The Mexican American Studies trial is over. Judge Tashima’s decision could come in a few days or a few weeks, though from what I’ve heard, we might have to wait until the end of August. The defense of the MAS program can win in four ways. The judge can rule that the anti-MAS legislation, HB 2281, violated the equal protection clause with respect to the students in the program, or HB 2281 violated the first amendment rights of those involved in the program. Either ruling would mean ARS §15-112, the law created by HB 2281, will be tossed out. He can also rule that Huppenthal’s enforcement of the legislation to dismantle MAS violated one or both of the issues, at which time Huppenthal’s decision against the MAS program would be voided. If Tashima rules in favor of the defense on any of the four points, it will be an important victory for supporters of the Mexican American Studies program Multiple rulings for the defense will be a triumph.
I would love to see Judge Tashima rule for the program and against the anti-MAS law and Huppenthal’s enforcement. The whole affair smelled of politics and racism from the beginning.
Here’s a question. Are Tom Horne and John Huppenthal a couple of racists who went after the Mexican American Studies program because they hate brown people? If the judge thinks so, the defense is going to win big. But that’s not necessary. Even if they were the two least racist white folks on the planet, if they promoted a racist agenda to further their political ambitions, Horne’s bill—he essentially wrote HB 2281—and Huppenthal’s implementation of the bill could still be racially discriminatory.
A case in point. Remember George Wallace? He was the Alabama governor who stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama auditorium in 1963 to block two African Americans from registering, leading President Kennedy to call out the national guard to allow them in, effectively desegregating the university. But when Wallace ran for governor in 1958, he looked like a different guy when it came to racial issues. By the standards of the south, he was a civil rights moderate, so much so that his candidacy was endorsed by the NAACP. He ended up losing the primary to John Patterson who had the support of the Ku Klux Klan. Stung by his defeat, Wallace said, “You know why I lost that governor’s race? … I was outniggered by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be outniggered again.” And he never was. In 1963, he famously stated his platform as “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” For Wallace, virulent racism was more career move than personal conviction.
During the MAS trial, Tom Horne claimed he isn’t a racist, but he couldn’t claim he wasn’t ambitious. When he was Superintendent of Public Instruction, he envisioned himself sitting in the governor’s chair after a brief stopover in the attorney general’s office. All he needed was an issue to get him noticed, and it was handed to him in 2006 when labor activist and civil rights icon Delores Huerta uttered the phrase “Republicans hate Latinos” during a speech to students at Tucson High. The story blew up and became a cause célèbre among Arizona Republicans. For awhile it even went national, making it all the way to Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox. Horne saw his chance. He transferred the conservative fear of this one “uppity brown activist” to the entire Mexican American Studies program, painting its teachers and administrators as revolutionaries who wanted their students to rise up and reclaim the southwest for Mexico. The steps of the TUSD administration building became Horne’s home away from home. He was a regular visitor, holding press conferences to condemn the program. Immigration and fear of the growing Hispanic population were already rallying cries for conservatives. Horne claimed a slice of the racist, xenophobic pie as his own.
Is Horne a racist? If not, he played one as Superintendent of Public Instruction. He wrote HB 2281, a bill whose sole purpose was to dismantle MAS. It was an educational companion piece to the “Papers please” bill, SB 1070. Both passed in 2010. The godfather of SB 1070, then-Senator Russell Pearce, is a racist whose bona fides go back years. He recently renewed his credentials by crawling out from under the rock where he’s been hiding and threatening to sue the Arizona Board of Regents to stop “dreamers” from qualifying for in-state tuition. The thought of undocumented young people, who are in the country because their parents brought them here, getting a higher education which would benefit themselves and this country just sticks in Pearce’s craw. I don’t think Horne’s system is fizzing with the same strain of racist rabies that motivates Pearce. Most likely, Horne’s motivation is more opportunistic than racist—exploiting others’ racism for political gain. But that shouldn’t matter in Judge Tashima’s decision. If his anti-MAS law had a discriminatory effect, it should be taken off the books.
Is Huppenthal a racist? If you pore through the comments he made anonymously on blogs across the state, it’s hard to absolve him of the charge. He wrote, “No spanish radio stations, no spanish billboards, no spanish tv stations, no spanish newspapers. This is America, speak English.” And, “I don’t mind them selling Mexican food as long as the menus are mostly in English.” And, “Yes, MAS=KKK in a different color.” However, like Horne, his motives for the anti-MAS campaign he mounted likely had more to do with furthering his personal ambition than promoting a personal racist agenda. But again, the distinction between racist motivation and discriminatory effect isn’t the point. If Huppenthal’s obsession with wiping out MAS resulted in racial discrimination, Judge Tashima should void his actions.
