Who We Area
The Social Studies Task Force (SSTF) came together in the late spring and early summer of 2008 in response to a controversy over the quality of social studies textbooks. The Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) was ending a process of adopting a new series of kindergarten through 8th grade books. Teachers and community members raised a series of criticisms of those books, many of them summarized in an opinion piece in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Teach students the whole story of our country, by Bob Peterson one of the group’s founders. The criticisms included the failure of the texts to deal adequately with race, racism and anti-Semitism, class and the role of working people, gender, and the role of social movements, Because of these and other criticisms, the decision to adopt the series was postponed.
The SSTF meeting monthly at the Milwaukee Offices of the NAACP. Representatives of over 20 community and educator organizations and four area universities have participated in our meetings. Members of the SSTF have been working with members of the MPS administration to deal with the serious shortcoming in the textbooks. We have also been building this website so that educators can share valuable resources that promote equity and social justice. We encourage you to share your resources. To contact the SSTF write to Bob Peterson at repmilw@aol.com
The SSTF would like to thank Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center for their financial assistance in setting up this website.
Additional background:
White Washing the Past: A Proposal for a National Campaign to Rethinking Textbooks,
Rethinking Schools, Vol. 23. 1.