US Department of Education Offers Encouraging Quote from Communist Leader Mao Zedong...

...then deletes it.

From BuzzFeed.com and Department Of Education Website Quotes Mao Zedong:

The “Kids' Zone” of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) website, part of the Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, quotes communist leader Mao Zedong. The NCES is the“primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the U.S. and other nations.” Update: The quote has been removed. 

Find the screenshots here.


Below is a biography of Mao from pitara.com for kids which favorably portrays his policies of anti-capitalism and communistic political philosophy:

Mao's uniqueness as a leader is evident from his commitment to continued class struggle under socialism - a view confirmed in his theoretical treatise "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People" (1957). Dissatisfaction with the slowness of development, the loss of revolutionary momentum in the countryside, and the tendency for CCP members to behave like a privileged class led Mao to take a number of unusual initiatives in the late 1950s. In the Hundred Flowers movement of 1956-57 he encouraged intellectuals to make constructive criticism of the party's stewardship. When the criticism came, it revealed deep hostility to CCP leadership. At about the same time, Mao accelerated the transformation of rural ownership by calling for the elimination of the last vestiges of rural private property and the formation of people's communes, and for the initiation of rapid industrial growth through a program known as the Great Leap Forward. The suddenness of these moves led to administrative confusion and popular resistance. Furthermore, adverse weather conditions resulted in disastrous crop shortfalls, severe food shortages, and a famine that cost many millions of lives. All these reverses cost Mao his position as chief of state, and his influence over the party was severely curtailed. It was also during the late 1950s that Mao's government began to reveal its deep-seated differences with the USSR.

During the 1960s, Mao made a comeback, attacking the party leadership through a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which peaked from 1966 to 1969. As tensions mounted and events threatened to get out of hand, Mao was obliged to rely increasingly on the military, under the leadership of Lin Biao (Lin Piao).

Interestingly enough, it fails to mention the millions of people he had killed from 1958-62 who opposed his regime and assigns the cause of deaths to famine and adverse weather conditions.  From the independentuk.com and Mao's Great Leap Forward 'killed 45 million in four years':

Mao Zedong, founder of the People's Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday.

Speaking at The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival, Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian, said he found that during the time that Mao was enforcing the Great Leap Forward in 1958, in an effort to catch up with the economy of the Western world, he was responsible for overseeing "one of the worst catastrophes the world has ever known".

Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.

For more in-depth conversation of Mao's slaughter of 45 million people, read an interview of Mr Dikötter from abc.net here.

Why would you suppose the DOEd and a kid's website would promote Mao's theories to American students without informing them of Mao's extermination of 45 million people?  Don't you think that might be an important piece of history when learning about Mao?

This should cause parents great concern.  pitara.com is listed as a Common Core aligned resource.

Below is one district using pitara.com as a CCSS resource.  KECSS is the Kingsborough Early College Secondary School (NYC) and UFT is United Federation of Teachers.

Welcome to the KECSS UFT Teacher Center!

 

Common Core Resources

You can visit the follow sites for non-fiction texts, lesson ideas, and general information regarding the CCLS:

Common Core Library:

http://schools.nyc.gov/Academics/CommonCoreLibrary/default.htm

Achieve the Core:

http://www.achievethecore.org/

 

Engage NY:

http://engageny.org/

Mathematics Assessment Project:

http://map.mathshell.org/materials/index.php

Non-fiction Text Sets from the Reading and Writing Project:

http://readingandwritingproject.com/public/themes/rwproject/resources/booklists/nonfiction%20sets/High_interest_nonfiction_sets_-_edit.pdf

http://readingandwritingproject.com/public/themes/rwproject/resources/booklists/nonfiction%20sets/Middle_School_Nonfiction_Text_Sets.pdf

http://readingandwritingproject.com/public/themes/rwproject/resources/text_sets/2012/Science_Text_Set.pdf

http://readingandwritingproject.com/public/themes/rwproject/resources/text_sets/2012/Social_Studies_Text_Sets.pdf

Scholastic Non-fiction Texts:

http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/scholasticnews/index.html

The Current Events Newspaper for Kids:

http://www.thecurrentevents.com/overview.php

The Student News Net:

https://www.studentnewsnet.com/

Science News for Kids:

http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/

PBS Teacher Page:

http://www.pbs.org/teachers

PBS News Hour:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/

Education World: (Non-fiction texts, lesson plans)

http://www.educationworld.com/a_lesson/archives/newsforyou.shtml

Library of Congress Primary Source Documents and Teaching Resources:

http://www.loc.gov/teachers/

Lesson Plans and Resources from SAS Curriculum Pathways (Free Subscription Required):

http://www.sascurriculumpathways.com

National Geographic for Kids:

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/kids/stories/

DOGO News:

http://www.dogonews.com/

The Why Files?:  The Science Behind the News:

http://whyfiles.org/

Time for Kids:

http://www.timeforkids.com/

Pitara Kids Network:

http://www.pitara.com/news/news_world.asp

CNN Student News:

http://www.cnn.com/studentnews/

Washington Post for Kids:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/kidspost

The Learning Network:  Using the New York Times to Teach:

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/

News Wordles:

http://newsmap.jp/

Search "pitara.com and common core" to find other schools using pitara as a CCSS aligned resource.