To expand on the above, and as noted by a professional educator in the comments (someone with likely a masters degree and years of experience), children’s stories are often used as scaffolding, especially when teaching kids critical thinking and bias. Why? Because most kids know them well and don’t by nature critically examine them, and are generally issue-neutral/ non-controversial on their face (as opposed to jumping into a long form article on SCOTUS or Breonna Taylor).

Who what when where and why are obvious at first but dig deeper. Who is writing the story? The Bear Post or the Bear Villiage Times? Why is a child breaking into Bear houses? Is it an isolated incident or part of a larger trend? If a study was done, who funded it- Bear Rights Org or Big Bear Security Co.? Is she a colonizer, barging into their habitat, utilizing what suits her and discarding the rest, pushing them further to Bear Reservation? Or are the bears developers who ate her mom, took her home, renovated it, jacked up the price and she’s reclaiming it as protest? Is she acting alone or is this some grassroots (or astroturfed) larger movement? Is it a boarding house, and Baby Bear’s things are “just right”- is this class solidarity, do she and baby Bear have common goals/class struggles against landlords despite their differences? Is the story pushing an agenda and could it be made more neutral, or could details be added or removed to bias the reader to one side or the other?

The assignment worksheet shown clearly demonstrates the class discussion was about a civil rights case in Chicago and the story was designed to teach structure.

EDIT: THAT SAID, I agree the assignment is more like 6th grade level, tops, and multiple students reported being unchallenged and bored, and other NYC teachers were critical. To my point in the earlier comment, the administration’s comment is dismissive and demonstrates an unwillingness (or inability) to justify what’s happening here.

This I think demonstrates a failure due to removal of tracking and lack of proper early reading instructions and disinclination to continually use increasingly challenging materials. The Scarlet Letter is not that challenging of a text and reading a summary instead of the book is likely due to students not reading at grade level and the school essentially teaching cliff’s notes, which is indeed problematic. Though elsewhere ITT it notes this might have been a special education section of a general class - wasn’t noted by the admin but wouldn’t put it past the NYP to omit that detail.