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TRASH TEXTBOOKS?

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Educators across the state of Texas are working feverishly on implementing a progressive learning style called Project Based Learning. Sound great doesn’t it? As a student I loved doing projects and getting my hands messy, buidling and making dioramas, etc. Unfortunately this is not what it is all about to the liberal progressive educator of our day.

They want to trash your students textbooks and build a learning practice built on Marxist Lev Vygotsky’s learning theory of “Social Constructivism”. Social Constructivism is based on students creating their own knowledge of things. There is no absolute value, right or wrong. You will hear educators today mention 21st Century Learning Skills and Critical Thinking. These are buzz words for everything is up for debate.

The following is a snap shot of a newsletter from written by, Texas Education Service Center 6’s Coordinator of School Improvement, Ingrid Lee.  In the article Ms. Lee’s  promotes the idea of shedding textbooks and worksheets and grow relationships with peers and teachers. Are educators now promoting schools as just some sort of social club? I would hope we would send out children to school to be taught and educated by qualified teachers. Unfortunately,  Teachers are being converted into being just some class room facilitator. Students are to work in groups for the majority of the time in “DISCOVERING THEIR KNOWLEDGE”  as well as critically thinking material through and discover if it is truth for them or not. SERIOUSLY?

NO TEXTBOOKS

 

 

Eli Crow from Tyler ISD wrote this attachement on Project Based Learning and stated the following “Many of the CSCOPE curriculum performance indicators can serve as potential PBL project ideas.” CSCOPE has appeared to be the foundation for a bigger progressive agenda of implementing Project Based Learning. CSCOPE is not officially gone and thankfully parents and taxpayers are waking up to what is going on in our school districts. The fact that the lessons are supposedly going to be removed doesn’t remove the control aspect of CSCOPE for teachers and the agenda of Project Based Learning.

 

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TEXAS TEACHERS CELEBRATING

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Texas teachers celebrate end of CSCOPE, say it will lead to improved student learning

 

By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

AUSTIN, Texas – A number of Texans cheered yesterday when state Sen. Dan Patrick announced that CSCOPE will be sent to the ash heap of history at the end of August.

CSCOPE is a curriculum management system used by more than 800 Texas school districts that provides educators with pre-written lessons to use in the classroom. A number of those lessons came under fire from conservatives for promoting a left-wing, anti-American point of view.

While conservatives were understandably happy with Patrick’s announcement, it might have been Texas’ teachers who rejoiced the most.

DANCING TEACHER

KLTV.com reports that many teachers despised CSCOPE’s rigid, one-size-fits-all approach to education. After seven years of CSCOPE, those teachers are thrilled to be set free from the tyranny of the ready-made lesson plan.

Bill Martin, director of the Tyler Sylvan Learning Center, said the end of CSCOPE means teachers “get control back over their classroom again.”

“They get to use lesson plans that they feel are best suited for their class and their students in their class,” Martin told KLTV.com.

Martin added that he doesn’t know “a single teacher that likes CSCOPE. Not a single teacher.”

One Tyler ISD teacher, who spoke to KLTV.com on the condition of anonymity, said, “The end of CSCOPE means teachers will be able to teach English and other core subjects without watering them down. It means we can prep students for college. The need for college remedial courses will drop dramatically as CSCOPE lesson plans are removed.”

The end of pre-written CSCOPE lessons means teachers will have to spend a lot of time and effort to write their own. Judging from the comments of one teacher union official, not many of them seem to mind the prospect of extra work.

“We’ve got to meet the individual children’s needs so they can be successful and this (CSCOPE) curriculum just has not allowed that,” Jamie Womack, organizer of the Texas American Federation of Teachers in East Texas, told the news site.

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