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Opinion: Alabama BOE member decries Common Core, SPLC and 'homosexualists' indoctrination

By Kyle Whitmire | kwhitmire@al.com AL.com

When lesser politicians try to out-Roy Moore Roy Moore, bad things happen. The Alabama High Priest's brand of politics should come with a warning label, or a disclaimer like that old MTV show Jackass.

Don't try this at home, or you will seriously hurt yourself.

And for goodness sake, don't try this in public, either.

Just don't ever.

If you don't heed that warning, you risk coming off as a full-blown crackpot, as happened last week with Alabama State School Board Member Betty Peters.

Before the Coffee County Republican Women, the Enterprise, Ala., Southeast Sun reported this week, Peter preached the evils of Common Core which she said "homosexualists," the federal government and the Southern Poverty Law Center, among others, are using to indoctrinate school children into all kinds of things, including the "gender fluid spectrum."

"The Southern Poverty Law Center is going to be developing your children or grandchild or neighbors' children into little social activists for social justice, as they define it, or else transgender stuff," Peters said.

Peters handed out examples of the SPLC's indoctrination -- coloring books.

"The students are supposed to color the photos of the clothes they want to wear," Peters told them. "You will notice these are called outfits. I have never asked my son or my husband what 'outfit' they are going to wear. This is just crazy. I think all this stuff is mainly written by wacky feminists."

The thing is, and Peters tacitly acknowledges this, none of this is part of Common Core, a loose set of standards put together by the National Governors Association so that eighth graders in one state would be learning roughly the same thing as eighth graders in another state.

"When you start complaining about this, the first thing you are going to hear is 'that's not part of Common Core,'" Peters said. "No, it's not but it is aligned with it and it is allowed to be part of Common Core because it is informational text and teaching tolerance."

Basically, Peters' speech falls back on a lot of the same stuff you've probably seen floating around on Facebook about Common Core math and "counting up." Nevermind that counting up is "old math," as she calls it, and the way cashiers used to count your change back to you before the cash registers did all that for them. This is what she calls "the stupid ways to do math."

"They are not teaching the way we learned and golly, we did pretty well with our old math," she said. "We got to the moon, done a lot of medical research, making movies, all sorts of stuff."

The truth is that teachers are teaching the way Peters and her contemporaries learned, but the curriculum includes other methods, too.

And that's a good thing.

Where the United States ranks among developed nations in math and science depends on which study you're looking at, but all of them have one thing in common -- the U.S. is nowhere near the top. The last Program for International Student Assessment tests showed 28 countries with students significantly ahead of ours.

This isn't a Common Core problem. It's not a problem with the Southern Poverty Law Center or coloring books making our kids gay.

It's a problem that perpetuates itself because parents who learned the "old math," who don't understand the "new math," would rather coddle their own egos by assuming the "new math" is screwed up. New math makes old math people scared.

And it's a problem with our elected education leaders, people like Peters, who would rather stoke those fears than assuage them.

Because there is one math that Peters and her contemporaries know -- appealing to the lowest common denominator.


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