorting the full truth of our past and ultimately damaging our political health.

In my last post I cited Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen's essay, Patriotic Vision: At Home in a World Made Strange, to support this concept of the critical patriot. I've taken further inspiration from another essay by Deneen, found in the same collection, Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents, called "Progress and Memory: Making Whole Our Historical Sense" (text of an early version, presented as a speech, can be accessed here).

In "Progress and Memory," Deneen argues that three key ideologies tend to dominate American political thought, each with its own distorted attitude toward time, particularly the past. Deneen identifies these maladaptive philosophies, which promote various kinds of disconnection between present, past, and future, as liberalism, progressivism, and nostalgism. He argues for the concept of "temporal continuity," which he associates with a healthy conservatism, that unites a "felt-presence of past and future in the present."

I believe that temporal continuity is precisely what is missing from our current approach to the teaching of American history and civics in many of our K-12 schools, primarily because of the dominance of liberal and progressive ideas within the education establishment. A restoration of temporal continuity could be a key to revitalizing history and civics education that forms young people who both appreciate the gifts of the past and also possess the capacity for independent and critical thinking, especially as they engage as virtuous citizens in our democratic republic.

Deneen argues that liberalism, which originates primarily in the thought of John Locke (but also proto-liberals like Machiavelli, Descartes, Bacon, and Hobbes), "begins with a radical critique of the ancestral:"

That which is bequeathed us from the past is understood to be a form of generational oppression...Liberalism inaugurates a project in legitimacy that can only be conferred upon a human institution when that institution has been chosen...The anthropology of liberalism divorces us from time past and time future. Humans are de-cultured and a-historical creatures: in the State of Nature there is only Now-time, absent culture or memory, history or planning...The claims of the ancestral - of the past - are to exert no preferential claim upon us.

I remember from my own experiences learning - and then teaching - social studies, that we took (and taught) the construct of the social contract as a given. That the purpose of governments was to secure maximum liberty, understood as the freedom to do as we please as long as we don't interfere with the "right" of others to do as they please. The liberal lens tends to see history as one long struggle to liberate individuals to pursue their own happiness in a realm of pure choice, free of the stifling restraints of family, religion, and societal expectations. 

So consider the common way the Pilgrims are now presented in American classrooms. They are not heroes of religious freedom, brave political pioneers whose Mayflower Compact helped lay the groundwork for self-government in America. No, the Pilgrims were intolerant theocrats who suppressed the religious liberties of dissenters in their midst and brought disease and destruction upon the Native Americans. That both of these things is, at least partially, true is too complex a picture for the liberal mind bent only on advocating for the perpetual liberation of the individual over the very society which forms him.

Meanwhile, progressivism is a form of liberalism that is utterly dissatisfied with the personal "liberty" liberalism alleges to have secured for us. It is not enough to be free, we must also seek a particular kind of justice. Simply put, the present is not good enough, and progressives fix their eyes on an idealized future.

If liberalism put all human institutions on the footing of choice - even family - Progressivism regarded all such institutions as fundamentally illegitimate, partial expressions of our true social and even "cosmic" consciousness. Thus Progressivism set in its sights all partial and intermediary institutions, whether marriage, family, church, fraternal association, neighborhood, partial political units such as the States, even and ultimately the Nation itself. In the end all such partial allegiances were to be dissolved in favor of the universal embrace of humanity itself, and thus - in the name of the Future - efforts to accelerate the dissolution of those partial associations were justified in the present...Egalitarianism is posited as a desirable future condition, an aspiration that justifies the beneficent and paternalistic rule of sufficiently progressed elites in the Present.

And thus, with the heightened presence of progressivism in our schools and culture, our education system has tilted even further toward a theory of history that encourages young people to seek out the villains, and to see the past and our collective political and social heritage as a collection of crushingly conformist and illegitimate institutions that must be eliminated in the name of equity, grievance, or restitution for past wrongs. Perhaps the best example of this attitude is captured in the New York Times' historically inaccurate 1619 Project, which has been adopted as a curriculum in numerous schools around the U.S.