I have a story in this week’s print edition. You can read it here. This is the short version.
The Koch Brothers put up a million dollars. Ken and Randy Kendrick (he owns the Arizona Diamondbacks) pitched in even more. They funded UA’s Center for the Philosophy of Freedom, usually shortened to the “Freedom Center,” which opened in 2011. From the beginning, the Freedom Center folks had their eyes on training high school teachers in their special brand of libertarian economics and creating courses to be used in high schools.
Starting last year, “Phil 101: Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship” is being offered in Tucson Unified’s high schools. This year it’s being taught in four of the district high schools as well as schools in the Amphitheater, Vail and Sahuarita school districts and at least seven private and charter schools in Pima and Maricopa counties. The course was created by the Freedom Center, members of its faculty wrote the textbook, and it offers workshops to instruct high school teachers on how to teach the class. They plan to spread the course to high schools across the state and the country, the more the merrier.
This isn’t someone at the Freedom Center saying, “Hey, I have an idea, let’s spread our ideology to the high school classroom!” It’s part of a carefully conceived plan by the Koch Brothers which began in the 1980s and includes universities across the country, think tanks (the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation are two of the best known examples) and dissemination to the general public, including high school students.
If you want the details, read the article.
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2017.
This moral panic from a supporter of MAS is pretty rich.
Somebody is OD’ing on fake news. Get a grip…
Yup, in the case of MAS apparently its fine to teach high schoolers that Republicans hate Latinos and fine to fail to pony up the details of exactly what curricular materials were included in a curriculum taught in a publicly funded school, but God forbid people on the other side of the political spectrum should try to slip their politically skewed, tendentious ideas into the high school curriculum.
This Freedom Institute program is exactly the kind of right-wing counter that will be summoned as a response to instances of left-wing curricular bias. And the argument will be you promoted your views in that curriculum, were promoting ours in this one; its a free country, the contest is on: let the best man (or the best funded man?) win.
(In the non-stop partisan ideological warfare this country is engaged in, we seem to have lost track of the idea that the entire spectrum of ideas should be taught responsibly and dispassionately in high school social science courses that present them all and allow students to weigh the pros and cons and think for themselves. And to ensure that this is whats happening not partisan indoctrination of either the left or right variety what the content of the course is and where it is being taught and whose funding supported the development of the curriculum should be 100% transparent to anyone who cares to inquire.)
Dearest Commenters, one word: homeschooling.
Why not just stick with Obamaeconomics? Eight years no results.
They are promoting right thinking about the economy.
Why did the Koch family become involved in politics? Fred Koch, the father of the infamous Koch brothers, went to Russia in the 1930s to sell them oil refinery technology and befriended many communists. He was there when the purges began and personally witnessed his friends first purged from the communist party and then shot dead in the middle of the night.
The Russian archives now show the plans to murder tens of thousands of Russians. In the margins are Stalin’s notes “not enough.”
The fathers, mothers, and grandparents of the UofA professors protesting the Koch brother centers thought it was cute and chic to be “fellow travelers” of Stalin in his mission to spread communism to the United States.
Paradoxically, the Koch brothers have created a true communist heaven in the Koch industries, not the evil conception of Karl Marx. In Koch industries, bosses don’t reign supreme, they are held accountable to their subordinates and evaluated by them.
As a result, they have proven that “right creates might.” People like working for them so much that over 100,000 have chosen to do so. In a country with over a million companies, they are one of the 100 largest.
Our intellectually corrupt universities would never tolerate such creative thought. Have the professors evaluate the Deans? Ha! Not in this lifetime.
The difference between the MAS program and the Koch program is that one indicates that it is teaching a particular lens on history, and does not pretend to teach all history. The other, however, DOES totalize itself–that is, it purports to teach Ethics, Economy and Entrepreneurship without at all indicating that it is teaching a LIBERTARIAN ethics (?!) including a very one sided Economy and Entrepreneurship. Other than that, though, the writer is correct above–the course was “approved” on a day that there was no Board meeting (as confirmed by Mary Alice Wallace who knows the schedules and the archives) and the textbook appears to have only been confirmed by being bought and paid for (according to FOIA information). According to publisher and Freedom Center information, the course can only be offered in high schools where the administration has committed, prior to its teachers taking the summer 2015 workshop, to hold the course–so one wonders who, during the Sanchez administration, offered so many assurances that the class would be held. Of course given the revolving door of friends from Texas and local administrators, many with very questionable qualifications for those jobs, there is no one from that era left at 1010 in those positions who can answer for how the course ever got authorized to begin with. But Board authorization, unless gathered in famous Board one on one’s, never took place.
