Date: September 25, 2003
Subject: Dan Barreiro

On the way home from work last night, I tuned into KFAN-AM 1130 to catch the latest Twins talk. Instead, I was treated to host Dan Barreiro's mini-meltdown over some of the criticisms that the draft social studies standards overemphasize the United States culture and its strengths. He said that it seems logical that kids in America should learn about America, just as kids in France for instance would learn about France and its European neighbors. He said let's not ignore America's mistakes, but let's not overemphasize them, either.

Thanks Dan. We're not done as a society, yet.

Date: September 24, 2003
Subject: Liberal teacher attack!

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend Monday's public hearing in Saint Paul, but from press accounts, it was another mob attack from liberal teachers, replete with alarmist rhetoric, raised voices, and cheering sections. This was a repeat of similar staged attacks during the hearings for the math and language arts standards, designed to undermine and discredit the process, not improve the standards.

The public comment period, and the work sessions scheduled for November, are designed to resolve criticisms such as bias toward European history, or an inequity between the number of Republican presidents and Democratic presidents mentioned, or the omission of specific historical events such as the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, or an emphasis on the roles of women and minorities, and yes, reduce the number of standards statements, which in the draft are copious in number by design.

As a member of the Academic Standards Committee, I welcome and look forward to vigorous criticism and specific suggestions for improving the standards. But political attacks will be exposed as such:

[Star Tribune, September 22:] "The standards must reflect the worlds from which these children come from," said St. Paul school board chairman Al Oertwig, who noted that half of St. Paul's kindergartners are immigrants for whom English is a second language. "And many are not from American backgrounds."

[Diane Ravitch, Research Professor of Education at New York University, and board member of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, said, "Our ability to defend — intelligently and thoughtfully — what we as a nation hold dear depends on our knowledge and understanding of what we hold dear." Speaking of being "out of balance," not enough students today understand what is good about America, and what it stands for. I hope that the final version of the new standards corrects this situation.]

[Pioneer Press, letter to the editor, September 18; and Star Tribune, letter to the editor, September 15. Yes, both daily newspapers carried the same letter. What a coincidence!] The Department of Education created a committee on which public teachers made up fewer than half of the members and it was not even a requirement to have a background in the social studies discipline to be on the committee.

[The inclusion of non-teachers at the table is considered an asset, and is required by the Profile of Learning repeal legislation signed in May. Parents, school board members, businesspeople, higher ed, and taxpayers have representation on the standards committees, in addition to K-12 teachers and administrators.]

The 9-12 Standards were written during two meetings without even the entire committee in attendance. A nonteacher's reconstruction of the United States history standards were accepted by the committee without having being read. The committee was neither diverse nor representative of Minnesota.

[Other members of the same committee would disagree with this version of the process. A cursory scan of the committee membership lists will reveal much diversity, and as mentioned earlier is required by state law.]

The committee was both forced and encouraged to take standards from the five samples supplied by the Department of Education. The sample standards came from California, Arizona, Alabama, Kansas and Virginia. It is worth questioning when we know that we are following the states that rank at the bottom of the educational standings.

Marc H. Doepner-Hove, Mound

[The committees were neither forced nor encouraged to use any existing standards or guidelines. The standards from other states were provided for reference only. The standards provided to the committee were rated the best in the nation by standards experts.]

Some will continue to work to undermine and discredit the standards process. I urge the rest of us to work hard to develop nation-leading standards for the next generation of Minnesota's public school students.

Date: September 18, 2003
Subject: Letters to the editor

The following letters to the editor appeared in the September 17 Star Tribune:

Only a theory

The Sept. 15 article about the new school standards for science, it was noted that it was OK to use words such as "may" and "might have" in connection with evolution. What's wrong with that? Last I heard, it was called the theory of evolution, not the facts of evolution.

If nobody is allowed to challenge a scientific theory or reexamine the evidence, doesn't it seem more like indoctrination?

Brad Parks, Watertown.

Talk about creationism

I read with dismay the Star Tribune Sept. 9 story, "State proposes academic benchmarks for social studies, science." The article stated that the science standards mention evolution several times, but Education Commissioner Cheri Pierson Yecke instructed science committee members to avoid debates about whether creationism ought to be taught alongside it.

Is freedom of speech still considered part of America's freedoms? What is she thinking?

The theory of evolution is not a fact. Maybe it is a religion. It takes as much faith to believe in evolution as it does to believe in creationism.

Marguerite Hoffman Richards, Coon Rapids.

Date: September 18, 2003
Subject: Factual correction

I received this from a Minnesota Department of Education staffperson, who clarified a factual inaccuracy in this blog. I post it here with his permission, in the interest of accuracy. Let the record acknowledge that Christine Jax did not create the Profile of Learning, rather it was largely implemented during her tenure as commissioner.

