The cacophony of complaints about Dr. Cade Brumley needs to be addressed.

Recent whining about Brumley’s Department of Education (DOE) approving free and optional course materials for classroom social studies programs  has caused a silly and unfounded drama.   Those doing the complaining are either uninformed or refusing to read publicly available materials in terms of Social Studies Content Standards for Louisiana’s students.

The quality and objectivity of the Standards is beyond the scope of the word limit that this article can contain.  The complaints in recent days have impugned a good man and one even compared him to a racist Democrat who ran our schools long ago.  A response is in order.

DOE went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the information on the Black experiences in the world, the US and Louisiana was superb.  The Content Standards are beyond excellent and if there were time to report the details, Brumley’s accusers would be frightfully embarrassed. The Standards adopted an exponential increase in both the historical facts and experience of Blacks in America and the world.  An honest academician would probably tell you these Standards are the best in the nation.

If the critics would take time to look, they’d see THESE new Standards include critical events from the history of African kingdoms, to the Middle Passage, to the 3/5 compromise, to the Civil War, all through the Jim Crow era, up through the election of Barack Obama, and many other key pivot points.  Things that happened in Louisiana, such as the massacres at Colfax and Opelousas are included as are events such as critical moments like the Baton Rouge bus boycotts.

All of Louisiana’s students need to know the truth and truth is found in the Standards. They are objective, even-handed and politically agnostic. The fact that Doe decided to authorize the use of free materials from an organization that some have labeled conservative is grasping at straws and creating drama.   Most have forgotten to mention that no Parish or District will be required to use these free learning aids.   The fact Brumley would even acknowledge PragerU scares the detractors.  They can’t stand anything outside their own, self-created bubble.

In truth, the complaints we now hear are rooted in something known as repressive tolerance. Repressive tolerance is a tool of Cultural Marxists that seeks to silence anything that they don’t approve or understand.  If you’ve never head of it, look it up and look up Herbert Marcuse.

Cade Brumley is a fine man. He is an accomplished educator who is working and, incidentally succeeding in improving education in the state of Louisiana.  So no one forgets, he’s moved us from 48^th to 40^th nationally and all sorts of areas are improving rapidly under His leadership.   The criticism against Brumley and the things he has done is unfair at best, intellectually dishonest and insipid.

The Standards are here: k-12-louisiana-student-standards-for-social-studies.pdf (louisianabelieves.com)

Charles A. Owen, LtCol (ret), USAF, Ph.D.

State Representative, District 30

 

PS  The word count requirement for an editorial will not allow for the inclusion of the key words that exist in the Standards related to the history of African Americans.  For anyone interested, the key words and the number of times these subjects are referenced in K-12 is in parentheses

KEY TERMS IN LOUISIANA’S K-12 CONTENT STANDARDS

abolition(ists) (7); Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in 1807; Africa (18); African(s) (7); Barack Obama; Baton Rouge Bus Boycott;  Benjamin Banneker: Birmingham Jail (2); Birmingham Demonstrations (2);  Black Codes (2);  Booker T. Washington (3); Brown v. Board of Education (5); civil rights (32); Civil Rights Act of 1964 (4); Civil Rights Act of 1968; Civil War (17);  Colfax Massacre; Dred Scott Decision;  Compromise of 1877; desegregation; desegregate (3); Duke Wellington; Elizabeth Freeman; Ella Fitzgerald;  Emancipation Proclamation (6); Emmett Till (2);Equality Under the Law (2) Equality (7); equal protection (4); FDR’s Executive Order 8022; Fifteenth Amendment (4); Fourteenth Amendment (4); freedom (19); Freedman’s Bureau;   Freedom Summer (2); Freedom Rides; Frederick Douglas (3); Fugitive Slave Acts; German Coast Uprising; gerrymandering; George Washington Carver; Greensboro Sit-ins; Harriet Beecher Stowe; Harlem Renaissance (2); Harriet Tubman (3);  Historically Black Colleges; I have a Dream Speech; Ida B. Wells; James Meredith; Jesse Owens;  Jim Crow (3); John Brown’s Raid and Trial; Jackie Robinson (2);  John Lewis; Juneteenth (4); Katherine Johnson (NASA); Kingdoms of Mali, Ghana, Songhai;  Ku Klux Klan(4); liberty (20); Lincoln-Douglas Debates; Little Rock Central High School; Medgar Evers; Langston Hughes; Louis Armstrong;  Mae Jemison (Astronaut); Malian Kingdom;   Marcus Garvey; Martin Luther King, Jr (10); Mary Church Terrell (2); Malcolm X (2); Middle Passage (2); Montgomery Bus Boycott (2); NAACP; Nat Turner’s Rebellion; Nebraska Act; 1963 March on Washington; Sargent Claude Johnson; Selma-to-Montgomery; Voting Rights Act; Olaudah Equiano;  North Carolina v Mann; Opelousas Massacre; Oscar Dunn; P.B.S. Pinchback; Plessy v. Ferguson (3); Radical Republican Plan for Reconstruction; Ruby Bridges (2); Reconstruction (13); Shirley Chisholm; Slavery (14); Slave (30); Slave trade (2); Sojourner Truth (4); Thirteenth Amendment (4); Tulsa Massacre (2); Tuskegee Study; Tuskegee Airmen (2); Tuskegee Institute; Truman’s Executive Order 9981;  Thurgood Marshall; White League; W.E.B. Dubois; West African Kingdoms; William Lloyd Garrison: Underground Railroad; ; Zora Neale Hurston.