The Mexican American Studies trial is a trip down memory lane for me, especially with former Education Superintendent John Huppenthal on the stand. Back when he was using his two aliases, Thucydides and Falcon 9, to comment on blogs across the state, my posts were on the receiving end of much of his anonymous wit, wisdom and, well, idiocy. After all, I write mostly about education, and dozens of my posts were about TUSD’s Mexican American Studies battles, so it was natural for his alter egos to defend his corporeal self against what I was writing.
I looked back through some of my old posts and came across something I wrote in 2010 when Huppenthal first ran for superintendent. He was in Tucson for a candidates’ forum, and I was there with my recorder. One of his favorite subjects on the stump was the evils of the Mexican American Studies program, a topic he inherited from his predecessor Tom Horne. Huppenthal talked about his experience sitting in on an MAS class.
“My first-hand classroom encounter clearly revealed an unbalanced, politicized and historically inaccurate view of American History being taught.”
He said he was upset that MAS classes gave students a distorted view of people like Ben Franklin, who was condemned for owning slaves. Then he gave his own rendition of Franklin’s bio, one of those classic Huppenthal fact-and-fiction tossed salads I read so often in his blog commentaries.
“Ben Franklin . . . was the president of the Abolitionist Society in Pennsylvania, he led the fight against the slave trade, successfully stopping the slave trade. He freed all of his own slaves, and not only freed them but gave them positions of responsibility so that they could grow into leaders.”
Huppenthal’s depiction of Franklin revealed his own unbalanced, politicized, historically inaccurate view of history. I’m sure he derived a great deal of satisfaction from his portrayal of Franklin. It was history told by winners for historical winners like himself. Bits and pieces of his thought stream are accurate. Franklin was the president of Pennsylvania’s Abolitionist Society (he was 82 at the time), but that was years after the state ended its slave trade. Franklin freed his slaves, but he kept them and profited from their labor for years after he took up the abolitionist cause. As for giving them “positions of responsibility so that they could grow into leaders,” well, Franklin advocated for education of black people. He believed they had as much intellectual potential as whites. But so far as I can tell, Huppenthal’s protestation that Franklin gave his ex-slaves positions of responsibility so they would grow into leaders is his own construct designed to transform Franklin into the untarnished, heroic Founding Father Huppental wants him to be.
Huppenthal’s Franklin hagiography is a powerful advertisement for the need for ethnic studies programs. “Ben is a great man, period,” he asserts. “Why tarnish the man’s greatness by emphasizing minor flaws? He was one of the good slave owners, let’s leave it at that.” Huppenthal doesn’t want to hear the response, “Franklin owned slaves! They were his property to do with as he pleased, simply because they were black. Washington was a slave owner as well. So was Jefferson.” Anyone who wants to understand historical and present day America has to wrestle with slavery, America’s original sin, in all its manifestations. That’s one of the things ethnic studies programs are designed to do, which makes them a threat to Huppenthal’s world view.
I learned a sanitized version of American history when I was in school which distorted my understanding of our country’s origins. I don’t remember when I learned our Founding Fathers owned slaves and had the range of human weaknesses common to “great men,” but it certainly wasn’t during my K-12 education. I would have benefited from some ethnic studies education when I was younger to counterbalance the historical inaccuracies and outright lies I was taught. Now I’m trying to correct my school-fed ignorance on my own time.
I recently finished one of the most revelatory books I’ve read in years,The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed. It won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2008 and the Pulitzer Prize in history in 2009. The book is about the slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson, which included Sally Hemings whom Jefferson bedded when he was 46 and she was 16 and continued to have a relationship with throughout his life, fathering a number of children by her. The book’s emphasis on the slave family shifts the story away from Jefferson, who occupies a secondary role as the man who owns the Hemingses instead of his usual position as a great many who happens to own a collection of nameless, featureless slaves. The story is rich and detailed. It added volumes to my meager knowledge of the story and shattered a multitude of misconceptions. It’s also a well written narrative that kept me turning pages even though I’m not much of a reader of history. I can’t recommend it too highly.