Just like Hitler and his henchmen you have to get the impressionable minds before they have been influenced by liberty, equality, and fraternity , to replace them with regimented control, white superiority, and narcissistic behavior. The one thing that you have to always remember is that, “if a Republican ever does anything for you that seems generous and reasonable , you can bet your last dollar that they have set an inescapable trap inside a well concocted enticement that will make it seems as if you have destroyed yourself instead of them doing it to you. Somewhat like the “SAW” movie. Never ever under any circumstance trust a Republican!
Thank you for the information on how the Freedom curriculum got into a few TUSD high schools, Betts Putnam-Hidalgo. Interesting.
Could you provide some clarification on a few other TUSD curricular process & transparency issues:
On what date was the MAS curriculum approved by the TUSD Board? Id like to go into the archives and read the minutes, and also the agenda for that meeting together with whatever curricular materials were attached for public review.
In the past few months as the MAS trial was approaching, I have repeatedly done web searches to try to access a complete curriculum plan and readings list for MAS. If I understood what I heard RE the recent trial correctly, evidence was presented that the State Department of Education was never provided with a complete curriculum to review during the time when it was trying to respond to complaints it had received about MAS. There were just pieces here and there which had to be evaluated without understanding the larger curricular context in which they were embedded.
If there is a link to complete MAS curriculum materials, please provide it. I doubt that after all the recent media discussion, Im the only member of the public who would like to be given the opportunity to review that curriculum in full so we can better assess the validity of the claims being made about it in both sides of the political spectrum.
Thanks in advance for your help with this…
I have searched for that and would also like to read it. I thought it should have been public record but I have not been able to find it anywhere.
Mr. Obama brought us out of the great recession caused by the previous administration which got us into expensive military actions in the Middle East. Why do you keep saying he did nothing. Don’t like the regulations passed to make your banking a little safer? Poor corporations and CEOs.
Betts, my understanding is, the course was approved, not by the board but by the office of the assistant superintendent in charge of curriculum. Based on my experience as a high school teacher, that’s not surprising. Teachers often recommend new courses they want to teach. If they’re approved by the school’s curriculum director and principal, they’re sent to the district administration for approval, which is generally granted. That process makes sense to me, both for efficiency and for empowering individual teachers and schools. I don’t know the process that went into approving the course at the other three local districts.
I don’t think the problem is with the process, or with TUSD and the other districts. The problem is, the system was gamed by the folks at the Freedom Center. They exploited a normal trait in school districts to slip a course they created into high schools. Now it’s time for the boards to take a hard look at the courses and decide if they belong in their district curriculum.
I would rather have something like this happen, then correct it, than tighten up the procedure of approving new courses and take power and authority away from the individual schools by making them jump through more administrative hoops to gain course approval. If the procedure is tightened up, it should be in a limited way — say, if there are red flags about the suggested new course originating outside of the district, then it should be looked at more carefully and the board should be involved.
Any new curricular adoption should be approved by the board of a democratically controlled district in a public process, with opportunity for public review of curricular materials and public feedback. If this process is not used, the public is not being given the opportunity to understand what is being taught in a “public” institution, and you cannot advertise “transparency” as a virtue that makes public school districts superior to other forms of education (charters, privates).
Yes, it has become pro-forma in TUSD and perhaps in other districts that there are many non-transparent ways of making decisions which should be made at the Board level: for example, by embedding them in district administrations or in Site Council meetings which almost no one other than Site Council members ever attend, and which get little or no coverage from the local media. These are practices that need reform, and not only in instances where the Koch brothers have used them (just as some assert that the creators of MAS used them) to slip politically tendentious classes into the high school curriculum.
