Friday, February 8, 2013

More on CSCOPE: Conservatives are Nazis?

With all the recent publicity about the CSCOPE hearings, I've been getting many questions about which local school districts are using the controversial program.  Here's what I've found:

Hutto ISD
Jarrell ISD
Taylor ISD

Interestingly enough, if you do a search for CSCOPE on the Taylor ISD website, it looks like there was a good deal of content there originally, but many of the documents that mention CSCOPE are no longer available.  I did find one remaining document in Spanish, so I dowloaded it before it disappeared as well.  

If you click on the link above for Jarrell ISD, you can enter the parent portal and see some very limited information, but no actual samples or materials.  It's all very, very, vague, and we only get brief glimpses when certain teachers revolt and release materials like the CSCOPE handout I received yesterday.

As for the above mentioned handout, it is allegedly a CSCOPE accessible material for teaching about political parties and philosophy to 10th grade students.  Here is what the document states about liberal and conservative governments:

"The focus of Conservative Governments:  The collection of individuals forms the state/group that is greater than the individuals themselves." 

"The focus of Liberal Governments:  The individual is above all else and the state is not greater than the individuals that create it."

Huh?  Could this be any more Orwellian? 

The document also positions the conservative answer to Socialism as "Monarchy."  No mention of representative democracy or free markets anywhere.  This lesson teaches that conservative governments are Facist/Nazi, while extreme liberal government is Communism.  The author does not mention that Communism requires totalitarianism, and isn't so great on individual rights. 

America's two political parties are summed up as follows:

Republicans:  "Will favor big business over labor unions."
Democrats:  "Will spend more tax dollars on education to benefits each individual."   (Quoted verbatim; don't even get me started on the grammar issues.)

Although we only 'found' this in CSCOPE, don't be fooled; there are plenty of teachers out there actually teaching this stuff.  See the alleged CSCOPE handout for yourself.

1 comment:

Ginger Russell said...

Thanks you Holly. Cscope is going down. Though Senator Patrick released a statement of what TESCCC is willing to do. We can't give up. We have to call our Reps. to support Steve Toth's Bill 760.