Teacher Has Two Critics

The good news? Katherine Kersten - the Twin Cities' media's best columnist - has a blog!

The bad news? She's got so much material.

She writes about a protest at a Minneapolis public school:

The scene last Saturday at the Interdistrict Downtown School in Minneapolis was straight out of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. A group of black mothers and their supporters stood shoulder to shoulder, demanding what they called a decent education for their kids.But the story has a 2006 spin.

Gena Bounds, a mother of three, described it this way: “On September 15 I gave my kids a big hug after school, but something was clearly wrong.”

Bounds’ 7-year-old daughter, Darriell, explained the situation to her mother. “She told me that her teacher had read the class a book about a girl with two moms,” says Bounds. “Then he told them that he’s gay and that he and his partner are adopting a child, and the child will have two dads. Now Darriell thinks the school is telling her she needs to believe that two daddies or two mommies is the same thing as a mom and a dad.”

Was this just a little detour from reading and math? No. “Asha’s Mums,” the book that Darriell’s teacher, Peter Sage, had read, is part of a diversity curriculum called the “Families All Matter” book project.

And what happens when parents collide with curricula, programs, and the academic-industrial-complex's sacred cows?

FeLicia McCorvey Preyer, who has second-grade twins at the school, was also incensed about “Families All Matter.” Before the school year began, she told Sage and school officials that she didn’t want her children reading books with homosexual themes, she says. “They knew my wishes and they defied them,” she adds.

“Families All Matter” is supposed to teach tolerance. In fact, says Bounds, her daughter has learned that people who believe that a mother and father are best for a family are discriminatory.

After Sage read “Asha’s Mums,” he “told the class that his grandfather had believed that black people are stupid,” she says. “He said that other adults had helped him see that his grandfather was a bigot.” The implication? That parents who don’t share Sage’s views on family matters are bigots too.

Sage touched a nerve by claiming the mantle of the fight against racism for his own agenda, says Preyer. “I’m appalled that he, a white man, would use that tactic to push his views on African-American children.”

But Bounds and Preyer are most upset at the school’s message that kids don’t need to listen to their parents when the school and the parents disagree. “The school is undermining my authority as a parent, at a critical, formative stage of my daughter’s life,” says Bounds.

School officials reacted with indifference, even “arrogance,” to their concerns, say Bounds and Prior. Administrators failed to inform them of their legal right to review the curriculum, and refused to reassign their children to another classroom. Officials told them to consider withdrawing their children or enrolling them in a private school.

Public schools have a lot of problems (as do most private schools); the most galling among them is that parents have to become mini-lawyers to navigate the systems' procesures and policies. And after you spend enough time becoming that lawyer, you eventually wonder why it is that a school district has to adopt such a formal, legalistic approach to everything - and, inevitably, you realize the answer; to keep parents like you stifled, in the dark, cowed into confused inaction.

Kersten comments on the story's irony:

Bounds and Preyer are battling to instill a sense of respect for their authority as parents, and to pass on their sense of right and wrong to their children.

But they say the school does not appreciate that. Preyer puts it this way: “They treat me as if my beliefs are the problem.”

They are!

More - much more - on this later.

Posted by Mitch at October 16, 2006 04:55 AM | TrackBack