FRANKLIN — Parents of students in the Williamson County School System who worry that school officials politicize their child’s social studies curriculum have a right to view the material if they wish.
The Tennessee Star reviewed a portion of the school system’s social studies curriculum Tuesday, with the caveat that we had to do it at the school system’s main office in Franklin and with school staff monitoring us.
We also could not take screenshots of the curriculum, which is online.
But if it is online then why could we not simply review the material on our own from a location of our choosing? Could WCS officials cite a specific state statute or statutory authority to explain that?
When asked, WCS spokeswoman Carol Birdsong did not cite any statute or statutory authority.
But Birdsong did say the following in an emailed statement:
“The information that you saw today is part of the social studies OER which contains the materials designed for teachers to access and utilize in their classrooms. Teachers may choose to use any or all of those resources. What you reviewed was not for students to directly access through a password. Also, remember that each resource you saw ties back to the State standard associated with it,” Birdsong wrote.
“Parents may access the OER materials selected by the teacher through their child’s Google Classroom or Learning Management System, LMS. Teachers are expected to share the State standards, the resources and how the resources are going to be used with parents prior to the lesson being taught. The teacher is always the best place for parents to start when communicating about their child’s classes and materials being used.”
As The Star reported earlier this month, two WCS parents appeared on The Tennessee Star Report radio program and said only parents are allowed to view the school system’s new online social studies curriculum — in person at the WCS office and under the supervision of WCS staff.
As reported earlier this year, school system officials used taxpayer money to create a series of training videos for teachers that preached “white privilege” and America’s supposed dysfunctional history.
Former School Superintendent Mike Looney said parents were never supposed to see those videos.
The Star will report Thursday what we found in the school system’s social studies curriculum and whether the material does or does not have a political bias.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
[…] The Tennessee Star reported this week, parents of students in the Williamson County School System who worry that school officials […]
[…] As reported this week, parents of students in the Williamson County School System who worry that school officials politicize their child’s social studies curriculum have a right to view the material if they wish. […]
[…] As reported this week, parents of students in the Williamson County School System who worry that school officials politicize their child’s social studies curriculum have a right to view the material if they wish. […]
Parents and taxpayers can only see any of the thousands of Open Education Resources by making an appointment with the social studies experts and educrats at WCS. Teachers can also provide some of this information, but only those resources they may use in teaching the standards for their classes, however, it would be quite cumbersome for teachers to constantly provide their lesson plans to all parents prior to their use in the classroom.
Their are thousands of OERs that correspond with all the standards for all social studies courses taught in K-12. There are 25-35 standards per course. Primarily, the sources used in the current OERs come from left-leaning sites which means that students are not necessarily getting the facts and are certainly not being presented balanced material. This is against WCS school board policy 4.402 in WCS.
Chis, your wording is off on this. Yes, parents are allowed to see the Open Ed. Resources, but ONLY at the Williamson County Central Office, by appointment, with the curriculum expert operating the computer. OR, the teacher can send home some heads-up on what they will use from the resources to teach a certain lesson/standard (which would be ridiculously cumbersome for teachers to send home info for everything they do.) So, it is not “ONLY parents” may see the OERs with an appointment, but parents can ONLY view the curriculum by appointment at the WCS office. Obviously, they allowed you as a taxpayer to view them. There are thousands of resources to accommodate the standards for the social studies courses (K-12), which, roughly would be 35 standards per course for ALL social studies courses in K-12. That’s a lot of resources for a lot of standards for each course. It would be impossible to you or the administrator to go through all the standards/resources at one or one hundred sittings! And, yes, the resources they use are primarily left-leaning sources. Examples: Newsela, Newseum ed, Khan Academy, New York Times, Newsweek, Achieve 300, ABC, CBS, NBC Learn k-12, etc.
The arrogance of WCS is readily apparent here which, in and of itself, raises serious concerns about leftist and statist bias. These are taxpayer funded institutions and need to be held to account. Every taxpayer has a statutory right to a fully transparent accounting of where and how their funds are being spent.
Gov. Lee’s initiative to provide parents with school choice should be more widespread, public schools held to account, and perhaps allow taxpayers, not just parents, to designate where their individual funds are to be allocated – whether the funds are to be spent on public schools, or to support private and/or homeschool alternatives.
I agree with you Ralph. It’s especially disturbing that the administrators keep punting the responsibility of sharing the teaching materials “in advance” onto the teachers. That’s some “leadership” right there. The teachers are in fact not doing this (sharing), and I am not surprised, since they are so busy anyway — and why would they have to field questions about a curriculum developed by a small team within the administration? If WCSD is so concerned about how their curriculum is perceived there is an easy solution to it: make it publicly accessible. We have there right as taxpayers to view it and Dana Ausbrooks inadvertently admitted that is the case when she responded to my FOIA for one of the standards. Except, she converted the entire document into a pdf file, to make sure the links are not clickable and therefore we could not really see / type into our browser the actual website addresses constituting the teaching materials. These are the sorts of games they are playing. Calling in a journalist and giving him a presentation in a very controlled situation does not prove anything, except for the fact that they are desperate to try to do damage control, but are still not willing to openly share the curriculum. It may very well be that most of the curriculum is more balanced and the units we saw were more leaning to the left. We will not know until we have seen more of the curriculum — but we are not going into the office again, as that sort of restriction on the access to online materials is cumbersome and uncalled for. So — until such time as we see more of the curriculum, we will assume that it the entire thing is as leftist as the tiny sliver we saw, and which we attempted to help them “correct.”