This op-ed by SPN Executive Vice President Tony Woodlief first published in The Wall Street Journal.
I knew we’d lost the day I met the superintendent of North Carolina’s schools in 2011. I was leading a nonprofit whose civics curriculum was a stark improvement over the mishmash that the state’s teachers were then using. The Legislature had recently passed the Founding Principles Act, which required North Carolina schools to teach concepts like property rights, due process and federalism. Unlike the textbooks then in use, our materials were loaded with facts and original documents, illuminating concepts that undergird the U.S. Constitution and its founding. We were offering exactly what the state’s new law required.
The superintendent and her team were polite and engaging, but we couldn’t understand much of what they said. They tossed around jargon like “inquiry models” and “cross-walked objectives,” and insisted that North Carolina schools already met the new law’s standards. My colleagues and I walked out of that meeting knowing that—law or no law—civics instruction in our state wouldn’t change a bit.
Read the full article here.
Tony Woodlief on the David Webb Show:
