Checking Your Kids’ School Assignments
Checking Your Kids’ School Assignments
by Phyllis Schlafly
October 23, 2013
Sixth-grade children in a history class in the Bryant School District in Arkansas (whose website brags that the district “has embraced” Common Core standards) were assigned a project to update the U.S. Bill of Rights because it is “outdated.” They were instructed to “prioritize, revise, omit two and add two amendments.”
The written assignment is full of lies, such as that “the government of the United States is currently revisiting The Bill of Rights,” that “They (presumably the government) have determined that it is outdated and may not remain in its current form any longer,” and that our Constitution can be changed by a “National Revised Bill of Rights Task Force (NRBR)” (to which students could be appointed).
St. Joseph-Ogden High School, a public school in St. Joseph, Illinois, gave its sophomore class an assignment to choose which of ten people were “worthy” of getting kidney dialysis when the hospital had only six machines. The assignment instructed the students, “four people are not going to live. You must decide from the information below which six will survive.”
The students were given the list of the ten who desperately needed kidney dialysis with identification about their occupation, age and ethnicity, and told to give each a score. The instructions stated: “Put the people in order using 1-10, 1 being the person you want to save first and 10 being the person you would save last,” with the assumption that those getting scores 7 through 10 would be marked for death.
Since when are high school students allowed to judge who may live and who must die? Is this to prepare us to accept Death Panels from Obamacare?
Unfortunately, such public school class assignments are not new. A Department of Education hearing in Seattle on March 13, 1984 heard a parent describe the Health class in Clackamas High School in Oregon.
Students were presented with the “lifeboat situation”: too many people are in the sinking lifeboat and the students were ordered to choose whose lives are not worth saving and should be thrown overboard so the lifeboat won’t sink. Variations of the lifeboat situation have been widely used in public schools for many years.
A drama teacher at Cactus Shadows High School in Cave Creek, Arizona, had his students perform a play in which one of the characters falls in love with a goat. The play includes sexually explicit content and vulgar sexual terms.
At Lucy Elementary School near Memphis, Tennessee, an assignment required each student to pick an idol and write an essay about him. A ten-year-old girl chose God as her idol, but the teacher found this unacceptable and demanded that the girl write about someone else.
The girl then wrote about Michael Jackson, which the teacher accepted. After the girl’s mother spoke out against this in the local media, the school apologized and gave the girl credit for her original work.
Fourth graders in Gilbert, Arizona, and third graders in Louisiana and were given a lesson on adultery that included specific questions designed to make the child curious about what adultery is and how it affects relationships. The teacher said it came from approved Common Core materials for third-graders.
Glenn Beck reported that Poolesville High School in Montgomery County, Maryland, which is Common Core compliant, administered an intrusive survey to students that included personal questions about family, religion, income, political identification, illegal drugs, Obamacare, guns, and same-sex marriage. Click on The Blaze to be entertained by the conflicting responses that school officials gave to parents who complained and to reporters.
The question that parents found particularly obnoxious and trouble-making was, “If President Obama were caucasian how much more or less criticism do you think he would receive?” The multiple-choice answers were: “A lot less, Somewhat less, No difference, Somewhat more, A lot more.”
Fifth-graders in North Bellmore, New York, spent several weeks studying the United Nations. One mother was highly offended when her daughter received full credit for writing that our human rights come from government (instead of from God, as our Declaration of Independence proclaims).
At Alliance High School in Nebraska, the principal announced on October 7 that, because of the government shutdown, he was shutting down the usual morning recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. After public protest, he reversed his ban.
None of the above assignments quoted directy from a Common Core curriculum, but some claim to be “aligned with Common Core” or “Common Core compliant.” It’s beginning to look like such assertions are a cover to fill the minds of public school students with all kinds of inappropriate leftwing notions, while erecting a Common Core “wall” to prevent parental oversight.
