Social Studies Standards in Rhode Island Failing Students, Report Finds
“The Standards do not teach Rhode Island’s children what freedom is”
The focus of almost everything now is the left’s obsession with equity. Everything else is a secondary consideration.
The National Association of Scholars reports:
Rhode Island’s Social Studies Standards Fail Students, Report Finds
The Civics Alliance and the Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity have just released Taken For a RIDE: How Rhode Island’s Social Studies Standards Shortchange Students. This report provides a detailed critique of Rhode Island’s Social Studies Standards (2023) (hereafter, Standards), which fail to achieve the fundamental goal of American social studies education.
Taken For a RIDE has been released jointly by the Civics Alliance, a coalition of organizations and individuals dedicated to improving America’s civics education, and the Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity (RICFP), which provides Rhode Island’s citizens, media, and public officials with empirical research data, while also advancing market-based solutions to major public policy issues in the state.
“The Standards do not teach Rhode Island’s children what freedom is,” said David Randall, report author and Executive Director of the Civics Alliance. “Nor do the Standards teach where America’s ideas of freedom come from in the long history of Western civilization, nor how our ancestors achieved their freedom, nor how our laws, republican institutions, and limitation of the scope of government preserve our freedom, nor what they need to do to preserve their country’s liberty.”
The Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE), enabled by misguided legislation and a secretive bureaucratic process, has produced a document that is bloated, vague, riddled with errors, distortions, and absences, and animated by a radical identity-politics ideology (sometimes known as Critical Race Theory) that permeates the Standards with hostility to groups such as whites, men, and Christians—and, above all, with hostility to America. Social studies instruction should teach students to appreciate America’s original and ongoing fight for freedom; the Standards teaches them to hate America because it has not yet achieved the nightmare of equity.
“The Standards is neither by the people of Rhode Island, nor of the people of Rhode Island,” said Mike Stenhouse, CEO of the RICFP. “Nevertheless, it will be imposed on the people of Rhode Island.”
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Comments
“Social Studies Standards in Rhode Island Failing Students, Report Finds”
No, that’s succeeding in exactly the way intended.
Besides, who are these students that we are about the outcome for them (in their terms, or their parents’, or the larger volk’s even) — they’re fodder for the greater good (as the curriculum crafters see it), as is everyone else.
But this is nothing new.
I grew up in RI. I literally could not comprehend (much less articulate) a basic understanding of the concepts of either freedom or honor until I had them clarified in college philosophy courses.
For decades I have understood that my teachers never properly imparted those concepts to me because they never really understood them themselves. And really, the concepts basic to each are so simple that they can be summarized in one to three short sentences.
It may have been a Rhode Island thing, it may have been that most of my teachers had themselves traded in their freedom for the dependent collegiality of a religious order, or it may have been a combination.
Still, after having escaped the New England environment for long enough to detox, I remain amazed that I ever considered the zeitgeist of the region to be acceptable, much less normal.
Feature, not a big.
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The Teenage Liberation Handbook (3rd Edition): How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education.
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Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas.
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At some point, why imagine there can ever really be a better outcome from the current education system
At some point, isn’t it on us?
social studies….