TEAM

EDITORIAL
Kathleen Sloan, Sierra County Sun

Kathleen Sloan

Founder and Chief Reporter

Debora Nicoll

Reporter

tom plant

Tom Plant

Researcher

Linda King

Researcher

Tom Hinson, Editor, Photograph of the Week

Tom Hinson

Editor, Photograph of the Week

Ron Fenn, photographer for Sierra County Sun

Ron Fenn

Photographer

Board of Directors
MaryAlice Holmes, Sierra County Sun Board of Directors

MaryAlice Holmes

Member

John Johanek, Sierra County Sun

John Johanek

Vice President

Diana Tittle, Sierra County Sun

Diana Tittle

Secretary-Treasurer

Max Yeh, Sierra County Sun Board of Directors

Max Yeh

President

Community Advisors

The Sierra County Sun is committed to proactively seeking public input. We want Sierra Countians to have a say about our coverage. We also need ideas and advice about how to earn community support for our work. By regularly asking for feedback through the following three means, we are better able to serve the community’s news and information needs and to engage new readers and supporters.

Community Surveys

To guide its relaunch in October 2020, the Sun invited Sierra Countians to participate in two online community surveys, one for charter subscribers, the other for new or occasional readers. Among other helpful insights, the survey findings influenced the Sun’s decision to make its website free to all. The Sun intends to periodically update and roll out these surveys as they have proved to be an effective, efficient tool for taking the pulse of the community.

Community Forums

Held twice a year, the Sun’s community forums are opportunities for members of public to comment on the Sun’s editorial performance and business and fundraising operations.

Community Advisory Committee

The Sun’s Community Advisory Committee is comprised of members of the Campaign to Save the Sun Committee. After the Sun announced that it would cease publication in August 2020, this group of concerned citizens stepped forward to raise the necessary funds to keep the Sun in operation for another year.

Serving one-year terms, committee members meet quarterly with the Sun’s board and editorial principals. Their feedback and expertise inform planning to secure the future of public-interest journalism in Sierra County.

Community Advisory Committee

Robbin Brodsky
Stan Brodsky
Mary Cavett
Jim Ciancia
Mary Anne Ciancia
Anka Ewerbeck
David Farrell
Gary Gritzbaugh
Jan Haley
MaryAlice Holmes*
Tom Hinson
Durrae Johanek
John Johanek*
Lou McCall
Tracy McGowan
Martin Mijal
Steve Morgan
Barbara Pearlman
Haruhuani Spruce
Nichole Trushell
Max Yeh*

* Member of the Sierra County Sun’s Board of Directors

HAVE YOU SEEN?

Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

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