Texas school district - Teach different Shoah perspectives

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A top administrator with the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake advised teachers last week that if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also offer students access to a book from an “opposing” perspective, according to an audio recording obtained by NBC News.

Gina Peddy, the Carroll school district’s executive director of curriculum and instruction, made the comment Friday afternoon during a training session on which books teachers can have in classroom libraries. The training came four days after the Carroll school board, responding to a parent’s complaint, voted to reprimand a fourth grade teacher who had kept an anti-racism book in her classroom.

A Carroll staff member secretly recorded the Friday training and shared the audio with NBC News.

“Just try to remember the concepts of [House Bill] 3979,” Peddy said in the recording, referring to a new Texas law that requires teachers to present multiple perspectives when discussing “widely debated and currently controversial” issues. “And make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust,” Peddy continued, “that you have one that has an opposing, that has other perspectives.”

“How do you oppose the Holocaust?” one teacher said in response.

“Believe me,” Peddy said. “That’s come up.”

Our district recognizes that all Texas teachers are in a precarious position with the latest legal requirements,” Fitzgerald wrote, noting that the district’s interpretation of the new Texas law requires teachers to provide balanced perspectives not just during classroom instruction, but in the books that are available to students in class during free time. “Our purpose is to support our teachers in ensuring they have all of the professional development, resources and materials needed. Our district has not and will not mandate books be removed nor will we mandate that classroom libraries be unavailable.”

Clay Robison, a spokesman for the Texas State Teachers Association, a union representing educators, said there’s nothing in the new Texas law explicitly dealing with classroom libraries. Robison said the book guidelines at Carroll, a suburban school district near Fort Worth, are an “overreaction” and a “misinterpretation” of the law. Three other Texas education policy experts agreed.

“We find it reprehensible for an educator to require a Holocaust denier to get equal treatment with the facts of history,” Robison said. “That’s absurd. It’s worse than absurd. And this law does not require it.”

“Teachers are literally afraid that we’re going to be punished for having books in our classes,” an elementary school teacher said. “There are no children’s books that show the ‘opposing perspective’ of the Holocaust or the ‘opposing perspective’ of slavery. Are we supposed to get rid of all of the books on those subjects?”

. A group of Southlake parents has been fighting for more than a year to block new diversity and inclusion programs at Carroll, one of the top-ranked school districts in Texas.

Late last year, one of those parents complained when her daughter brought home a copy of “This Book Is Anti-Racist” by Tiffany Jewell from her fourth grade teacher’s class library. The mother also complained about how the teacher responded to her concerns.

Carroll administrators investigated and decided against disciplining the teacher. But last week, on Oct. 4, the Carroll school board voted 3-2 to overturn the district’s decision and formally reprimanded the teacher, setting off unease among Carroll teachers who said they fear the board won’t protect them if a parent complains about a book in their class.

Teachers grew more concerned last Thursday, Oct. 7, when Carroll administrators sent an email directing them to close their classroom libraries “until they can be vetted by the teacher.” Another email sent to teachers that day included a rubric that asked them to grade books based on whether they provide multiple perspectives and to set aside any that present singular, dominant narratives “in such a way that it ... may be considered offensive.

clusterf**k

I am pretty sure the administrator in question is a progressive who does not want holocaust denial books in the school and did this to make the anti critical race theory law and movement look stupid.

downright evil and to deny such makes one part of the enormity.

https://www.yahoo.com/finance/m/35f2a577-c91c-3710-809c-96702169803f/an-%E2%80%98opposing%E2%80%99-view-on-the.html

I would not be the least surprised if this leads back to white nationalist and holocaust deniers who have gotten a headlock on the political right.

This is the repercussion of the current pogrom against teaching critical race theory.

It's not rocket science. Educators have known for a couple of hundred years that filling kids heads with details doesn't make their child skilled, It's the ability to impart critical thinking. Employers want graduates who can solve problems and think outside the square. They want critical thinkers not homogenous clones who are full of information but don't know how to use it. This means teaching children critical thinking about why things like the holocaust happens is important, Opposing views teach children to bend the truth. That doesn't help their education.

So when politically infused doctrine contaminates the education system you get a form of book burning where some information is deemed innapropriate.

How do you get an opposing view of the holocaust? a better question to ask is why create an opposing view?.

Answer: If republican propaganda has worked in preventing white kids from having to learn about slavery, then why learn about racism altogether. Learning about racism creates uncomfortable questions about why in 2021 their neighborhood is segregated or why their school is segregated.

My best guess is that this is an attempt to re-write WWII history in the context of competing empires in order to diminish the repurcussions of Nazi racism. They are already doing this with the civil war which has long been pitched as a battle over state sovereignty rather than a war to keep slavery.

Harvard historian William Goldhagen and others have eloquently argued that critical thinking about the causes of the holocaust have been prevented from being taught in schools because the power of group think that created the conditions for the Nazi holocaust are capable (and have been repeated) in other situations. Psychologists have known this for years.

Or to put it another way, if you erase history you are doomed to repeat it.

one must know that the only "opposing view" is total denial of the enormity of the holocaust. you know, the banality of evil and all that.

Is someone willing to paste the article in? I've blocked that site in my hosts file so I stop wasting so much time reading miserable news.