Most people probably don’t remember much that they read in their school textbooks. But Milwaukeean Harriet Schachter McKinney vividly remembers something missing from one of hers.
She had attended a Jewish day school until sixth grade, when she entered a Chicago suburban public school. At her new school, she noticed that her history textbook’s account of World War II said nothing about Nazi Germany’s attempted genocide of Europe’s Jews. When she questioned this, the teacher changed the subject.
This experience helped make McKinney, now executive director of the Milwaukee Area Jewish Committee, receptive when Bob Peterson invited her and MAJC to help review and recommend new social studies textbooks for Milwaukee Public Schools – a process that was concluded on May 26.
Peterson is a fifth grade teacher at La Escuela Fratney, a Spanish bilingual MPS school, and an editor of the magazine Rethinking Schools.
In a telephone interview, he said that every seven years, MPS reviews and buys new textbooks in different subject areas. Around March 2008, the time had come for MPS to begin the process in social studies.
Although he was not a member of this committee, he had served on previous such committees. Above all, “I feel passionately” that schools need to develop and implement a multi-cultural curriculum in social studies that does not present “a sanitized version of their own nation’s history.”
“My perspective is that the way can grow as country and community is for children to get accurate renditions of stories of what happened in the past so we can learn from the past and become a better society,” he said.
“Some people think, ‘Let’s not tell kids about the bad things that happened in the past,’” Peterson said, but “it’s not like we can isolate them from the real world,” and trying to do so is “doing them a disservice.”
Above all, the books placed “very little emphasis on matters of racial justice and multi-cultural understanding.” For example, when the books would show photographs of family gatherings, they mostly used white families and few African American families, he said.
Peterson became so concerned that he sent emails to individuals and organizations in the community, urging that they organize for action. According to an article in the May 2009 issue of Educational Leadership magazine, responders included, besides MAJC:
The local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the YWCA, the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Milwaukee Ethnic Council, the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Wisconsin Labor History Society, the Educators’ Network for Social Justice; plus faculty from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Marquette University, National Louis University.
Responders organized in June 2008 and named themselves the Social Studies Task Force. In addition to their own monthly meetings, they met with the publishers of the proposed books and with MPS officials through 2008 and early 2009.
Through this work, McKinney examined the proposed books, and she, too, felt appalled at the books themselves and some of the supplemental materials the publisher proposed.
“As Jews, we are clear about wanting people to tell the truth about the Holocaust and Jewish history and Israel,” she said in a telephone interview. “How can we sit still when people don’t tell the truth about the history [of the United States and the groups within it]?”
Peterson said McKinney brought to the attention of the task force a different series of social studies books created and published by the Teachers’ Curriculum Institute.
Based in Palo Alto, Calif., this teacher-created organization seeks to transform social studies education and “engage all learners in the diverse classroom,” according to its Web site.
McKinney said she liked both the TCI approach to multiculturalism and its general teaching philosophy. “Teachers are no longer ‘the sage on the stage’ but facilitators of learning,” she said. Moreover, in other school systems where TCI materials were used, “students were very excited about social studies,” McKinney said.
Upon the task force’s recommendation, the MPS committee on May 26 decided to purchase the TCI materials. The schools will begin using them this autumn.
But both McKinney and Peterson said this is just the beginning.
“What happened in the whole process was that people started coming together from different walks of life and racial heritage and said it is time to put the issues of race and ethnicity on the table in the schools and in the city as a whole,” said Peterson.
In addition to adopting the TCI materials, for example, the MPS board on June 4 budgeted $500,000 for multi-cultural training for teachers, he said.
Moreover, Peterson believes that in the future the Social Studies Task Force should address the issue of how to teach about religions in the schools.
“That’s a topic increasingly discussed among educators” since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the U.S., he said. “You have kids who don’t know anything about Judaism or Islam or Hinduism. I would argue that we have to figure out a way to educate people in basic knowledge” to “promote tolerance and unlearn stereotypes.”
Said McKinney, “For us [at MAJC], this is a wonderful opportunity to be in alliance with other people to do this work to create an inclusive learning environment and to actually move the discussion forward.”
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