The Department of Education’s first Hillsdale standards brainwashing festival—the Civics and History Summit taking palce next week, June 12–14, at the Sioux Falls Convention Center—sought to attract teachers by making all sessions free, covering motel rooms for folks who registered online, and offering $300 stipends to “full conference participants”:
The Department of Education has since clarified that “full conference participants” are only those educators who “are directly responsible for creating curriculum around, and implementation of, the South Dakota social studies standards“:
That new requirement likely means our teacher preparation professors and school board members won’t get the stipend. Superintendents and principals may not qualify, either: they oversee their schools, but they aren’t directly responsible for writing curriculum. I wonder if all teachers will qualify: after all, some teachers, especially in larger districts, may not directly create the curriculum they implement; they may just teach from the textbooks and other materials that they and/or their curriculum committees and specialists have chosen for the entire school district.
Of course, given that there isn’t a published history or civics textbook on the planet that aligns with the new standards that Hillsdale College wrote for South Dakota. Either South Dakota teachers will have to scramble to write their own curriculum materials, or school districts will end up handing out copies of Hillsdale’s fundamentalism- and nationalism-indoctrinating 1776 Curriculum.
But some professionals who registered for the DOE’s indoctrination session thinking they would get $300 to cover their travel and meals may want to call the Department and ask if their professional duties satisfy the new stipend requirement.
A republican elementary teacher I know thinks the new standards are ridiculous.
Teachers should be protesting not taking money for falsifying history.
The unfunny thing about all the Christian Fundamentalism now being injected in state legislatures and schools is how the Christian Fundamentalists put on Cowboy Hats and got Trump and the Libertarians to open the door wide enough for them to get their Poison Pills planted and a Supreme Court to guard them.
All the Hells Angels, Proud Boys, and Rural Rebels have no idea what they unleashed. Idiots.
Irony = The refusal to teach systemic racism is a valid example of systemic racism.
What happens when teachers ignore the Reichstag Dictates on Scrubbed History and Civics and stick with an honest, fact- and science-based curriculum and teach what has gone on in the real world? Screw Kristi Noep. All she needed was a cheap applause line for the MAGA base. Primary voters in other states can’t remember her name, much less what happens in backwater South Dakota. Why would she kick back and stir up those trouble-at-home headlines?
My advice to teachers: Collect the $300 bribes and sit through the boring lectures and leave. Then go back to running your schools as usual. Kristi Noep couldn’t care less about you. You’re safe.
I think this change means only Hillsdale participants get the $300 stipend. Holy cow. It’s like your mom just brought home new kids she likes better than you, and gave them your supper.
If there was any actual History being read by our bright students, they would spot the exact, played out tactics being used by these demons from a mile away. They cannot allow that. I won’t be surprised if Hillsdale decides to separate the sexes rather quickly. They do not seem all that comfortable allowing the rib-takers any participation in their plot for white male domination.
Larger schools have Curriculum Directors and I believe all schools, regardless of size, have a staff member, usually a Principal, who is responsible for Curriculum development. Oddly, Curriculum Directors aren’t mentioned in the ” Civics and History Summit” promotional blurb. “Civics and History Summit” is a rather grandiose name for this confab and the whole Christian Nationalist blather fest seems to have as it’s objective the sale of Hillsdale College instructional materials to South Dakota schools. Like most things Trumpist, it is transactional.