Texas GOP lieutenant governor candidate and state senator Dan Patrick warned yesterday of supposed left-wing indoctrination in public schools. Right-wing claims about CSCOPE, a curriculum program used in Texas, have been roundly debunked, but Patrick, a longtime CSCOPE critic, repeated the bogus claims in an interview yesterday on the Family Research Council’s Washington Watch.
Patrick claimed that the CSCOPE curriculum frames the Boston Tea Party as the work of “terrorists” and promotes communism. He also criticized public schools for having “a bias for the environment against oil and coal and natural gas” and “a bias for less standards (sic) and America should not be a leader in the world but we should be just part of a world community.”
The Boston Tea Party story Patrick mentioned was actually part of an assignment to see if students could discern news reports coming from the British perspective, and the “communist flag” lesson concerned how communists used propaganda.
What troubles me is that in Texas we had something called CSCOPE, which is kind of a shadow figure of Common Core, and we had lessons for example that the patriots who threw out the tea in the Boston Tea Party, they were called terrorists in these lesson plans.
Before our committee we had testimony on CSCOPE, a very related curriculum to Common Core in my view, in the case of a lesson plan where sixth graders were learning to design a flag. And that sounds reasonable, except it was a flag for a communist country. So you start seeing these things and people say, ‘That’s just an anecdote here and there.’ But the more we looked into all of this, we saw more of the curriculum, Common Core, CSCOPE -- and different states may have their own version of that -- is that the parents really don’t know what kids are learning, and what the kids are learning is controlled by liberals who often write the curriculum in education at the federal and local level.
What they see is a bias for the environment against oil and coal and natural gas, a bias for less standards (sic) and America should not be a leader in the world but we should be just part of a world community. We start seeing these things seep into the curriculum and that’s why, and I say this at every event, the most important election that anyone can be involved in is the school board.
