GilfordGrok

Mary Grabar, over at Pajamas Media, has an interesting piece on Barack Obama's pal (and former Weatherman) Bill Ayers:

In To Teach, Ayers lists a number of “myths” about teaching. Number four is “Good teachers always know the materials.” Such an assertion flies in the face of research that indicates that knowledge is the most important quality of the teacher when it comes to student achievement. But when education majors take classes like “Education and Cultural Diversity” and “Introduction to Social Justice Education,” as they do at a major Atlanta university, little time is left to focus on subject areas.

Indeed, the model is the 1960s “freedom schools,” those schools that Stokely Carmichael taught in and whom Ayers references. In To Become a Teacher, Ayers repeats nostrums like “classrooms should honor diversity truly and fully,” and that children should “co-construct values” and be exposed to “community engagement and involvement.” In the collection Teaching for Social Justice, Ayers includes a piece by Rashid Khalidi, the pro-Palestinian professor who helped Barack Obama get into Columbia. In the suggested reading, amid offerings by Howard Zinn, Jonathan Kozol, and other left-wing ideologues, Ayers presents Obama’s Dreams from My Father.

A survey reveals what those of us in the academy already know: “the proportion of professors who believe it is very important to teach undergraduates to become ‘agents of social change’ is substantially larger than the proportion who believe it is important to teach students the classic works of Western civilization.”

And it seems that education colleges are churning out teachers more concerned with being “agents of social change” than the three “R”s. Little wonder, then, that Ayers’ book is being reissued as a graphic novel. Little wonder that student groups sponsored Ayers’ visit on March 5 to the University of Colorado to speak in defense of ethnic studies professor Ward Churchill, who was fired for plagiarism and not for calling 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns.” We can thank their teachers for planting in their heads notions about “social change” that would lead to their ignorantly calling the event “Forbidden Education and the Rise of NeoMcCarthyism.”

So, if parents demanded webcams for the classrooms to see what their taxpayer money was funding, would they find American Exceptionalism being taught, Bill Ayer's philosophy, or something in the middle? If asked, what would be the response to "Do parents have that right?"

In the recently released 2008 Annual Report Card, we are seeing more about IB - what is its core philosophy and what is that history? Does it match up with more with what we with grey hair remember as the fundamentals, or what we see in the above snippet? 

I continue look at the NECAP scores and wonder....