School Board hears comments on new Human Growth and Development Curriculum

There are lots of them.

[Note: There will be only one article this week, and I am going on vacation (again) next week so there may not be an article next week.]

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not.

- from David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature

I. The Meeting

Last week’s school board meeting on August 8th wasn’t quite standing room only. There was, though, a lot of standing, mostly in line before the microphone so parents and educators and other interested parties could express their thoughts and opinions. Those thoughts and opinions were occasionally spoken extemporaneously but more often they were read aloud from notes composed beforehand on their phones or paper. I’ll get to those.

And there was standing before the meeting as well. When I arrived, the board was still in closed-session and a line of 20-30 people had accumulated in front of the closed doors. I stood behind a man with a graying goatee, baseball hat, and a t-shirt that said, “Put on the whole armor of God.” Although I suspected he—along with everyone else in line—were here for the District’s presentation on the newly revised Human Growth and Development (HGD) curriculum, and while I had some inclination of what his opinion on the matter might be, I never actually got to hear it because the board ended public comment before he had a chance to speak. Still, I’m glad he could make it.

I got a slightly better sense of what the pair sitting next to me—after the doors of the conference room opened at 7 p.m. and everyone filed in and found seats—believed as one whispered to the other with a certain ironic detachment that, “I just want to see how silly it all is,” and that, “Human Growth brought everyone out of the woodwork. Buckle up.” And although one didn’t do much other than work on his laptop, clap occasionally, and let out exasperated sighs when someone said something he thought was “silly,” I’m glad he and his friend could make it.

I estimate there were about 70 people in attendance, and as the School Board Meeting began they all settled politely into silence. Most were here to listen to the presentation on the new HGD course—what in an earlier decade might have been called Sex Ed, though the current curriculum appears slightly broader, covering as it does topics like the responsible use of social media and how to maintain healthy relationships. The district had recently completed their revisions to the curriculum and had emailed parents on August 3 with links to the proposed lessons. I don’t know what the previous curriculum looked like, but apparently there had been a lot of…additions. I’ll get to those.

While the District's Chief Academic Officer, Nicole Marble, set up her presentation, Superintendent Demond Means explained how the curriculum review had been conducted, including the requirements for an external committee, incorporating the input of community members, and the use of Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction-recommended standards in revising the curriculum. He also explained why the review was happening now:

I want to point out that per Board policy you have an obligation at the Board to review this every three years. In the fall of 2021 it was discovered that in the Wauwatosa School District, the Human Growth and Development curriculum had not been properly reviewed in 10 years. […] It’s really important I think as we set the context for this conversation that [you know] we came to this conversation because we were adhering to board policy.

This was a recurrent theme in the statements and explanations offered by administrators, members of the school board, and members of the various committees—both internal (comprised of teachers and other school staff) and external (mostly parents, clergy, community members, and health care professionals)—tasked with revising the curriculum. The picture painted was one of careful and considered planning, of diligent packing and preparation for a sort-of bureaucratic train that will depart the station at its appointed time, on tracks that lead in only one direction, that no one has the power to stop, and which we all have no choice but to board. Buckle up, indeed.

They emphasized a compliance with statutes, a consideration of mandates, reviews of requirements, and adherence to national standards. They highlighted the robust discussions that were had, the transparency of the deliberation process, the extensive solicitation of stakeholder input, the credentials and expertise of the members so assembled, and their sober consideration of facts and scientific evidence. Experts were convened. They had many meetings. Some broad though not absolute consensus was achieved and recommendations were made after much “heavy lifting.” The effort, in short, was immense.

I have no doubt that all this is, in some sense, very true. There are policies, and state statutes, and requirements. There really is a bureaucratic machine with its own inertia that solitary individuals are expected to keep running and that they are certainly not given the authority to stop. And though I’ve described it in a somewhat ominous tone, I do think that it is, on average, good when schools follow rules. They must have a citizen advisory committee so they have a citizen advisory committee. The state recommends a particular set of curriculum standards so they use the recommended standards.

