The curriculum that ate New York - controversy over New York New York's first grade teaching guide that encourages lessons about different lifestyles and multicultural diversity - Cover Story

Insight on the News, March 15, 1993 by Stephanie Gutmann

Summary: It started small - a few paragraphs in a teaching guide destined to gather dust on bookshelves throughout New York's vast school bureaucracy. But a directive to incorporate homosexuality into lessons sparked a monstrous public backlash that gobbled the city's top administrator.

It's just a booklet. Well, a biggish booklet - 443 pages with a cartoon drawing on the cover of children jumping rope, reading, practicing their ABC's. Looking at the Children of the Rainbow - First Grade teaching guide, it's hard to believe these innocent-looking pages led to the New York public school system's biggest brawl in two decades.

But when this teacher's guide containing a few paragraphs about homosexual parents landed in the city's far-flung 32 local school districts, it sparked a raging debate between the civilians (parents and lower-level administrators) and the politicos (city officials, the central school board and the chancellor of the city's behemoth public school system).

By the time the dust settled in early February, Chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez and his allies, Mayor David Dinkins chief among them, were the clear losers - the central board voted not to rehire Fernandez when his contract expires in June.

In an immediate sense, the battle has been about whether a curriculum guide that instructs teachers that "classes should include references to lesbians/gay people in all curricular areas" could be chucked - and, if it couldn't be chucked entirely, whether individual school boards should be allowed to revise the controversial sections until parents associations found them acceptable.

But as in most New York brawls, much bigger issues roil beneath the surface. In a larger sense, the debate - which eventually pulled in activists of all stripes - has been over issues cresting all around the country. What is a family? Must it necessarily contain a dad and a mom? Where is the line between tolerating behavior (such as homosexual couples raising children) and promoting that behavior? Should the public schools have the right to override parents if the school administrators believe children aren't learning decent values at home? Should the schools be in the business of inculcating attitudes and values at all?

Be that as it may, because of Children, Fernandez has received death threats, matronly black mothers have gotten in shoving and shouting matches with young, white gay activists, and a 61-year-old grandmother who crowed, "We've bloodied Fernandez's nose," has become New York's latest citizen celebrity

The controversy over whether a few paragraphs that were supposed to combat homophobia should remain in classrooms and shape lesson plans has divided the central school board, generated tons of newsprint, become a litmus test for candidates in New York's upcoming mayoral election and is stimulating unprecedented interest in upcoming and usually ignored community school board elections.

The fracas - which has lasted about a year and is only now settling down (for the moment at least) - featured a typical New York cast of characters. There were the Lesbian Avengers and Pentecostal ministers, a smattering of black Muslims and Hispanic parents, black parents and Jewish parents, trendy "progressive" parents - even the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and its top prelate, John Cardinal O'Connor, who thundered from his pulpit that parents should "not permit this destruction of childrens' values."

What was everybody so riled up about? The bulk of Children is songs and games intended to inoculate 6-year-olds against "Eurocentrism" via plenty of fun exposure to other cultures. Thus there are directions for how to lead a class in playing African blindman's buff, doing the Mexican hat dance, singing Irish ballads, baking Greek bread and making scrolls for the Chinese New Year.

There are nods to the environmental lobby: lessons in how to recycle the newspaper and a recommendation for a book called A Child's Guide to Being Green. The feminist lobby gets its due: A long section titled "Overcoming Sexism in the Classroom" asserts that "changing sexist myths can begin on the first days of school" and instructs teachers that "at first, the boys will tend to play games involving guns or trucks and the girls may play with dolls. Gradually, the boys may ask if they can play with dolls and the girls may want to play with the trucks. (If they haven't asked after a few sessions, the teacher should.)"

But these are not the sections that caused the trouble. The following paragraphs, written in the vague jargon typical of the Board of Education, will live in New York history if not, when all is said and done, in the Rainbow curriculum teachers' guide:

"Teachers of first graders have an opportunity to give children a healthy sense of identity at an early age. Classes should include references to lesbians/gay people in all curricular areas and should avoid exclusionary practices by presuming a person's sexual orientation, reinforcing stereotypes, or speaking of lesbians/gays as |they' or |other.'"