This article appears in Jul 20-26, 2017.
Historically, one of the roles of public schools was to socialize and acculturate students into the dominant political culture. It was expected that children would be taught patriotism. This is why, for example, the Supreme Court has long upheld the constitutionality of requiring public school teachers to swear loyalty oaths to the U.S. constitution – teachers were the first representatives of our collective civic culture to school children. Teachers were expected to be pro-American propagandists. This was right and normal.
This role was particularly important for the assimilation of first and second generation immigrant children. If you want an anecdotal treatment of that, read Victor Davis Hanson’s “Mexifornia” – it’s a quick read, can be done in an afternoon – where he relates his observations about how public schools in 1950s California intentionally and systematically broke down students’ Mexican identity and replaced it with an American one. The result was a much better assimilated Mexican population than we have today.
As critical theory has spread like a poisonous fungus throughout the Academy, and especially though the teaching colleges (recall that weather underground bomber Bill Ayers is an education professor today), this role of education has been rejected. Children are not taught to be American. America, after all, is evil. It is built on slavery, genocide, patriarchal misogyny, anti-Semitism, LBGTQXYZ phobia and, I suppose, kicking puppies. No one should identify as an American. (Or alternatively, anyone who wants to come here becomes an American by placing their feet on our soil). Rather, one should adopt some other tribal identity – black, trans, feminist, La Raza Cosmica, etc. Read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed – it’s all there.
That is destructive. It creates social strife. It is a disservice to the student and society in general. The State should be entitled to stop it. In a serious society concerned with its own survival, this would not even be a question. But of course, ours has long since ceased being a serious society.
TL/DR: The public schools should not be teaching critical race scholarship to high school students. There will be plenty of opportunity to learn how to hate white people in college.
David, you are showing your bigotry.
The number one predictor for an immigrant’s success in the United States is their knowledge of English. We were developing Balkins in Phoenix with billboards in Spanish and literature in some neighborhoods completely in Spanish. You could have neighborhoods where children never encounter English until they reach school. That’s an economic curse to a lesser future.
I grew up and went to school in an overwhelmingly Hispanic neighborhood in Tucson. All of my buddies went on to graduate from college, an almost statistical impossibility from such a high poverty, high crime neighborhood. Marcelino Lucero is a pharmacist, Richard Sanchez became an athletic director, James Ortega became a vocational education teacher, Stella Peralta became a elementary school principal, Luis Rodriguez became an Avionics Engineer.
The one common denominator is that they all became very articulate in English – the best predictor of economic success better than a high school diploma, better than a college degree.
You know when researchers do that thing they call a specification, i.e. body weight is a function of height. Earnings is a function of HS diploma, College Diploma, English scores. English scores win.
My comments are antiracist. Concerned about the future of these kids. You are expressing what president Bush referred to as the bigotry of low expectations and the lack of discipline needed to escape extreme poverty.
Those of us who escaped extreme poverty know what it takes and want every one of these kids to have the great chances we had.
Those MAS classes were toxic and racist. They weren’t Mexican American studies classes, they were designed to be an indoctrination into Marxism. One of directors made no bones about it. He wrote a research journal article directly stating his intent. He was going to “racimize” the classroom – apply the Marx framework of the oppressed being Hispanics and the Oppressor being Caucasians. That’s racist and hateful.
They were direct about it. In their model classroom, they had this big poster of Che Guvera who shot 14,000 Cubans in the back of the head for their ideas and speech alone.
That’s who they were glorifying.
They described Benjamin Franklin as a racist. The founding father who helped create schools for African Americans, who associated with, published the ideas of and encouraged every leading abolitionist of the 18th century, and himself the President of the Pennsylvania abolitionist society.
You are deceiving people about what was going on in those classrooms. You are deceiving people about me.
I now devote my life to teaching students of color and poverty mathematics. Many of them from the highest crime, highest poverty zipcode in Arizona, the same way those nuns devoted their lives to helping students and me in South Tucson.
Four of my students this year made 4 years of academic progress. In one year, passing the scores of Caucasians. To do it, they did over 50,000 math problems each, having fun in the process. My slowest student did over 10,000 math problems. By eight grade, all will surpass Caucasian performance at this pace.
The idea that you propagate, that these students are ineducable, that the households that they come from permanently limit them, that is the ultimate racist idea. That current results are the best we can do.
Look in the mirror buddy. Your are the racist.