Your excellent and helpful Web log on the new Minnesota Academic Standards contains the statement, "...that is how the previous Commissioner [Christine Jax] created the Profile of Learning." ["Deconstructing Davnie," Sept. 16, 2003] In the interests of historical accuracy, the legislation authorizing the Graduation Standards (later called the Profile) was enacted in 1992, when Arne Carlson was Governor and Gene Mammenga Commissioner of Education. When the legislation requiring Minnesota school districts to implement the Profile by 2000-2001 was enacted in 1998, Carlson was still Governor and Robert Wedl Commissioner of Children, Families & Learning (formerly called Education). It thus appears that former Commissioner Jax inherited, rather than created, the Profile of Learning.

Doug Gray
Office of Communications
Minnesota Department of Education

Date: September 17, 2003
Subject: Moorhead Hearing Testimony

The following testimony is published with permission of the author. It was given at the public hearing of the Academic Standards Committee in Moorhead, Minnesota on September 15.

My name is Julie Sorenson. I am the mother of two school-aged children, a resident of Moorhead, and in two weeks will be for the first time a home-owner in the school district. I am also a foster mom to a senior special education student at Moorhead Senior High School. I have been exceptionally pleased with the teacher, and the many services provided. Academic content has never been an issue.

I wish to thank the individuals who have participated in the process of revising these standards. Obviously these standards form the heart of our state's educational system, and have far-reaching implications for our future.

At a time when many of our family, neighbors and friends are fighting a war and actively preserving the freedoms our nation's founders worked so hard to establish, we must make sure each student understands how important national sovereignty is to our freedom. In the social studies, civics, economics and history standards, it must be made crystal-clear to our future generations that only by protecting our unalienable rights was our nation able to become the lighthouse of freedom that it is.

Our future leaders need a clear understanding of our country's founding principles in order to maintain and perpetuate them. Thankfully, this draft of the Minnesota standards does ensure that the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights are the basis for defining these founding principles.

I'm also glad to see that the concepts of "unalienable rights" and "self-evident truths" are in these standards' educational lexicon. The National Standards on Civics and Government, for example, have gone too far in the direction of post-modernist thinking. Those national standards minimize or ignore these timeless, crucial principles, lifting up instead fuzzy notions such as a "belief in progress." Our country's founders believed in progress, all right, but they knew the only way they could enjoy progress is by first protecting the rights our Creator endowed to us.

The national standards, on which the Profile of Learning was based, do much to undercut the principle of national sovereignty. Instead, they focus attention on the lengthy United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. How many parents are aware that this document says in Article 29 that none of the human rights mentioned can be exercised "contrary to the purposes and principles of the UNITED NATIONS?" Minnesota has made a laudable (and closely-watched) first step in rejecting standards that denigrate our nation and fail to tell the truth about America's incredible contribution to the well-being of the world.

These new Minnesota economics standards would be improved by focusing more on how the United States has been a model of economic success for the rest of the world. The geography standards state that national sovereignty has a "changing nature." I object to that portrayal. National sovereignty "changes" only when it ends.

Last, I encourage revisions in the geography standards so that students will actually be required to know where nations, important cities and physical features actually ARE on the globe. The national standards say "people create regions to interpret Earth's complexity." When's the last time you asked someone "What region are you from?" People properly do and should identify with a nation. Especially their own.

An over-emphasis on "regions" and "cultural geography" leads the student to believe that individual nations and parts of those nations are inconsequential. Our future leaders must understand that each sovereign nation has a distinct place and boundary, and that it is not just some "region" of an amorphous globe.

Our family will continue to pray for those in leadership in our schools, and for the students in them, and we will seek to fulfill our responsibilities of helping to keep our nation free through excellent education.

Date: September 16, 2003
Subject: Deconstructing Davnie

Rep. Jim Davnie (DFL-Minneapolis) fired the opening shots at the draft standards last week, in the newspapers and on TPT's Almanac television program:

We seem to have gone from five pages of standards to fifty-four pages of standards, which I think is going to suck a lot of the life, a lot of the air out of the social studies classrooms, as teachers go for the inch deep, mile-wide approach that is mandated here. But more importantly, I think they've substituted their political judgement for educational judgement in a lot of the standards.

As Commissioner Yecke responded on the same Almanac show, the standards released last week are a draft, as Rep. Davnie is well aware, which will be edited down in response to public comment. And here we go with the disparagement of factual knowledge (more on that later).

For instance, there's three references in the standards to Ronald Reagan, none to John F. Kennedy. There seems to be a persistent theme of a very conservative political slant to the standards. On the middle school level, the civics and world history standards were all written by one man, a man who's on the board of a very controversial and conservative political think tank in California. And the committee was never allowed to sit around the table, review his work, come to consensus.

As anyone who was there could tell you, all we did was sit around the table and work toward consensus. Just who exactly is the alleged mastermind of the 6-8 World History and 6-8 Government & Civics strands??