David Safier will always turn any concern with process around to try to find a way of saying a process can only be declared wrong when it is used to forward the cause of his political opponents. In this, HE is wrong. And the saddest thing about his dishonest and irresponsible method of argument is that in being selective about defending proper process and transparency, he and others like him utterly wash away the ground on which we should all be standing together as citizens when we object to interest groups manipulating our public institutions.
Good for the Kochs! Now somebody should fund a revival of Civics classes so our students aren’t political idiots when they graduate.
But, if they did graduate as political idiots, the Democrats could hold onto their votes. Works in Chicago, it can work here.
RE the coaching Putnam-Hidalgo received above on how public institutions can have their Transparency cake and eat it too:
It would be a shame if we had additional TUSD converts to Realpolitik and machine-style pragmatism in the coming months.
The neglect of public standards and moral compromises made to forward partisan agendas undermine the strength of public institutions and make them extremely vulnerable to external critique. Within the last few years, the conspicuous process and transparency rot associated with some of our larger local public institutions has persuaded several previously committed supporters of public education that TUSD is a lost cause and choice policy is necessary.
Can advocacy groups that promote the ongoing validity of the public district system be strong enough to call for consistency in public process, even when it means asking for it from allies? Or will they be co-opted by exceptions made for friends in the network and the overall opacity that supports partisan agendas getting rooted in public institutions?
(FYI, Safier: a process of administrative approval (not Board approval) for new curricular materials may empower individual teachers and schools, but process in public institutions is supposed to PROTECT CITIZENS FROM ABUSE, not empower individual teachers and schools. If you object to your kid undergoing what you would consider Freedom Institute brainwashing in a high school social studies course, you have to respect your conservative neighbors right not to have their child taught that Republicans hate Latinos. It cuts both ways (or, more properly, many ways) in public institutions in a pluralistic society. Public review and comment processes protect public trust in public institutions by making sure instructional materials are balanced and fair and give accurate (not tendentiously skewed) information about what various political groups believe and promote as public policy.)
The words of a student who underwent this subversive right wing indoctrination.
[He] understands that, ultimately, successful businesses in a free economy are virtuous at their coremeeting people’s needs and doing so through ethical and mutually beneficial practices. In the end, [he] says, businesses that lack either virtuous purpose or ethical practices won’tand shouldn’tsucceed.”
To all of the commenters above, indeed, you will find no Board approval for MAS curriculum in the past. If you think that means we should not ask for one in this case, you are oh so wrong. That is EXACTLY the point. Because of that, the District could not legally fight the ban even if its then-Board majority had wanted to–it did not have standing. So when our boy HT or the minions who did his bidding decided that the Board had not weighed in they were repeating about the only thing that really WAS an objective problem in the MAS case. Whatever the case was in the pacific northwest, here in Arizona, school boards must authorize curriculum,not just central department heads. Board regs and State statutes are actually quite clear on that–and the district did, indeed, get read the riot act for an oversight of just this type with the MAS case.
When the then Board majority narrowed the field to its one self-declared candidate that it HAD to accept on his own terms, and when the same Board majority then turned its heads away and stopped watching anything their golden boy did, they left the door open a crack and the Koch brothers snuck in along with the raises and the bonuses and the designated payouts that DIDN’T go to teachers. (Sound like our governor anyone?) Don’t get confused though by partisan labels, this was our golden superintendent who we were supposed to be SO HAPPY would graciously accept a $500,000 salary package (or did you say bribe) to stay in town a little longer….In any case, when you drop the partisanship of it all, you find out that corruption and/or lax oversight look the same no matter who does it, and little issues like Board authorization (or lack thereof) need to be cleaned up.
it is the political comments here, limiting what high school students should be exposed to, that contribute to declining enrollment in TUSD, substandard teacher compensation, and the rest of the issues whined about. If exposure to a non PC class funded by the right is the most difficult thing a student has to deal with…you have no idea…. This has been talked about for ever and our school system keeps getting worse. New dialogue, new leadership, new commitment, less control.
But what do I know, I could be wrong.