That ‘Did the Holocaust Happen?’ Middle School Essay Exercise Turned Out Even Worse Than Thought

It can be hard to keep up with the
outrage du jour, so folks may have already forgotten about the
awkward, poorly conceived writing exercise developed by educators
for the Rialto Unified School District in Rialto, California. The
district decided to have eighth-grade students practice their
written debate skills last May by giving them a couple of documents
to read and then asking them whether the Holocaust actually
happened.

A public relations disaster then obviously occurred, and after
briefly defending the exercise, the district decided not to repeat
it. The school district also said that it didn’t find any essays
where students argued that the Holocaust was a fraud, which
probably came as a relief.

But it turns out the claim wasn’t true. The Sun of San
Bernardino got their hands on student essays and found dozens of
them had argued that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Reporter Beau
Yarbrough
exposed the truth over the weekend:

Rialto Unified School District administrators, besieged by
criticism
after the assignment became public in May,
claimed at the time that none of the students who completed the
assignment questioned or denied the Holocaust, but a survey of the
students’ work by this news organization found numerous examples of
students expressing doubt or flatly denying that the Holocaust
occurred.

“I believe the event was fake, according to source 2 the event
was exhaggerated,” one student wrote. (Students’ and teachers’
original spelling and grammar are retained throughout this story.)
“I felt that was strong enogh evidence to persuade me the event was
a hoax.”

In some cases, students earned high marks and praise for arguing
the Holocaust never occurred, with teachers praising their
well-reasoned arguments:

“you did well using the evidence to support your claim,” the
above student’s teacher wrote on his assignment.

The student received a grade of 23 points out of 30, with points
marked off for not addressing counterclaims, capitalization and
punctuation errors.

Back in May, I
criticized the exercise not so much for the content but for the
limited information provided to the students and the district’s
decision to use such a heavily one-sided argument to try to teach
debate skills (as well as giving the exercise to eighth-graders,
who are arguably too young to be debating this topic). It turned
out the limited information was a bigger factor than I thought. The
assignment sheet told students that they could search for other
sources of information to bolster their case as long as they
documented them. That does not appear to be how the exercise played
out in class, according to The Sun:

Students completed the assignment in class, with no access to a
computer or the library to debunk the claims made by the
[“Holocaust is a hoax”] site. Such debunking is easily achieved
with Internet access:

Yarborough goes on to explain exactly what evidence from the
Holocaust debunkers has itself been debunked.

The district is refusing to identify who was responsible for
putting the assignment together or whether there will be any
repercussions for them.