School assignment features Republican tearing up ‘pathway to citizenship’

2/22/2015

NEENAH, Wis. – An 8th grader at Shattuck Middle School received a perfect score for claiming Republicans want to “destroy” the pathway to citizenship.

According to the boy’s father, Scott Radies, he was given a worksheet by Social Studies teacher Grace Davis. Students were to read a political cartoon and answer questions about it.

As reported by Independent Journal Review, students were to look at a drawing of two men working on a brick path. One, with a Democratic Party logo on his clothing, was building the path while the other, with an elephant, was uprooting it. He can be seen literally throwing the bricks of his shoulder.

Students were then required to answer the following questions:

* Who are the men in the picture (What is their job? Look at what they are doing for a hint)
* What are they building?
* What do the symbols on their shirts represent?
* What is action being done by each man?
* What might this mean to us about immigration and citizenship?

“I flipped it over to see if the opposite view was maybe on the other side of the homework assignment, but there’s nothing, just one side of paper,” Radies says.

“When I saw his answers to the questions, and realized that the teacher gave him five out of five so apparently those answers that he gave were the ones she was looking for because he got them all right,” Radies says.

“The fact that the way that she structured the questions and then rewarded them with five out of five, I thought ‘Wow, it definitely looks like she wanted a certain answer…’ The whole thing was ridiculous, I thought.”

Indeed, the student received 5/5 for his answers – a perfect score for such answers as, “Democrats want immigrants to come in and Republicans don’t.”

Jim Strick, the Communications Director for the Neenah Joint School District, defended the lesson to IJ Review.

“It was basically a skill-building unit for reading and understanding a political cartoon. It was basically the simplest cartoon that [Davis] could find for an eighth-grade level as far as understanding the concept of a political cartoon,” according to Strick.

The communications director was reportedly “adamant” the lesson was not intended to “shape the children’s political views.”

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