Expertise is also generally good. Offering recommendations after a consideration of scientific findings and empirical facts feels objective, neutral, and defensible.

But it also seemed as if he wanted to make it very clear that they’re just cranking the machine, here. They didn’t build the machine; they don’t get to decide when it runs; they really don’t even get much input into what the machine makes (that’s the external committee). So, please don’t shoot the guy turning the crank.

I actually think there’s some support for this, and that this is not pure dissembling and self-preservation. I’ll get to that in part (III) when I discuss some of the differences in survey responses between the internal and external committees.

II. The Curriculum

So what is in the new curriculum?

My understanding is that the current Human Growth and Development Curriculum begins around fifth grade¹. The current curriculum begins in Kindergarten. To their credit, and in what I think is probably a reasonable attempt to assuage fears and be transparent, a description of the proposed curriculum was emailed to parents and caregivers along with links to the lessons plans, exercises, books, and videos that students would use.

I’ve tried to briefly summarize the topics below. Keep in mind that while each subsequent grade tends to add new lessons and topics, they also cover the same topics as previous grades in more detail and nuance. So, for example, while my description of second grade only mentions the lessons on identifying forms of abuse and definitions of consent, the curriculum also covers the same topics as kindergarten and first grade.

→ In Senior Kindergarten, kids learn about different types of families, gender roles, stereotypes, how everyone should have the freedom to be themselves, and basic sexual anatomy. They also learn how to be respectful of other people who don’t want to be touched, and how to say No when someone touches (hitting, kicking, tickling, hugging, etc.) them in a way they don’t like.

→ First grade is mostly the same.

→ Second grade adds more detail on definitions of consent and lessons on identifying different types of abuse (emotional, physical/sexual, verbal).

→ Third grade adds lessons about respecting people with different body types and sizes, making sense of puberty and the role of hormones and reproduction, lessons on gender identity and understanding differences between sex, gender, and sexual orientation, and lessons on referring to people by their preferred pronouns.

→ Grade four adds adds lessons on understanding love, defining the terms cisgender, transgender, gender non-binary, gender expansive, and gender identity, and how some people question their gender.

→ Grade five looked mostly the same.

→ Grade six adds lessons on intersectionality (“Understand how peers, family, and a person’s intersecting identities can influence attitudes, beliefs, and expectations about gender, gender identity, gender roles, and gender expression”), respectful communication, accessing medically accurate information about gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, puberty and adolescence, more information on identifying sexual orientation, and lessons on understanding how social media, culture, peers and family influence attitudes and beliefs on sexual orientation.

There are also lessons on communicating respectfully about sexual orientation, communication skills for healthy relationships and getting out of unhealthy ones, why victim blaming is wrong, intervening and helping people who are being sexually harassed or abused, understanding the difference between friendship and romance, how power differentials impact relationships, lessons on how to “define vaginal, oral, anal sex and other forms of sexual activity (masturbation).” The risk of STIs and the role of “abstinence as the safest, most effective method of protection from disease and pregnancy,” methods of contraception, the role of technology and social media on relationships and how to be safe using social media, and familiarity with sex-trafficking.

→ Grade seven adds lessons on how alcohol and drugs affect people’s ability to provide consent.

→ Grade eight adds information on state laws regarding consent, minor’s rights and confidentiality in health care, lessons in which the student learns to “Describe the steps to using barrier methods correctly (e.g., external and internal condoms, dental dams)”, lessons on reducing the risk of pregnancy, accessing accurate information on pre-natal care, identifying symptoms of pregnancy and options in response to pregnancy including parenting, abortion, and adoption.

→ In high school, I didn’t go through all 15 lessons, but based on public comment, there’s some demonstration of putting on condoms that some people didn’t like plus probably everything else that’s already been mentioned.

III. Public Comment

By my count, most parents who spoke at the meeting were not onboard with all this.

Of twenty-three people who made a public comment, fifteen were opposed to some aspect of the curriculum as it was presented at the School Board meeting (I include here one or two individuals that said while they appreciated the intent and liked some of the ideas, they were ultimately opposed to it in its current form). Eight people expressed complete support for the curriculum.

