Jeff Biggers has contributed many great pieces on the ethnic studies battle in Tucson for the Huffington Post. His latest captures another of the many mistaken and lost approaches TUSD has taken rather than celebrating a program that works: the demotion of Mexican American Studies co-founder and director Sean Arce.
You can read Biggers’ work here.
“Mr. Arce has been in the business of saving lives for many years, whether he realizes it or not,” said Jesus “Tito” Romero, a 2007 alumni of the Mexican American Studies program. “It wasn’t until I had Sean Arce as a history teacher that I discovered what it meant to be as a student, and I soon realized that Mr. Arce had not only saved my life, but had changed and touched so many others.”
In this week’s Tucson Weekly, we have a story previewing the three-day administrative hearing on TUSD’s appeal of state Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal’s June findings that the Mexican American Studies classes are illegal. The hearing starts Friday in Phoenix. We plan to be there to see how TUSD’s attorney’s from DeConcini McDonald Yetwin and Lacy present their case along with Huppenthal’s Phoenix attorneys from Burch and Cracchiolo.
The hearing starts at 8 a.m. and takes place at the Office of Administrative Hearings, 1400 W. Washington, Suite 101, in Phoenix. The hearing continues Tuesday, Aug. 23 and concludes Wednesday, Sept. 14.
This article appears in Aug 11-17, 2011.
I am being discriminated against as there are no Welsh History classes. Mexican history is an attack against citizens of European descent.
Will the MAS classes be teaching their students how Mexico stole the land of the YOEME? Will they teach their students how the YOEME were murdered by Mexicans? Tortured? Enslaved? If we gonna sing, let’s SING!
“Jeff Biggers has contributed many great pieces on the ethnic studies battle in Tucson for the Huffington Post”
This is the equivalent of saying that you are a contributor for a major tabloid, and being proud of it as real news.
Contribute something real to a real reporting agency and eventually you may be taken seriously. Until then, that initial tag line makes the entire article void.
Such a divisive program should be lamented not celebrated. If we are divided by these well meaning, but backward, educators our lot will remain poor, in both cultural and material wealth. The truth of history will come out, and it won’t be pretty for all sides. Best keep our eyes on the future, not creating a false pride past.