CSCOPE Takes Another Awful Spin Around the News Cycle

[TexasTowelie]

Near the end of the regular session, Sen. Dan Patrick, chair of the Senate Education Committee, headlined a “Mission Accomplished” press conference. He stood with other conservative Republicans to proclaim the end of the vile “CSCOPE era” in Texas, freeing us all from that long Texan nightmare of the last 20 years.

The state’s regional education service centers, which sell the curriculum management program to almost 900 of Texas’ thousand-plus school districts, agreed to discontinue the classroom lessons, placating tea party groups who believed that CSCOPE muddied children’s minds with critical thinking exercises about U.S. history, religion and gender. (One lesson did untold damage by placing “communism” at the top of a list of economic models, rather than at the bottom.) Our future, once again, was safe.

But that victory suddenly turned very hollow last week, when Texas Education Agency general counsel David Anderson told the State Board of Education that CSCOPE’s lessons were in the public domain now—accessible to anyone at all, for free.

The latest chapter in this controversy comes just in time for the lieutenant governor’s race, a fine chance to out-charm the right-wing fringe. Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst vented his outrage over CSCOPE (and how the Internet works) on conservative activist Alice Linahan’s web radio show on Monday.

More at http://www.texasobserver.org/cscope-dewhurst-patrick-news-cycle/ .

[mbperrin]

1. What do districts think they did for curriculum before CSCOPE just a few years ago?

It's a crappy clunky difficult jargon-laded piece of shit as a curriculum, and most of the lesson plans were either written by student teachers, downloaded off the free sites on the Internet, or simply typed out as jokes by the staff of the Onion.

On the other hand, there are specialists who are taught to write, evaluate, and modify curricula. They are called teachers, and districts might find they have a few on staff.