Parents are expressing outrage after a Wisconsin high school's classroom assignment described Republicans as believing in the ideology that helping poor people was "a waste of money."
A 16-year-old student's mother, who asked only to be identified as "Heather" to protect her son's privacy, expressed shock after her son, a junior at Nathan Hale High School in West Allis, Wisc., was asked, along with other students, to figure out which political party was opposed to helping the poor in an assignment about different views on the political spectrum, EAGnews.org reported.
The assignment, passed out in a U.S. government and politics class last Thursday, listed a series of quotes and required students to identify which party affiliation best represented each statement.
"We should not help the poor, it's a waste of money," the first quote stated.
"When I picked my son up from school, he asked me what political party did I think thought 'We should not help the poor, it's a waste of money,'" the mother told EAGnews. "I said, 'Nowhere. I don't know any political party that espouses not helping the poor.'"
"He answered 'E' which stood for fascism because he couldn't imagine conservatives or liberals saying such a thing," Heather said, adding that the question bothered her son "a lot."
"If a 16-year-old believes that a Republican or conservative doesn't believe in helping the poor, they may view themselves as liberals at a young age ... and incorrectly," she said.
"Once we got home, I looked at the worksheet and saw that his answer was marked wrong. The teacher had put the correct answer in the margin and marked it conservative," Heather told FoxNews.com. "I was shocked and then I was very angry."
On Friday morning, she contacted the superintendent of West Allis-West Milwaukee School District to inquire about the assignment, but she didn't receive a response until Monday.
"The reason that I publicly posted this worksheet is that I hope people will take a look at what their children are learning in school, especially in high school," she told EAGnews. "We tend to only see what they are learning as parents when they need our assistance on something. I think that all parents need to realize that there are things taught sometimes to their kids that aren't true or at best are misleading."
On late Monday, the school district issued a press release stating that students were "required to take a political spectrum quiz, which is not a quiz in the traditional sense with right or wrong answers; instead, the quiz asks survey questions. The answers to the questions place students on the political spectrum. While the survey is completed online, no personal information is entered, including name, login, and student number."
Meanwhile, the bottom portion of the assignment instructed students to visit a website - gotoquiz.com - to "find out where they stood on the political spectrum."
