The Zinn Education Project has revealed yet another example of the radical left’s wholesome understanding of education and the teaching process. While many on the right try to fight for “transparency” in curricular materials, not knowing what a curriculum is or how one is used, deems this goal ill-informed and useless even if achieved. In their National Report on the Teaching of Reconstruction from January of this year, the Zinn Education Project explains exactly why this “curriculum transparency” will fail to make any notable difference in daily classroom lessons.
According to the Zinn Education Project’s article Erasing the Black Freedom Struggle: How State Standards Fail to Teach the Truth About Reconstruction, they present the question, “What does make it into the curriculum?” Adding that, “unfortunately, standards won’t help us fully and accurately answer that question. There is an enormous gap between the bureaucracy of state standards and the living, breathing, dynamic organism that is a classroom. Some teachers hew closely to the standards; some teachers do not. Some schools encourage their faculty to “teach outside the textbook” while others do not. Two teachers in the same state, teaching to the same standard, can spend dramatically different amounts of time on the same topic.”
There is no doubt that real teachers are working on the team that makes up the Zinn Education Project. Their incredible success has only grown since the beginning due to their critical understanding of the lesson planning process and the function of classrooms, alongside their wildly popular radical agenda of course. Still, political agendas aside, the Zinn Education Project and so many other organizations that have been formed by radical leftists, know exactly what they need to do and exactly how to do it. If the right wants to begin to make any type of impact at all, they must begin with acknowledging the power of the teacher and properly defining the world curriculum. Until then, nothing will change as the right will only continue their attack on the teaching profession while undermining teachers and challenging their education.