Criticisms of the curriculum in order of frequency included:

→ Not age appropriate (x10)²

• Graphic images being shown to young children (x2)

• Sexualizes children (x2)

→ Too controversial, activism-oriented, or ideological; based on nascent or incorrect science (x8)

• Assumes promotion of gender fluidity or reassignment to minor children is helpful, healthy, and reaffirming to those who suffer gender dysphoria

• Worries teachers will express opinions and material beyond that described by curriculum

→ Curriculum incomplete or being presented incorrectly (x5)

• Legal issues need to be covered earlier

• Doesn’t address negative aspects of pornography, doesn’t address emotional and social context of sex

• Doesn’t foster collaboration between parents and schools as required by statute 118.019

• Disagrees with coed curriculum in early adolescence. Boys can be immature, girls can be insecure. Why put them together for some of these lessons?

• The alternative curriculum for kids with special needs was outdated by several decades or inappropriate

→ At odds with family or community values (x4)

• Contradicts Christian faith

→ Parents aren’t being given enough time to review and voice concerns (x3)

→ Bad balance of tradeoffs: Need to focus more on literacy and math (x2)

→ Negative effects (x2)

• Sows division and victimhood, prefer that students “not be turned into fragile butterflies but rather be turned into Wisconsin Badgers.”

• Will cause more not less depression, anxiety, chaos

Meanwhile, supportive comments included:

→ Providing more facts empowers students to make better decisions

→ Misgendering students is hurtful and more education on these topics is better

→ We need to equip children to survive in the world as it exists not as we’d like it to be. Eliminating myths and misconceptions does more to reduce STIs and pregnancy than other methods like abstinence-only education (x2)

• There is a lot of good information on social media use, gender stereotypes and other useful topics in the curriculum

• Kids learning correct terminology and what is and is not appropriate are better able to protect themselves from sexual abuse and seek help when needed.

→ Kids aren’t that malleable and won’t get gender dysphoria after one lesson

→ We should trust educators to make decisions based on research and data

Additionally, during the presentation itself, several members of the external committee—which overwhelmingly though not universally (there was one outspoken dissenter who thought his opinions and questions had been ignored) supported the proposed curriculum—also mentioned:

• the high rate of STIs among teens in southeastern Wisconsin and the need for better education,

• social media can expose children to these topics before parents might think to discuss it and so starting education earlier is beneficial,

• you can always opt your child out of particular lessons,

• high rates of attempted suicide among LGBT youth and the need for more inclusive training on gender, and

• the importance of basing curriculum on medically accurate information rather than beliefs'

Survey Responses

In contrast to the greater proportion of negative comments by parents and educators during the meeting, the School District also sent out a survey to all caregivers (13,425 emails sent). When asked whether they agreed or disagreed with curricular standards with respect to grade level appropriateness, having both genders receive lessons together, and the chosen curriculum resources:

• About 60-65% of respondents strongly agreed with all three

• 5-6% agreed.

• 2.5% disagreed.

• About 25% strongly disagreed

This breakdown was pretty consistent all the way from senior kindergarten to fifth grade with strong agreement with the proposed curriculum eventually increasing to 70% for high school students.

Unfortunately—and I don’t think this was really emphasized enough during the presentation—the survey only had 183 responses, or a 1.3% response rate. I would not conclude, as the man next to me appeared to based on the things he mumbled while also sighing in exasperation, that this demonstrated strong support for the curriculum. I suspect that the survey tended to get answered by those with the strongest feelings and that much larger numbers feel less strongly or perhaps don’t care at all.

To be fair, the people who showed up for public comment are also probably not representative of the community as a whole, though I think they’re still useful because they show why people agree or disagree with the curriculum.

[Update: Revised slides for the August 22 meeting now show about equal proportions of respondents strongly agree and strongly disagree although they don’t appear to mention the total number of responses and also include this disclaimer: “The data represented in the following slides reflects input from individuals beyond the intended stakeholders in the Wauwatosa community. As such, the data cannot be interpreted as an accurate reflection of the thoughts and opinions of our community,” which I think reflects the fact that the survey was distributed beyond people on the original email list. If it’s useless, I’m not sure why they bothered to still include the graphs.]

