The Sun Prairie Area School District (SPASD) Board of Education will vote Monday whether to adopt new language arts curriculum that depicts Native Americans as “wandering” and encourages kindergartners to don “costumes” to reenact a powwow—curriculum many educators and community members find inaccurate and culturally offensive.
While the curriculum’s skills-based phonics sections have been deemed effective, its content sections are seen by many as racist and generally problematic.
Core Knowledge was developed by the Core Knowledge Foundation, a nonprofit based in Charlottesville, Va. According to its website, the foundation is dedicated to “advancing excellence and equity in education for all students” through its educational books and materials. However, that hasn’t been the experience of local Madison area teachers whose districts have already implemented the curriculum.
Charis Boersma, a kindergarten music teacher in the Monona Grove School District, has viewed some of the material as “red flags” while observing classrooms around her building, especially regarding how Indigenous peoples and cultures are discussed. This is the first school year that the district is using the Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) curriculum.
The kindergarten “Native Americans” unit suggests an enrichment activity in which students create costumes, learn “drumming and dancing,” and reenact a powwow.
“That, to me, was the big red flag that this was problematic in a very deep way,” Boersma said. “They don’t even use the word ‘regalia,’ they say costumes.” Additionally, “seven of the eight lessons are talking about Native Americans only in the past, and they just tack on that Native Americans exist today [at the end].”
Further inaccuracies from this unit include condescending descriptions of tribal ways of life and non-factual descriptions of the wildlife they engage with (bison, which are native to North America, are repeatedly referred to as buffalo, which are native to Africa and Asia).
The textbook states, “Long ago, Native Americans did not have cars and trucks. There were no buses, or trains, or planes. Another section reads, “Long ago, Native Americans traveled by foot.There were no roads. Native American paths were made by the pounding of their own footsteps and the hooves of animal herds.”
Long ago, white Europeands didn’t have cars, trucks, or motorcycles either.
“Teaching that Native Americans ‘wandered’ is inaccurate,” a Sun Prairie parent wrote in an email to Madison365. The parent wished to remain anonymous.
“There was nothing unthoughtful or aimless about how they traveled and lived. Labeling them as ‘roaming’ implies that they didn’t have thought or intention about where they lived,” they continued. “This paints a picture that they are unintelligent and primitive. People in the world who were not Native Americans also did not live in modern looking houses at the time of the pictures. By not mentioning this, Native American culture is ‘othered.’”
CKLA has claimed that they collaborated with the National Indian Education Association (NIEA) to develop these curricula, which the NIEA has explicitly denied. In an email to Boersma from December of 2023, a NIEA spokesperson emphasized that the association conducted a “brief review of a very limited amount” of CKLA material, but had not reviewed its Native American content in full.
A portion of the email reads:
“I am very familiar with CKLA and find that it’s [sic] treatment of Native history and present as well as other topics is very problematic […] This was not a full review of the entire curriculum, and we were very clear with the many issues that we found beyond just the scope of our review. The company promised to make things more appropriate when they redid the next version of their curriculum.”
In response to these issues, concerned parents have been reaching out to the Sun Prairie school board in recent weeks via phone and email to express their opposition to the curriculum’s implementation, and many plan to show up to Monday’s meeting in protest of it being approved.
‘We’re trying really hard to raise our children with certain values, like anti-racism,” the anonymous parent said. “It seems like nobody looked at this entire curriculum through a lens of racial equity or being sensitive to cultural differences.”
Boersma shared that educators in surrounding school districts are defending the curriculum because its success in early literacy is an “equity move.”
“I think that could be true, except when you try to increase reading while also increasing racism and marginalization and disengagement in the content, then you don’t actually achieve what you set out to do with increased literacy,” she said. “You further push down our [non-white] students who are already marginalized […] It shuts them out of our education goals.”
District administrators said no curriculum is perfect, and teachers are allowed to customize content to eliminate problematic elements.
In an email to Madison365, SASPD explained that the selection of the CKLA curriculum involved 50 educators “studying the current research and identifying instructional materials that have been proven to increase literacy outcomes” over the course of two years.
“Our teams of educators analyze instructional materials for alignment with our equity expectations,” the email stated. “Our teams are empowered to address areas misaligned with our equity expectations in three ways: To eliminate and replace content, to address the content directly and provide additional resources (such as multiple perspectives), or to adapt materials and supplement with materials that align to our expectations.” These guidelines, however, would create more work for teachers to make the provided content more suitable for their classrooms.SPASD has been faced with multiple racist scandals over the past few years, including white students wearing blackface and social studies lessons that involved inappropriate speculation around slave ownership and punishment. Most recently, an altercation at a Sun Prairie West High School basketball game escalated so much that former athletic director LaRon Ragsdale resigned from his position. In light of incidents like these, the district launched a strategic framework in 2022 that centers their commitment to equity and explicitly states that they stand by their BIPOC students.
“With all the negative publicity that Sun Prairie School District had a few years ago, they’ve been saying that they care about equity, and that they care about race relations and now is their opportunity to show us that it’s not all talk,” the anonymous Madison parent said. “I really hope that they choose to act on their values because they say that they care about it, but if they go ahead with this curriculum, it will be very clear that they’re all talk.”
School board members could not be reached for comment.