Again with Ben Franklin, John? I wonder why that bothers you so much. If the man owned your ancestors, if they were his personal property, and all around him others were treating people like your ancestors as property, as animals over whom they had the right of life or death without any legal repercussions, as nothing more than useful machinery, that wouldn’t bother you? If you could shrug your shoulders about that — “Oh well, that’s life, it’s the way things were back then” — you either have ice water in your veins or you have no self awareness.
I think he just outed you David.
The State’s closing arguments:
http://threesonorans.com/2017/07/26/leslie…
Because of course John Huppenthal would comment…that’s what racist-fallen-elected-official-internet-trolls do.
It’s frightening that someone who can’t lay off the racist dog whistles to save his life is teaching anybody anything. Today, it’s the overture from “English Only” as if that issue is in anyway pertinent. The MAS trial was an object lesson, facilitated by the State, in how much programs like MAS are needed for our kids. I can’t wait to read the transcript.
As a longtime successful educator, I remain highly skeptical of Huppenthal’s self-aggrandized statement of his superior teaching capability and knowledge of effective pedagogy. I thought in court he testified that 5 African-American students in unnamed grade levels in an unidentified setting under his tutelage each solved 50,000 math problems. Now it is four in his statement. Whoop-de-do. Without much more serious description of location, grade level, materials used, hours devoted to practice, types of problems encountered and solved, and “fun doing it,” we have no proof at all that he is doing anything remarkable. Was this done in a regular classroom setting with other students involved as well? Were the boys sitting at computers playing “Number Munchers” or “Fraction Munchers?” Does he use a variety of teaching materials? Are the students working and developing word problems or just doing worksheets or pressing arrows on a computer? How is he measuring grade level progression? And where is his control group that proves his method is superior? Most of Huppenthal’s testimony was just as specious as that little diversion he tried to make.
I can’t help wondering if Huppenthal put a poster of Albert Einstein on the wall! Since posters have such power.
Your’re a coward John Huppenthal! A mentiroso who seems to always have the time to defend your racist blogs! You have no clue about what MAS was or who the teachers were that taught the classes and never bothered to talk to us to our faces about the concerns you had. In our community, which you claim to know so much about, we call that type of person a sin verguenza! You looked like a punk ass little chavala on the stand…a disgraced and despicable politico that CAN NEVER STOP LA RAZA!
Huppenthal seems to forget that this counties fore fathers spoke multiple languages and encouraged it because if further proved you didn’t have to be rich from a good family to be an educated gentleman. Worries me he is so focused on English only, yes it’s a key to success but it’s not a corner stone. Plus US history books kinda skip over how they broke their own treaties and laws to steal land. Maybe he can explain to me how a little less then half a million in acres is taken legally from the original inhabitants? Plus wish my grandmother was still alive so he could to tell her the lynching of her grandfather was legal. Maybe he can explain to her why she wasn’t allowed to buy that land back let alone any unless specifically designated, till civil rights movement. Horne might be able to answer me how I go about requesting for our ancestors to be exhumed off land that was theirs, but belongs to the state and private owners…but these are just problems for those whose families have been here for generations before the deceleration of independence.
Remember the story of the tower of Babel. In a multicultural society you need a common language to make your support systems (in this case anything associated with the economy and health) to run smoothly. So the argument for learning English is in fact an argument for get further in life.”English only” is a shunt. In other words it is limiting and abrasive. I read part of the argument for the the Huppenthal and Horne side saying the MAS program taught “what to think rather than how to think”. I have not seen the MAS program so I would only point out that if in fact that is true, then the MAS literature should be edited to teach how to think. Teaching what to think creates isolationism and leads to smaller economic groups which will stunt the communities growth.
and finally based on reading these comments some of you need to back up a bit and think about how to make this work. The court ruling is is going to be an opinion that will be used for hard law. if your lucky the ruling will give you something to measure with and come to a decent conclusion.
Huppenthal’s comment didn’t even make any sense as a response to this article. As such, it doesn’t even really deserve a lot of conversation: sort of like Drumpfs repeated tweets. The bottom line is that it is sickening seeing the endless repetition of “Anglo History Only” as the model that public education should use. Language is not the issue here–the issue is do you present history as a rich, moving and developing tapestry of rights and wrongs, causes and effects and interactions between peoples and genders and political parties and etc.? Or do you present it as a monocolor story that ends at the second world war (the last one we “won”—think about that please) and still has elementary school kids reading the same damned white male canon that I had to read fifty years ago? C’mon people, this is a no brainer. Pretending that critical people and thinkers and philosophies don’t exist doesn’t make them go away. Ignoring Marxism doesn’t make it NOT one of the most relevant economic systems to a huge number of people in the world–it only makes you ignorant. Our recent Presidential election is a real slam to the education system in this country and the return and reinvigoration of programs like MAS are essential to turn it and this country around.
