-Marlith- (CC)

The state’s regional Education Service Centers will no longer issue lesson plans – and will forbid their use after Aug. 31 – for a popular online curriculum system that became a lightning rod for conservatives who criticized it as anti-American, legislators announced Monday.

The move is expected to leave school districts across the state, including some in the greater Houston area, scrambling to replace CSCOPE, as the program is called, before the start of next school year. Districts that lack the staff or budget to design their own curriculum tend to rely on it.

The CSCOPE plans are in use at 877 districts, or 78 percent of school districts in Texas, said Kyle Wargo, the executive director of Regional Service Center 17 in Lubbock.

“Since we are a small district, we don’t have the resources to hire specialized people in that area,” said Somerset Independent School District Superintendent Saul Hinojosa, who credits CSCOPE with helping the district raise its test scores.

However, while Hinojosa claims CSCOPE helped to increase test scores, that does not necessarily mean that it helps students learn. Debates over the efficacy of standardized tests as a metric to determine how well students learn continue to rage, and in Texas, there are at least some teachers that believe that the end of CSCOPE will mean a better learning environment for their students.

KLTV.com reports that many teachers despised CSCOPE’s rigid, one-size-fits-all approach to education. After seven years of CSCOPE, those teachers are thrilled to be set free from the tyranny of the ready-made lesson plan.

Bill Martin, director of the Tyler Sylvan Learning Center, said the end of CSCOPE means teachers “get control back over their classroom again.”

“They get to use lesson plans that they feel are best suited for their class and their students in their class,” Martin told KLTV.com.

Martin added that he doesn’t know “a single teacher that likes CSCOPE. Not a single teacher.”

If reports that parent requests to see CSCOPE materials were met with demands to pay exorbitant fees were true, the end of this program should also mean a return to school districts obeying Texas laws, requiring that parents be given course information and learning materials on request. Of course, to conservatives, this means the end of students being taught to compare Boston Tea Party Activists to terrorists.

The curriculum management system known as CSCOPE is used by teachers in 875 districts to manage their lesson plans while allowing them to customize material for their own specific classrooms.

Some of the ideology promoted in the material, though, is wholly inappropriate and openly endorses anti-American sentiment.

According to reports, numerous witnesses spoke before the Senate committee to explain why Texas students must not be indoctrinated with the leftist lesson plans. One witness described the program as “mind control” while a teacher emotionally testified he quit his job because using the system made him feel like he was “aiding and abetting a crime.”

Other criticism of the program included lack of transparency, as the program’s particulars are not readily available to anyone other than teachers and school administrators. Questionable lesson plans covered various subjects and issues, though one of the most reprehensible forced sixth-graders to design their own socialist flag.

The CSCOPE curriculum encourages students to “notice that socialist and communist countries use symbolism on their flags” while prompting them to come up with their own symbols to use on the flag for a new socialist country. In addition to allegations the curriculum is overly supportive of Islam, the lesson plans also reportedly refer to those involved in the Boston Tea Party as terrorists.

This type of blatant leftist indoctrination deserves no place in any American school and, as a Texan, I am incredibly offended such nonsense has made its way into our great educational system. Such blatant disregard for traditional values combined with the secrecy with which the material is treated just further exposes the left’s ongoing mission.

Those unhappy with America as founded seek to change this nation’s future by systematically brainwashing the next generation in the government-mandated education camps known as the public school system.
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