On Wednesday, The Daily Caller reported on a bizarre, politically-charged series of Common Core-aligned mathematics lessons for elementary- and middle-school students involving U.S. presidents and presidential elections (e.g., was the 2000 presidential election “fair”?). (RELATED: Common Core MATH lesson plans attack Reagan, list Lincoln’s religion as ‘liberal’)
One of the perfectly innocuous-sounding lessons is called “There is a Difference: Histograms vs. Bar Graphs.”
Math teachers using this lesson use various facts about presidents, including religious affiliation. The lesson plan offers Infoplease.com as its “recommended” website for obtaining this information about American presidents.
At the linked Infoplease.com page, Abraham Lincoln’s religion was listed as “Liberal” — until at some point on Wednesday or Thursday when some unknown person at Infoplease.com changed this dubious information.
Here’s a screenshot The Daily Caller took of the Infoplease page informing the world that Lincoln’s religion was “liberal”:
Here’s the new page, where that information has mysteriously disappeared and a curious new footnote (5.5) has appeared in the last 24 hours:
Footnote 5.5 says that “Lincoln was not a professed church member.”
Infoplease.com is Information Please, a subsidiary of Pearson.
Pearson is a multinational education conglomerate that offers a very extensive line of Common Core-based instructional materials and tests.
TheDC’s attempts to contact Pearson about this incident proved generally unsuccessful. The guy in media relations who initially answered the phone was not aware that Pearson, in fact, owns Infoplease.com. Another media relations employee did not return messages seeking information.
Follow Eric on Twitter and on Facebook, and send education-related story tips to erico@dailycaller.com.