Assignment gets F – for ‘fascist’
Haverhill High history teacher accused of anti-Trump bias
A Haverhill High School history teacher is under fire for assigning a controversial assignment on whether President Donald Trump is a fascist.
The Eagle-Tribune first reported that history teacher Shaun Ashworth assigned the homework, “Some People Claim that Donald Trump is a Fascist: Time to Check it Out,” to students last week.
Haverhill High School Principal Glenn Burns wrote in a letter to parents that “it is evident to us that the prompt may have skewed the debate or provided the perception that we were looking for (students) to prove Donald Trump was a fascist.”
“This was not the intention of the assignment and we apologize to those that felt that was the experience we were trying to create,” Burns continued.
The controversy gained traction after a parent questioned on Facebook whether the assignment contained a liberal bias.
“Now, I have an older child that had the same teacher a couple years ago,” the parent wrote on a Facebook group for Haverhill Public Schools parents. “He did not receive the assignment: Why or why not is Barack Obama a fascist?’”
In his letter to parents, Burns wrote that students “were provided a graphic organizer for each characteristic and a place to write evidence from the texts they read as to why or why not Trump demonstrated that characteristic.”
Haverhill Mayor James Fiorentini said at Thursday’s school committee meeting that the issue wasn’t on the agenda and that there are no “actions being taken or contemplated.”
Spencer Zbitnoff, a freshman in Ashworth’s class, said the controversy is being overblown and that parents “have ironically been influenced by bias themselves … they don’t know the full picture.”
This sort of social media firestorm “concerns me,” said Anthony Parolisi, an eighth-grade Haverhill civics teacher. “I worry that the kinds of attacks we’ve seen on social media and reported in the news … have a very detrimental effect on all our students and public education overall.”
“I worry that such bad publicity will frighten districts into further restricting an educator’s professional autonomy. Teachers may likewise hesitate to challenge their students, worrying that parents may choose to address their concerns in a public forum before so much as an email or phone call to the teacher or the principal,” Parolisi said.
“I see an assignment that asks tough questions and encourages children to think for themselves … they are taught to be critical thinkers, and don’t we need more of those,” said one parent at the meeting.
Haverhill Public Schools Superintendent Margaret Marotta declined to comment.