Curriculum Documents Posted
MCPS pulled the revised curriculum documents off the web as soon as the judge's ruling came out. I suppose this protected them in some way, but it did make the discussion much harder for the rest of us to discuss.
The curriculum itself was very innocuous. Yes, it introduced the concept of sexual variation, but it certainly didn't advocate anything or encourage anyone to do anything ... any of that crazy stuff some people have been saying. And you can look at the documents and see that.
People mostly gave up actually criticizng the curriculum as it was written a long time ago, and actual complaints died out almost entirely after the revised editions came out, which cleaned up some language that was too easily twisted by dirty-minded puritans. (Ah, that phrase does have a ring to it, doesn't it?) So the only thing left to do was to criticize the teachers' resources, which are not part of the classroom presentation. Those materials are for teachers to get up to speed on the topic, to read up on their own time. But people could find some controversial statements in them, so they were considered fair game, and were the basis of the lawsuit which was brought successfully by Ex-Recall and PFOX.
I have put the two curriculum documents online again, on our server. They are here:
As usual, our recommendation to people is to look at the documents. The judge ruled on the basis of stuff that students never see, which strikes me as strange. But some of his wording suggests that he had been misled to believe that students would, for instance, take a quiz on Myths and Facts, which was in fact not to be shown to them.
If you want to judge what's going on in Montgomery County's sex education curriculum, look at the actual curriculum, OK?
I am keeping the links up on the righthand side of the page permanently.
The curriculum itself was very innocuous. Yes, it introduced the concept of sexual variation, but it certainly didn't advocate anything or encourage anyone to do anything ... any of that crazy stuff some people have been saying. And you can look at the documents and see that.
People mostly gave up actually criticizng the curriculum as it was written a long time ago, and actual complaints died out almost entirely after the revised editions came out, which cleaned up some language that was too easily twisted by dirty-minded puritans. (Ah, that phrase does have a ring to it, doesn't it?) So the only thing left to do was to criticize the teachers' resources, which are not part of the classroom presentation. Those materials are for teachers to get up to speed on the topic, to read up on their own time. But people could find some controversial statements in them, so they were considered fair game, and were the basis of the lawsuit which was brought successfully by Ex-Recall and PFOX.
I have put the two curriculum documents online again, on our server. They are here:
As usual, our recommendation to people is to look at the documents. The judge ruled on the basis of stuff that students never see, which strikes me as strange. But some of his wording suggests that he had been misled to believe that students would, for instance, take a quiz on Myths and Facts, which was in fact not to be shown to them.
If you want to judge what's going on in Montgomery County's sex education curriculum, look at the actual curriculum, OK?
I am keeping the links up on the righthand side of the page permanently.
posted by JimK at 6:43 PM
2 Comments:
Actually, they've been criticizing the teacher's resources (which, by the way, INCLUDE HANDOUTS THEY WERE TO GIVE TO STUDENTS) since Day One.
Did you notice that the judge's opinion actually specifically criticized hand-outs designed to be distributed to the students?
I think the judge was confused. The teachers' resources are not handed out to students. If you see any place in the Teachers Editions that say to do that, please post a comment, saying where this happens.
Recursively, the resources may be teaching materials, but not for use by MCPS teachers... that's hard to explain, which is probably why the judge didn't distinguish between classroom materials and background information.
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