Finally, the School District also included in their August 3 email survey results from members of the internal and external committees. The internal committee was mainly comprised of educators and schol staff and their task was to take the input, suggestions, and goals from the external committee and craft a curriculum that met those goals. The external committee was comprised mainly of members of the community. I thought some of the differences in their survey responses were interesting:

There were obviously more questions, and the ones I’ve included illustrate some of the more extreme disparities between the internal and external committees about when certain concepts should be taught. While both groups mostly agreed that it was useful to teach kindergarten and first graders about how to have positive communication with family members (Q3. Not pictured) and most agreed that we didn’t need to teach kindergarten and first graders about the legal consequences of underage sex (Q10. Except for this one person on the external committee.), there were wider differences in opinion about when to teach kids about gender identity (Q18) and sexual orientation (Q19).

I was surprised that community members (external committee) tended to have more extreme views than the educators and administrators (internal committee). On further reflection this might make sense. Teachers and administrators might have narrower and more uniform views based on a common experience dealing with kids every day for years and years. Who knows what kind of idiosyncratic experiences random members of a large community have. I also expected them to be more progressive on average than the community but maybe members of the external committee were a highly self-selected group.

IV. Three or four thoughts One Thought

Science, Facts, and Values

I think the following comment by one community member as she described her 30 years teaching some of these topics to high school students in a religious setting captures something important about how supporters of the curriculum view their position:

They appreciated getting all the facts. They felt empowered to make better decisions, because they had facts. Any questions they had we answered them with facts as best as we could, with science and research that we were able to use and get our hands on, and they were just so grateful, and they have been promoting this to their friends over the last 30 years. I've had them reach out to me on Facebook or other ways to express their gratitude for that. So anybody who thinks that teenagers can’t handle facts... I guess what I just want to say is that it really helps empower them to make better decisions when they have all the facts. So a fact-based curriculum like this I think is really beneficial.

I should state up-front that I also like facts. And I really do feel like science is probably our best and most productive method for understanding the world. But I think it’s important to distinguish between what the scientific method does—which is help us understand how the world is—and what values, morality, beliefs, and systems of ethics do—which is to help us decide what ought to be done.

Science is supposed to help us find true things about the world or help us optimize particular goals. It is less helpful in determining values and goals or helping us choose between competing values and goals. Deciding between those requires political and moral judgment. Discussions about science and facts aren’t actually a substitute for discussions about values, and scientific research, especially social science research as it relates to policy making, rather than making discussions of competing values unnecessary, instead often just smuggles its values in through the back door.

I was reminded of a passage in James C. Scott's book Two Cheers for Anarchism where he talks about the value judgments built into seemingly neutral and objective procedures like cost-benefit analysis (bolded portions are mine):

Everything, all costs and benefits, must be made commensurate and monetized in order to enter the calculations for the rate of return: a sunset view, trout, air quality, jobs, recreation, water quality. Perhaps the most heroic of the assumptions behind cost-benefit analysis is the value of the future. The question arises, how is one to calculate future benefits—say, a gradually improving water quality or future job gains? In general, the rule is that future benefits will be discounted at the current or average rate of interest. As a practical matter this means that virtually any benefit, unless massive, more than five years in the future will be negligible once discounted in this fashion.

Here, then, is a critical political decision about the value of the future that is smuggled into the cost-benefit formula as a mere accounting convention. Quite apart from the manipulations to which cost-benefit analysis has always been subject, the great damage it does, even when rigorously applied, is its radical depoliticization of public decision making.

[…]

Although cost-benefit analysis is a response to public political pressure—and here is one paradox—its success depends absolutely on appearing totally nonpolitical: objective, nonpartisan, and palpably scientific. Beneath this appearance, of course, cost-benefit analysis is deeply political. Its politics are buried deep in the techniques of calculation: in what to measure in the first place, in how to measure it, in what scale to use, in conventions of “discounting” and “commensuration,” in how observations are translated into numerical values, and in how these numerical values are used in decision making. While fending off charges of bias or favoritism, such techniques—and here is a second paradox—succeed brilliantly in entrenching a political agenda at the level of procedures and conventions of calculation that is doubly opaque and inaccessible.