A MAS thought experiment.
Imagine a Tucson neighborhood. It is located mid-town, along I-10, and consists mostly of trailer homes and light industrial facilities. Its population is 63% non-Hispanic white, the vast majority of whom are poor and disadvantaged: high unemployment, high incarceration rates, rampant opioid abuse, etc. It has one high school, three middle schools and three elementary schools, all of which underperform state averages, and especially, when measured relative to other majority non-Hispanic white school districts. We will call this neighborhood “Seeping Springs” for the purposes of our discussion.
Suppose that Seeping Springs High School (“go Cowboys!”) introduces an Anglo-American studies program. This program’s goal is to emphasize the positives of white, Euro-American Civilization. The curriculum is implicitly, if not explicitly, pro-white. Students learn white history starting with the Greeks and going through the moon landing. They read great works of white literature and study white art and music. They are taught evolutionary biology from a pro-white perspective, from Darwin, to Madison Grant, to Jensen and Rushton. There’s a lecture on average racial IQ differences. The American Civil War is taught from the perspective of “lost cause” historians like Shelby Foote, and there’s a largely positive unit on Arizona’s Confederate history. Non-white cultural and historical contributions are deemphasized as not being culturally relevant to white students.
Participation in the Anglo-American studies program is voluntary, and it is open to all races and ethnicities.
After five years of the program’s operation, grades (even in classes outside of the AAS program), standardized test scores, and the reported self-esteem of white students in the program all show statistically significant increases. Behavior problems show marked decreases.
Question – would we accept such a program, even if it lead to better educational outcomes? Should the state be permitted to stop it?
Response
Ethnic studies students were not getting statistically different results on academic gains. There were t tests run. The students were gaining about 9 points. That’s not enough to reduce the achievement gap. That’s not excellent results. They had a very slightly higher graduation rates than the “control” group but so did every other subject and class because the numerator for the graduation rate of the “control” group was defined at a different point in time that the numerator for the graduation rate of MAS students.
What I am doing with my studies is establishing how fast students of color and of poverty can improve academically without any help from the home. If the typical Latino student can move 60 SAT points per year, 100 AZmerit points per year, that has tremendous significance. That’s four times as fast as the typical student is doing now.
That means that the system is holding these kids down, that the system is racist.
That was Benjamin Franklin’s breakthrough, as he studied African American students in school. He came to the conclusion that these kids were every bit as capable as white kids and that it was the institution of slavery that was holding them down. That was a huge breakthrough because not even abolitionists held that view.
We have a similar situation now. Liberals don’t believe that Hispanics and Blacks have the ability to thrive and that we just have to accept their substandard academic outcomes.
In words they would never admit, they are racist to the core.
Addendum
Does 95 round to a hundred? Does 3.8 years of progress round to 4 years? I’ll stick with 4 students but for all practical purposes, its five.
The students alternate, doing fluency problems at their highest possible level one day and math comprehension (word problems) the next at their highest possible level the next day.
Try sticking students on “Number Munchers” for 40 minutes a day. That would fall apart in less than a month. My students averaged 36 minutes a day of math work for an entire year. A recent research study showed that students at the tenth percentile averaged only two minutes of reading a day. Its hard to believe that they would have done much more math work.
I am glad that you paid such close attention, even if you are a critic.
Thanks.
Well, there ya go. The last refuge of a racist is to call people who challenge them on it “racist.”
Give it a break, Dupenthal. First rule when you’re in a hole–stop digging.
Re: Nathan K’s “logic” problems, they are utterly illogical. The picture you paint of educational whiteness is exactly how our educational system used to be, before programs like MAS–and more importantly, teachers who challenged the institutional racism of the educational system–came along.
No one was taught that the U.S. stole half of Mexico’s territory in a bald-faced war of aggression. No one was taught that Native Americans were pushed off their land and slaughtered wholesale in a bald-faced war of genocide. No one was taught that racism was still a rife and destructive force in our supposedly democratic institutions, and remains so TO THIS DAY–criminal justice, voting rights, education, you name it.
Facts like these are demonstrable and indisputable, yet children in public schools were taught a very different reality that socialized them to be part of the problem when they grew up, rather than part of the solution. Suppressing and discriminating against identities is what creates social strife. Claiming and celebrating identities only creates strife for people who feel threatened by those identities and would prefer to mask or erase them with mandatory whiteness.
