Witch Hunt Takes Down CSCOPE

[TexasTowelie]

State Sen. Dan Patrick, the Republican chairman of the Texas Senate Education Committee, sounded downright gleeful today in making a surprise announcement that the state's Education Service Centers will no longer provide lessons in their CSCOPE curriculum management system.

“The era of CSCOPE lesson plans has come to an end,” Sen Patrick declared at a Capitol press conference this morning. What remains of CSCOPE will essentially be a guide to scheduling instruction on the curriculum standards. The hundreds of small school districts that use CSCOPE will now have to find other resources for developing lesson plans for teaching those standards.

Officials with the Education Service Centers that created and managed CSCOPE released a letter at the press conference agreeing to stop providing lessons to school districts. The letter came after increasing pressure from Sen. Patrick, the Texas Attorney General's Office and an assortment of Tea party and other right-wing pressure groups.

Those critics have been absurdly claiming that CSCOPE has been indoctrinating students into Islam and Marxism and undermining Christianity and patriotism. (Current and retired teachers had been writing those lessons for CSCOPE. Who knew that so many Texas teachers were Marxists and Islamists? Shocking!)

More at http://www.burntorangereport.com/diary/13554/witch-hunt-takes-down-cscope .

[mbperrin]

1. They did it for the wrong reasons, but it's the right result.

Lousy and incomplete lesson plans, resulting in a dramatic decrease in scores in our own district after the first year of adoption. Having to sign a non-disclosure agreement so that teachers could not share the content of lessons with parents, or even other teachers in other subjects.

The whole idea of robotized one-size-fits-all instruction is just dumb and harmful to kids.

Besides, schools have curriculum specialists who know how to write relevant lesson plans with appropriate modifications for special populations, as well as reteaching and tutoring methods for those who didn't get it the first time. Those people are called teachers, and they took all those education courses for some reason.

Didn't they?

[TexasTowelie]

2. Heck, I learned how to write lesson plans during the first semester of my deficiency program

after getting a BS in math so I agree with you about CSCOPE.

BTW, it is also BS to require 48 additional hours after getting a degree. Twelve of the 48 hours were for courses that I placed out of before I even started college.

[TexasTowelie]

3. It looks like Irving ISD dropped it.

http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/irving/headlines/20130520-new-irving-isd-board-drops-controversial-cscope-curriculum-program.ece

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In its first major vote and against staff’s advice, Irving’s newly seated school board pulled the district out of CSCOPE, a curriculum program under attack by conservative groups statewide.

About three-quarters of Texas school districts buy the suite of teacher guides and lesson plans instead of writing their own curriculum.