Instead of having a distinct history class and a distinct geography class, we're going to a mushy, generic social studies class that is poorly based on standards that focus more on "When was the War of 1812?" and "Who is buried in Grant's Tomb?" than the inspiring stories of American History. We lose students, we lose good quality teaching when we turn history into memorizing dates, facts, places, and events, and not connecting with the grand stories.

The inference that facts and "stories" are mutually exclusive is a false premise. There is nothing in the new standards that mandates teaching methods (that was The Profile of Learning, remember?). School districts and teachers are free, under the new standards, to use an integrated or non-integrated approach. Nothing in the new standards prohibit "the grand stories" of American History. The disparagement of facts and knowledge is a tactic, ironically of education elites, that goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, and leaves us with a generation of high school graduates who can't tell Jay Leno when the War of 1812 was.

The standards are going to take away a great deal of local control and not allow teachers to connect current events with historical antecedents.

This tactic is called "The Fear Factor."

I think what the Commissioner needs to do is bring the committee back together, look at those people who placed their political ideology over their educational judgement, replace those people with parents, teachers, administrators, and others who are going to build on the strengths of Minnesota's educational system.

Fear Factor II. Rep. Davnie is trying to paint the 80+ members of the science and social studies committees as a homogeneous select group with exclusive control over the content of the standards. No, that is how the previous Commissioner created the Profile of Learning, remember? A review of the committee members will reveal a diversity of backgrounds, and fourteen public hearings plus a public web site will allow for ample public comment. With a process so exposed to the light of public scrutiny, no one — including the Commissioner, including thank God the Legislature — has exclusive control over Minnesota's academic standards.

Davnie's three-part strategy is tried and true: fear, uncertainty, and doubt, with a few straw men thrown in for good measure. But what's the end game? If supporters of the Academic Standards process, committee members and non-committee members, are silent, we're headed for the preservation of the Profile of Learning, which will not be completely repealed until the new standards are adopted by the Legislature.

I'm all in favor of partisan political debate, but let's declare a moratorium until the Legislature's in session. In the meantime, let's work on drafting nation-leading academic standards in science and social studies — regardless of our political stripes.

Date: September 10, 2003
Subject: Politics as usual

The DFL has fired its first shot at the draft standards, just as the public comment period begins:

Already, the proposed social-studies requirements have come under fire. Rep. Jim Davnie, DFL-Minneapolis, who is also a social-studies teacher at Buffalo Middle School, charged that the standards give short shrift to key points in U.S. history such as the women's and civil rights movements, and that the language of some requirements is charged with politically conservative sentiments. ("New school standards stress basics." Star Tribune, 9/9/03)

One critic claims the new social studies standards are too political and too conservative. Rep. Jim Davnie, DFL-Minneapolis, who teaches middle-school social studies in the Buffalo School District, had several concerns: The Vietnam War is characterized as "defending freedom," and the labor union movement gets three mentions but entrepreneurship gets 10.

"There are some odd omissions and inconsistencies,'' Davnie said. "Their standards represent a high-gloss view of American history." ("Academic standards strike nerves," Pioneer Press, 9/9/03)

Funny, the Star Tribune and Pioneer Press never accused the Profile of Learning of being "charged with politically liberal sentiments." To the contrary, they saved their most acerbic editorial attacks for Profile opponents.

I know, you're shocked, SHOCKED that there is politics going on at the Capitol. Opponents of the Pawlenty administration, of which Commissioner Yecke is a part, will try to make political hay out of the standards process, particularly when hearings are convened in Saint Paul.

Committee members said they were not interested in promoting partisan politics but strong education. "You didn't have a lot of cultural warriors in there — you had serious, dedicated teachers who worked together to produce a strong set of standards,'' said Southwest Minnesota State University Professor David Sturrock, a social studies committee member. ("Academic standards strike nerves, " Pioneer Press, 9/9/03)

If the last go-around is any indication, Pawlenty's political opponents will attack the messengers during the public hearings, and offer little in substance to improve the standards themselves.

Please read the standards yourself. I hope you will contribute your critical yet constructive comments via the web, e-mail, or public hearings, then tell your legislators to lay off the politics and approve the new citizen-created standards.

Date: September 9, 2003
Subject: Public comment

The public comment period for the science and social studies standards has begun. You can find the complete draft standards on the MDE web site. Click the link on the left side of the page to go right to the standards "home page," with links to the standards documents and details about how to comment. Please return to the Minnesota Education Reform News web site on Wednesday for a special report on the standards, including tips for sending your own "two cents" to the Commissioner, and thereafter for follow-up reports.

I will post the latest news about the public hearings and other comments throughout the comment period, which continues through the end of October.

Judging by the Google search hits to the web site, there is a lot of interest in the standards. Thanks for stopping by.