Several hundred students, community members, and educators packed a Jefferson County Board of Education meeting in suburban Denver on Thursday night, lambasting the conservative-majority board's proposal to censor the district’s history curriculum.
The proposal—to establish a committee that would review course materials to ensure they promote patriotism and avoid encouragement of "civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law"—was the catalyst for two weeks of student walk-outs and teacher 'sick-outs,' the latter of which closed several high schools on two days in September.
While board member Julie Williams, who has cited the Texas Board of Education as a model, refused to recall the proposal entirely, the protests appeared to have brought about a partial victory.
"The controversy over a history curriculum in Colorado is an argument over a very much bigger issue," public education expert Jeff Bryant wrote Thursday at the Education Opportunity Network blog.
"It’s about how we’re treating our nation’s youngest citizens with a substandard form of education that emphasizes fiscal efficiency over learning opportunity and standardization over individual needs and interests. And it’s about how we treat students as learners, imposing education as something done to them rather than with them."
The full article is available here
The full article is available here
