"How do we create a better world? As educators, we must help people to become committed to social change."
- Texas Region 10 mandated studies for the public school educators' program.
-- From "Texas teachers warned against being 'heterosexist'" by Bob Unruh © 2009 WorldNetDaily 12/31/09
Candidates for certification to teach in public schools in Texas are being told that they will be held accountable for any "heterosexist" leanings and must become agents working to change society, according to one candidate who was alarmed by the demands.
The applicant, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions, told WND part of the teachings on multiculturalism required him to read several online postings about the issue inside the education industry.
One warns that "teachers and administrators must be held accountable for practices deemed to be racist, sexist, heterosexist, classist, or in any other way discriminatory." And a second warned that educators must not define education as the basic skills.
But spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe at the Texas Education Agency said the state rules require teacher preparation programs to cover 17 curriculum topics, but not multiculturalism.
"While we establish the broad rules that are to be followed, we do not write or approve a training program's curriculum," she said.
She said the articles, if part of the program, were chosen at the region level.
One of the articles was on the EdChange Multicultural Pavilion and discussed defining "multicultural education."
There it states that there are several focuses for such programs, including those that insist "on education change as part of a larger societal transformation in which we more closely explore and criticize the oppressive foundations of society and how education serves to maintain the status quo – foundations such as white supremacy, capitalism, global socioeconomic situations, and exploitation."
The traditional teaching approaches, it continued, "must be deconstructed to examine how they are contributing to and supporting institutional systems of oppression."
A similar issue of demanding a specific social perspective arose recently at the University of Minnesota.
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