Teacher’s Evaluations and Teaching Social Justice in Denver Schools

In the article “Denver Schools’ Rebellion not the One They Wanted” The Washington Times discusses some verbiage that was recently added to the teacher-assessment criteria in the Denver, Colorado School District which has causes quite an outcry. The wording would determine a distinguished teacher as one who:

“encourages students to challenge and question the dominant culture and take social action to change/improve society or work for social justice.”

Okay, so they want to teach students to critically think, and to think like social workers? What’s the problem with that? Personally I see none, BUT I could see where some others think otherwise. Here are some of their points:

I think our job is not to challenge the dominant culture, but to prepare students for college or the military or the workforce, and be productive citizens, Mr. Peterson said. Working toward social justice typically comes as code words from the far left for big government programs and a redistributionist philosophy.

Let’s face it, in DPS, roughly 50 percent of the children across the board can’t even read at grade level. In math it’s the same, sometimes worse, Ms. Benigno said. And yet they’re going to spend time and have teachers being concerned about these types of issues.

Job requirements and the concerns of testing scores and education are all good points. In today’s culture we press the issue of academic success hard, often leaving little time to each topic and little time for little else beyond the standard required fields. This stresses teachers and students out, so I can understand the concern for adding more when you need to have a certain percentage of your students pass. However, I don’t agree with Mr. Peterson’s statement. Teachers need to be role models, especially since many parents are not around to do so, and role modeling to me includes helping individuals critically think about the injustices around them and know they can act to change them. Wouldn’t we want our youth to know they have that freedom? Isn’t that part of being American?

The article also mentions that ‘haters’ of the wording said it was the district’s attempt to push left wing political agendas in the class room. I don’t think the ‘left wing’ comment regarding the verbiage of social justice actually looks at the issue here, and instead gets caught up in politics. Left wing and Right wing should have nothing to do with our educational system, but unfortunately they do so in today’s political climate we must be cautious in word choice. Clearly, given the response, this choice was apparently not good. Luckily, rather than deleting the requirement for teachers all together Denver has changed it to stating that a top teacher:

“encourages students to think critically about equity and bias in society, and to understand and question historic and prevailing currents of thought as well as dissenting and diverse viewpoints, and cultivates students ability to understand and openly discuss drivers of, and barriers to, opportunity and equity in society.

Very good Denver, very good. You’ve appeased the left wing haters but still got your point across. Finally, as the article states:

If you look at people from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt to Martin Luther King to Ronald Reagan, they might have come from all different parts of the political spectrum, but they all challenged many of the main tenets of prevailing thought,  Mr. Boasberg said during a Sept. 27 interview on KOA-AMs The Mike Rosen Show.

STUDENTS MUST BE TAUGHT TO THINK CRITICALLY ABOUT THE SOCIETY AROUND THEM. They must, especially if we want them to become forward thinkers and work out the problems we now face. Luckily, Social Justice doesn’t need to overtly be called social justice to be taught.