WORRIED ABOUT CRT IN NEW MEXICO'S SCHOOLS? THINK AGAIN!

I congratulate PED for repeating deficiencies of the Common Core State Standards in its Proposed Revised K-12 Social Studies Curriculum.  Consider one Performance Standard for the First Grade:

Inquiry 22. Construct Compelling and Supporting Questions

●  1.1. Explain why a compelling question is important.

●  1.2. Generate supporting questions related to compelling questions across the social studies disciplines.

Absurd.  PED assumes that first graders understand “compelling” and “supporting.”  PED assumes that they can distinguish between them.  PED assumes that first-grade teachers understand them, can distinguish between them, and can teach first graders their meanings and the difference between them.  And lack of realism is pervasive.

Pace PED, neither teachers nor students can possibly know which questions are “compelling” and which “supporting” because of the vagueness of the terms,  Moreover, neither teachers nor students can have enough knowledge to generate supporting questions to compelling questions in the half dozen or so “social studies disciplines,” even if they know what they are.  Reality check: Experts in fields related to social studies often debate which questions are more or less important than others.

Dear Reader: can you perform to the level of these first-grade standards?  I admit that I cannot.

No less absurd: Teachers cannot readily, perhaps not possibly, assess whether students meet stated performance standards.  What standards do teachers have to know when a student has explained something?  How can teachers ascertain whether students have generated supporting questions to compelling questions in each field?

The performance standards do not stipulate what students are supposed to know and what teachers presumably must teach.  Performance standards fail because they assume that students have learned without specifying that teachers have taught the information necessary to perform.  Relatively minor issue: no standard states that students know the names of and can identify the continents; major bodies of water or major river systems; major mountain ranges or deserts; major countries; the fifty states, their capitals, their major cities, and their postal abbreviations.  Likewise, the distribution of populations, wealth or poverty, religions, and races.  Relatively major issue: teachers do not know enough to teach students about diverse cultures and societies throughout the world without presenting partial, superficial, and biased accounts of them.  Can white teachers give an informed, unbiased account of Blacks in Africa or urban America or Latinx in Brazil or rural New Mexico?  Can Christian teachers give such an account of Judaism in Israel?  In America?  In the Lower East Side and in Los Angeles?   Surely, PED jests.

The result of these deficiencies is that this curriculum is irresponsible in defining “performance,” not content, not what teachers teach to students so that they can satisfy yet-to-be-defined appropriate grade-level standards.  If students cannot meet PED performance standards, the blame for their failure can be shifted to what they could not perform and away from what the teacher failed to teach.  In addition, the statement of the curriculum is larded with jargon impenetrable to non-professionals, including most parents and many school board members.

In short, this curriculum is a compendium of professional incompetence and an exercise in educational obfuscation and pomposity.  It gets teachers off the hook and puts students on it.  Someone should ask Bill Soules if he is happy with it.