Since I live in New York state I am aware of the presence of MAGA supporters in surprisingly strong numbers in parts of our state. Northern NY is represented by Elise Stefanik who knows her base and panders to them. The “north country” is one of the biggest strongholds of New Yorkers who listen to Fox News all day every day, especially if they are retired or not working, and there are many in northern NY who find it difficult to land a steady job that provides a living wage since so many factories closed there, Fox News tells them that their grievances are justified, and that their livelihoods have been stolen. Fox News even tells them who stole their jobs, and it is “others”, mostly immigrants and seasonal farm workers in the north country. It doesn’t take much persuading as Fox is aware of how these rural Americans feel and is creating an echo chamber for them.
Lee Zeldin and Trump - From a Google Image Search
Lee Zeldin is a Republican running to be governor of NY. I doubt if he was an extreme right-winger in his career in Albany, but he also knows his base of voters in NYS and he has obviously moved right to woo them. He has decided to go with the “school culture wars” as his leading issue. He tells NY parents that he will secure their rights to have input into school curricula and that he supports their right to insist that teachers and school boards respond to their concerns. Behind his statement is the implication that parents need to become activists and that they may need to intimidate teachers and school board members to get their attention and force the change they seek. Of course, he is simply granting them a right that they already possess, but he is weaponizing it.
It is quite ironic to encourage parents to do things like watch for CRT in our schools and to tell them they need to watch out for the grooming of children to encourage gender choices as these things have not previously appeared to be issues New Yorkers were concerned about. In fact, teachers in New York usually get details about statewide curricula in a top-down fashion. Since 2010, Common Core has been mandated for New York schools, although there has been a recent revision called the New Generation Learning Standards.
“[Changes] are both minor and major. Math and English Language Arts updates range from simple wording changes to entirely eliminating or redefining some standards. (For example: CCSS separated reading for information and reading for literature. The NGLS, recognizing that they inform each other, combines the two.)
In math, certain trigonometry standards shifted away from geometry and were placed in Algebra 2; some probability and statistics standards for middle-graders have moved from one grade to another; some standards that students experienced in multiple grades were excised from one; and kindergarten gained standards on pattern recognition and coin money”
Common Core itself has an ironic history. It originated on the right, and once it became popular in blue states the right disowned it, walked away from it as if to imply that it was someone else’s mess.
“The conservative roots of the Common Core are little known today. Even among reporters who cover the education beat, few are familiar with, and even fewer have written about, the efforts of Ronald Reagan’s secretary of education, William Bennett, to develop and promote a model core curriculum while in office. Nor have they recounted, except in passing, the sweeping, self-described “crusade” that Senator Lamar Alexander launched to promote national standards and voluntary national assessments when he was secretary of education in the elder Bush’s administration.
What accounts for the collective ignorance of the Common Core’s antecedents and this airbrushing of history? It wasn’t a given that the Common Core State Standards would be “hated” by conservatives. Indeed, several of today’s GOP presidential candidates, like Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, and New Jersey governor Chris Christie were all famously for the Common Core standards before they were against them.
Jindal, Huckabee, and Christie would deny that their flip-flops are motivated in any way by political opportunism, partisanship, or reflexive opposition to policies that President Obama supports. Still, as Christie himself said in 2013, part of the Republican opposition to the Common Core is “the knee-jerk reaction that is happening in Washington ... if the president likes something, the Republicans in Congress don’t ... It is this mind-set in D.C. right now that says we have to be at war constantly.
While anti-Obama animus undoubtedly plays a role in the Tea Party revolt against the Common Core, conservative opposition is also grounded in objections to an active federal role in education. Some Tea Party leaders seek at one extreme to outright abolish the U.S. Department of Education. More mainstream Republicans now want to stop the federal government from providing incentives for states to set academic standards that establish the expectation students should be on track to be college- and career-ready by the time they finish high school. These anti-incentive conservatives do not seek to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education so much as block it from using incentives to encourage or support state and local reform—including state and local innovation, expanding high-quality state preschool programs, or reforming antiquated teacher evaluation systems.
The problem is not simply that outlandish, paranoid claims about the Common Core are rampant on the far right (e.g., that the Common Core calls for iris scans of children and facial recognition technology to read students’ minds, that it promotes communism, homosexuality, gay marriage, teaches children Islamic vocabulary, advances global warming propaganda, equates George Washington with Palestinian terrorists, indoctrinates children into the New World Order, data-tracks students from kindergarten on, etc.).The problem instead is that the norm of public understanding of the Common Core bears little connection to the standards themselves.”
The reality is this: The Common Core State Standards, as their name specifies, are state standards in English Language Arts and mathematics, created in a collaborative effort by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, with input from educators. It bears repeating that the federal government had zero involvement in drafting the Common Core State Standards—it neither wrote, paid for, or participated in the development of the standards.
New York State does not need the school culture wars. Our teachers are glad to talk to parents who are not intent on terrorizing them and so are our school board members. In the 1960’s teachers were called upon to write behavioral objectives to tell what tasks students would do and what learning goals would be met by doing each task. It could be said at that time that teachers had some control over content in their classrooms. Once Common Core was mandated the control moved from teachers to the private sector with the biggest contributor to the content of Common Core and the tests that made Common Core so stressful to parents and students being the Pearson Company who produced the first textbooks that schools purchased to implement the Common Core curriculum. Until the current moment the new approaches to mathematics were the most criticized areas of concern among parents, teachers who had little time to prepare for the new techniques, and students caught between unprepared teachers and shocked parents who could not help their children with their math homework.
Since the clamor on the right about teaching Critical Race Theory in our school and how teachers treat conversations about sexuality, especially gender came to the forefront with the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida and the publication of the 1619 project (for which CRT is code) parents have grown militant about confronting educators about these two things which are not even taught in schools. While gender may be dealt with if it comes up, as with a child who has two mothers or two fathers, there are no objectives for teaching gender in the common core curriculum or any other curriculum. If telling students the truth about American history teaches children to be critical of their own country, and if accepting that we are not perfect is not allowed, how betrayed will older children feel when they learn about our shortcomings, which they eventually will? Parental generations were taught to love our country without question, and although we have been saddened to learn about our nation’s bad behavior, it has not turned most of us against our country.
Lee Zeldin, Republican candidate for NY governor is ginning up the MAGA base to help him win an election, but the consequences of bringing this school culture war to New York and setting parents against school boards and teachers involves pushing NYS further to the right for no good reason. Shame on this trend that invents fake culture wars (soon we’ll be banning books) or uses fake culture wars to win an election. The campaign ad that calls for parents to act and offers to win for them a right they already have will make something happen in NYS which will not improve our children’s education in the slightest. Sadly, it may encourage more teachers to leave the teaching profession and fewer people to run for school board positions. Do not vote for Lee Zeldin and do not back the school culture wars.
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