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FactCheckED.org
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An educational resource for high school teachers and students designed to help students learn to cut through the fog of misinformation and deception that surrounds the many messages they?re bombarded with every day.
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Term Of The Week: Special Interest
A special interest is a group, an organization or an industry that seeks to influence politicians to act in its favor on particular issues.
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Topical Lesson: Amnesty: More Than a Word
Ever yelled ?fire!? in a really crowded theater? Don?t. It?ll probably get you arrested. Because language can inspire emotions (panic!) in addition to conveying information (the building is on fire), we have to be careful not to let words do our thinking for us. This lesson will teach students to identify when emotive terms, in this case ?amnesty,? alter their perceptions and obscure the facts. Students will examine two advertisements, both of which claimed a 2007 immigration reform bill would provide ?amnesty? to illegal immigrants. Students will also analyze polling data that show how the word ?amnesty? affected public perceptions.
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Topical Lesson: Combating the Culture of Corruption
It?s a classic American film: the young, idealistic new senator, Jefferson Smith, heads off to Washington where he finds that his boyhood hero, Sen. Joseph Paine, is accepting bribes. Worse still, Mr. Smith finds that none of the other senators really care all that much. In Hollywood, the solution is simple: Jimmy Stewart saves the day. Fast forward 60 years: The corruption is still around, and in a fundraising e-mail, the Democratic National Committee claims that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain is more Joseph Paine than Jefferson Smith. That charge has little basis in reality. In this lesson students will dig into a recent bribery scandal to assess John McCain?s real role in rooting out the culture of corruption.
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Topical Lesson: Death and Taxes
Did you know that the federal government taxes dead people? Did you know that John McCain wants it to continue? Well, actually, he doesn?t. But that didn?t stop the conservative anti-tax group Club for Growth from saying otherwise. The ad contains a claim that may be literally true, but misleads the viewer by omitting crucial information. This lesson examines the ways in which the unscrupulous can use charged language to mislead casual readers. Students will dig beneath the loaded language to assess the truth of Club for Growth?s claims.
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Topical Lesson: Dubious Adoption Data
Maybe numbers don’t lie, but they can certainly be folded, spindled, turned inside out and refashioned to support a different conclusion. In this lesson, students will analyze a graph from the New York City Administration for Children’s Services showing a significant increase in New York City adoptions after ACS was founded. They’ll see how the statistics were manipulated to show these results, and will learn to keep an open mind about statistical proofs and to analyze for themselves the numbers they encounter.
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