Another lesson on the Cold War is sold by Rutgers professor Marc Aronson, who advertises himself as a “Common Core consultant,” speaker, and author. He calls Common Core “a magnificent opportunity.”[x] His most recent book, Master of Deceit: J. Edgar Hoover and America in the Age of Lies, is tailored for English teachers who need to teach “informational texts” to middle and high school students. Aronson makes it easy for them, offering them free teachers guides.
Master of Deceit mocks Hoover’s own bestselling Masters of Deceit that described and warned about communist subversion. Aronson’s book is extremely manipulative and salacious, and engages in wild speculation. While a conservative point of view is thrown in here and there, the points come off as gratuitous and obviously contradictory to the main (correct) message. Aronson presents FBI Director Hoover as a repressed homosexual, who exploited Americans’ irrational fears about communism. Among the “original documents” that Aronson provides are photographs—of Hoover with his friend Clyde Tolson. He points out, for the benefit of eleven-year-olds, that photos of Tolson reclining on a lawn chair, and fully clothed, “might be seen as lovers’ portraits. . . but we cannot say for sure.”
In fact, we can. As Bernie Reeves, founder of the Raleigh Spy Conference, has noted, the story of Hoover’s alleged homosexuality was contrived by the KGB in the 1960s. He notes evidence that “…the Hoover rumor, fabricated by the KGB, found its way into the lexicon of our culture where it has evolved from vicious disinformation to accepted fact—a veritable success for the KGB and another example of the role of the failure of established media to serve as an honest broker in the affairs of the nation and the world.”
“Hoover provided the security Americans wanted,” writes Aronson. “Our beliefs about what was acceptable—what could be shown in public and what had to be guarded in private—shaped the secrets he could gather.”
Aronson’s parting words to the student are, “I hope Master of Deceit shows that we must always question both the heroes we favor and the enemies we hate. We must remain open-minded, even when the shadow of fear freezes our hearts.” In fact, our fear was real. Hoover led the FBI’s efforts to expose the Communist Party members and fronts that were part of the international communist movement that the editors of the Black Book of Communism had estimated were responsible for about 100 million dead.
Others advertise their services as Common Core speakers and workshop leaders, many through Edutopia, funded by movie producer George Lucas that has been promoting disturbing anti-bullying and emotional intelligence videos and workshops.
The publisher of Pathways to the Common Core, Heinemann, also publishes ready-to-go curricular material and offers workshops on Common Core by Calkins and her colleagues.
SELLING OBAMA CORE MATERIALS
Publishers are promoting new Core-aligned materials. The American Library Association directs educators to their Booklist, which offers “classics” suggestions from contemporary authors. More typical are categories like “Exploring Diversity.”
TeachingBooks.net offers lesson plans and discussion questions, reportedly, to more than a quarter of all U.S. schools. The site also features interviews and blog posts by authors about the research process on favorite topics like the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike.[xi] Publishers Random House, Scholastic, and Holiday House are re-launching their teacher and librarian sites with information about the Core.[xii]
PBS promotes the use of “public media” in the Common Core, thus updating their educational activities.
A July 18 Publishers Weekly article notes that publishers are eagerly putting out Common Core books by adapting adult nonfiction books, like Fast Food Nation, for classroom use in a new title, Chew on This. Indeed, they are following the lead of officials: One of the sample Common Core guides is for teaching The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Lerner Publishing Group is publishing biographies on stars, “such as Justin Bieber,” while carefully adhering to “Core criteria such as reading level, narrative arc, and sentence structure.” Books are sold in clusters, by topic, because “Typically, Core authors want students to think more critically about what they’re reading . . . to compare multiple sources in different formats; and to give more sourced evidence, and less personal opinion in their writing.”
Presumably, preteens would not be writing opinion essays about how “cute” Bieber is, but would rigorously be providing “sourced evidence” in their “deep” analyses.
CLASSROOM LESSONS
How is Common Core now being used in classrooms? On March 14, Education Week reported that tenth-graders in a suburb of Des Moines would be reading Nickel and Dimed by far-left activist Barbara Ehrenreich. This book, along with others on “computer geeks, fast food, teenage marketing, chocolate-making, and diamond-mining,” is about the “real-world topics” (like Bieber) promoted by Common Core.
The Pearson Foundation, with a grant from the Gates Foundation, will offer a “coherent and systemic approach to teaching the Common Core State Standards.” Another big, well-connected publisher, Scholastic, is developing “Everyday Literacy,” which according to Education Week, is a “K-6 program that incorporates brochures, catalogs, menus, and other text types.”
New York City’s new “Core-Aligned Task” for eleventh- and twelfth-graders centers on “doing work ‘On Behalf of Others.’” This idea of speaking out on behalf of the oppressed is canonized as “a long and dignified tradition of documentary work” that produces records “meant to raise questions and to function as calls to action.”
Students are asked to “read” a New York Times photo essay and audio clip titled, “Joshua Febres: The Uncertain Gang Member.” This exercise in “literacy” consists of “listen[ing] carefully” and “look[ing] closely at the images that accompany the audio.”
The exercise, “Building reading comprehension,” involves “extracting and analyzing relevant information from [Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era] ‘Migrant Mother’ photos.” The teacher is to:
Place students in pairs or trios. Using all the photographs, have the students spend at least ten minutes looking closely at the sequence of images that led up to the final image, as well as that final image. Ask them to infer what was selected and what was deflected from earlier photos, when making the final photo.
After reading an informational paragraph about James Agee and writing a one-sentence summary of it, students “return to [the] images.” As a class they then read a web page “which describes the complicated history of that image.”
The class next watches a short video about the artist “JR,” who works “on behalf of others,” by doing “massive public art installations all over the world in which he posts photographs of regular people on places such as the walls of buildings, rooftops, and the sides of bridges and trains.”
The essay-writing task is a “micro-report” of 500 words “about an event you witnessed [sic] place or person you know that needs to be brought to light or told about.”
Obviously, with only a “micro-report,” evaluation cannot be based on written “literacy” alone. So the teacher is offered a handy “Speaking and Listening Standards: Observation and Comment Form.” These upper-classmen are judged on “participat[ing] in collaborative discussion” that includes “work[ing] with peers to promote civil, democratic discussions and fair decision-making.”
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