While I’m personally very much in favor of more not less cost-benefit analysis, I also find his argument to be reasonable and correct. In quantifying things, in choosing what to measure and how, in our decisions on how much to weight various considerations, we are at least partly making value judgments.

As an example, one of the members of the external committee got up and read some statistics about how suicide attempts are highest among females at 11%, black students at 12%, and LGBT students at 23% as a reason to support the new curriculum. The individual described it as “really gut wrenching to see the numbers continue to trend in a frightening direction regarding the mental, sexual and relational health of our kids,” and so my impression was that these numbers from 2019 (the latest year of available data) were uniquely bad.

These statistics appear to come from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) and the Wisconsin-specific data for various waves going back to 1993 is available at the DPI website. There's actually a series of four questions on suicide. The first asks if you’ve ever seriously considered suicide in the past year. And probably because high school students vary widely in what they perceive to be “serious consideration,” it then asks whether you actually made plans in the past year. And probably because “making plans” could have a wide range of interpretations, they also ask whether you attempted suicide, and then whether that attempt required medical intervention from a doctor or nurse. The DPI helpfully offers trends for these questions stretching from 1993 to 2019. Unfortunately, they put them in difficult to parse tables and spread the relevant statistics across a 140-page report, so I put everything in one graph.

And what you see is that in terms of behavior there's been no change in over 25 years and in terms of serious consideration (Q26) there’s actually been a decline. There are some holes in the data. The black subgroup isn't broken out in earlier waves or in some questions. I’m not sure why, and I’m not sure where the speaker got her 11% figure. There's also no state-wide information on LGBTQ students though there is data in a Wauwatosa-specific report here.

Nevertheless, I do feel like this somewhat cuts against her claim that the figures she cited were uniquely bad in their severity and that, because of this fact, something ought to be done about it. While I do suspect that the pandemic really has made some of these statistics worse, the interaction between rates of attempted suicide in high school with the sex education curriculum in kindergarten seems kind of hazy to me. And if we do think it was the pandemic that made things worse, don’t we think that not being in a pandemic will make things better? What’s the additional effect of the revised curriculum expected to be?

I think another source of disagreement between people who support and oppose the new curriculum has to do with disagreements about the effects and implications of different facts. Among those who disagree with some of the changes, I think this can manifest itself in sometimes vaguely articulated premonitions about the deleterious effects of societal changes on family, culture and human flourishing. And people may put greater weight on the status quo because of these uncertainties.

Long-term impacts are hard to predict and many social science disciplines are not always on the firmest empirical grounds and deserve some skepticism about their claims. I’m not suggesting that anybody who spoke last week had the decade-long crises in psychology, medicine, education research and other fields caused by an inability to reproduce the results of hundreds of foundational studies in mind, but when I do try to understand what people mean when they talk about community values, skepticism of “new sciences” and “new-age ideas”, and “building kids who are Wisconsin badgers, not fragile butterflies,” in a way that seems at least plausible to me, I think of it along these lines.

It’s not that Science™ has looked at the long-term impacts of various proposed policies on family, culture, and society and determined empirically they are not significant. I think instead Science™ often finds these types of considerations annoying and difficult and tends to ignore them. And some people think they’re really, really important.

The School Board votes on the revised curriculum on Monday, August 22 (tomorrow). Their presentation for the August 22 meeting recommends approval of the curriculum with the following changes. From Slide 31:

Recommendations and modifications to internal team

• Greater clarity of outcomes

  • Lesson plans list specific learning targets

• Revise Illustrations

  • More medically accurate

• Review sequencing of HS lessons

• Develop a FAQ to support questions/ provide clarity to themes in the community feedback

1. Although, maybe not. This FAQ suggests they currently teach something in earlier grades.

2. x10 means ten different people mentioned this, 3x means 3 different people mentioned this, etc.