THAT is why programs like MAS are absolutely necessary–because without them, racist apologists like you and Dupenthal would continue to sweep these realities under the rug.
“The picture you paint of educational whiteness is exactly how our educational system used to be, before programs like MAS”
No not really. Previously, our educational system was implicitly pro-white. We were an 85-90% white country, critical theory was still in its incubation stage, so you wouldn’t expect a counter-narrative, and there wasn’t one. Now, there are all manner of counter-narratives being generated by the critical theorists who dominate the education Academy, and these narratives can be sustained because we are now a country that is 62% white and dropping (and a city that is 50% white, and dropping).
My question is, suppose we could increase the educational outcomes of poor, underperforming white students by putting them in a system that was more EXPLICITLY pro-white than say, the curriculum taught in U.S. schools in the 1980s – a curriculum that purposefully excluded these counter-narratives. Should we do it? Is there any level of increased outcomes that would justify such a system?
Nathan K, you’ve posed an interesting thought experiment. One problem with it is, your laboratory in the classroom is isolated from the rest of society. It doesn’t take into account that this country’s culture overwhelmingly presents the world from a white perspective. A “White Studies” program which overstated the white dominance argument would be reinforcing what people have heard in this country since its inception. We’ve made some advances toward multiculturalism in recent years, but they’re small, early steps which don’t nearly counterbalance the Eurocentric narrative. “White studies” — in other words, the traditional curriculum, possibly exaggerated from what it is today — would be compounding the historical and cultural misconceptions which permeate our society.
So let’s pose your thought experiment again, adding a new wrinkle. If whites were the oppressed minority in this country and people of color were the winners who wrote the histories and dominated the national narrative, if society taught whites that they were inferior, that they deserved their place at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap, would it make sense to have a “White studies” program, even if it sometimes went overboard and overstated the value and importance of white contributions to society and dwelled on the injustices visited on white students, their parents and their ancestors? Would it be a needed counterbalance to the nationwide oppression of whites — in this version of your thought experiment — an attempt to correct the record and turn white children’s sense of inferiority into a feeling of empowerment?
David, thanks for the thoughtful reply.
I disagree with your foundational premise. A white child born in 2003 (i.e., a High School freshman today) has not been brought up in an educational system (or a society) that sustains white supremacy, or that even permits any positive expression of white identity. Quite the opposite.
But we don’t have to agree on this.
My hypothetical AAS program would not be based on the milquetoast, IMPLICITLY pro-white narrative present in U.S. education prior to, say, the 1990s. It would be EXPLICITLY pro-white. One of its goals would be to encourage the formation of a positive white identity among its students.
And my point is just that we would never permit such a thing, even if it managed to create significantly improved educational outcomes among poor and otherwise disadvantaged white students. One of the reasons we would never permit it is because is because encouraging ethnic chauvinism is bad for social cohesion.
Response
Evidence and logic. The most important public policy number in the universe is the maximum possible speed of improvement for students from poverty.
If as you imply, we are there, then our current system is morally defensible and we should all protect it dearly. However, even a casual glance at the data reveals that we are nowhere close to living up to these students potential.
That makes our existing education system horribly racist – just a fact, just a purely logical conclusion.
And, its getting worse, not better. The productivity of the American k-12 education system has fallen 15% since the year 2000, 5% just since 2011.
Hey, let’s give John Hupp some credit. At least this time he has the huevos to post comments under his real name. I’d say that’s progress. He went from middle school level behavior almost to adult behavior. KUDOS John!!!
One of the issues in the MAS controversy was the extent to which the curriculum went through a public approval process by democratically elected officials in an open meeting and the extent to which the complete curriculum was and is available for public review.
Whether or not you agree with the pieces of the curriculum highlighted in media reports and in the recent trial, it remains the case that the validity of a lengthy sequence of instruction cannot be properly assessed by pieces of it taken out of context. If MAS taught Marx one week and Adam Smith the next week and asked students to form their own opinions about conflicting interpretations of history and economic structure, that would be quite different from teaching students that Marx (or Smith, for that matter) was “right.”
Laws about public approval processes and public accessibility of documents relating to how public institutions function are there for a reason. In public schools funded by tax dollars, the materials used for instruction should be readily available IN THEIR ENTIRETY for the public to review. We distract ourselves with partisan issues and disregard and de-emphasize the bipartisan need for transparency at our own peril: if we don’t uniformly defend our right to know what officials of both parties who are elected to “represent” us are doing with the power given them by the electorate, we’ll find that at some point, by some officials, that power is being abused.