A few highlights. Before reading the book, when I imagined Sally Hemings, a 16 year old slave in 1789, I didn’t see a young woman who was “mighty near white” with “straight hair down her back,” but that’s how she was described by someone who knew her. Her appearance wasn’t surprising given her ancestry. Sally’s grandmother had a white father. Her mother had a white father as well. That means Sally was genetically three-quarters white, one-quarter black. And that also means when she had children by Thomas Jefferson, they were seven-eighths white, one-eighth black. In Virginia at the time, that made them legally white. According to the book, “All of Jefferson’s children with Hemings were said to resemble him, one of the sons so much that a person coming upon the young man at dusk dressed as Jefferson would have assumed that it was Jefferson himself.” Yet Jefferson kept the children at Monticello as slaves — well-treated slaves, often doted on by their father, but slaves nonetheless.
Jefferson’s wife Martha died years before he took up with Sally. Martha and Sally, mistress and slave, were kin. In fact, they were sisters who shared the same father but had different mothers, one free and white, the other black and enslaved. (I guess you could refer to them as half sisters, but when I know two women who grew up in the same house and have the same father and different mothers, I think of them as sisters, so for me, “sisters” is the correct term for Martha and Sally.) Sally was the aunt of Martha and Thomas’s children who she tended as a slave/caretaker. The worlds of the Hemings and the Jeffersons were intimately intertwined. It was a family affair. It’s very possible that part of Jefferson’s attraction to the 16 year old Sally was that he saw his dead wife in her features and mannerisms.
The Hemingses of Monticello has many more layers than I can go into here, with stories about the rest of the Hemings family, about Jefferson’s foibles and weaknesses, about the small world surrounding Monticello and the larger world of American laws and politics. It reveals some of the inner workings of America’s original sin which I never learned in the sanitized version of history I was fed, and it adds shades and complexities to the starker vision of oppressed field slaves and their brutal masters and overseers. It’s not surprising that the author is an African American woman. I don’t know if someone white or male could have told the story with as much intensity and insight.
Huppenthal’s campaign against Mexican American Studies and his often vile and racist anonymous comments on blog posts reveal his own fear of a necessary corrective to a sanitized view of American history, and the popularity of his views reveals the need for more, not less, ethnic studies, both infused into the standard school curriculum and taught as separate courses.
This article appears in Jun 29 – Jul 5, 2017.
I agree, David, that a sanitized view of American history — or of contemporary Arizonan history — does not help students become well-informed citizens.
But the drama surrounding this curriculum and the State’s response to it doesn’t involve clearly recognizable advocates of “sanitzied / inaccurate” versus “accurate” versions of history, as you attempt to represent it here.
On the one hand, one can sympathize with the pain of the community that was committed to a type of pedagogy they had gone to considerable trouble to develop that was having what they believed were good effects for the students they genuinely intended to serve and empower. On the other hand, it seems that people with the enforcement mechanisms of the State in their hands believed very earnestly, looking at things from their own point of view and with a different interpretive framework, not that the history taught in that program contained too many untidy, unpleasant facts, but rather that the students’ best interests were not being served by that curriculum because what history it taught, it taught tendentiously with intent to indoctrinate and politicize, rather than with intent to convey complexity, compare and contrast different interpretations and viewpoints, and encourage students to weigh the evidence and form their own opinions. Is this statement the truth, or indoctrination: “Republicans hate Latinos”? It seems the two different sides in this case have two different answers to that question, and different perspectives on a number of other curricular pieces that both sides can point to with completely different views of their validity — and different views of the validity, as an educational program, of the curricular whole in which they were embedded.
Questions of interest to educators:
***Is a politicized environment like the environment surrounding public education in Arizona — an environment where any curricular or pedagogical issue can be transformed into a political football that either or both factions will kick around to scores points with their respective statewide and national constituencies and political affiliates — is this environment conducive to the development of sound and meaningful learning environments and programs of instruction for young people?
***Can schools that try to serve communities with such radically different interpretive frameworks as the ones involved in this particular legal case ever succeed in coming to constructive agreements about how to educate students? Would it be possible to come together around a history curriculum that all the values communities — political, religious, economic — that feel they have a stake in what version of history the next generation receives agree on a version that seems fair to everyone: Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, Independents, etc.; Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, etc.; all the forms of capital and all the forms of labor: salaried, hourly, contracted, outsourced, “gig” employed, with benefits and without, unpaid, “volunteer,” etc.
The more I see of education, the more I find I’m not a fan of trying to combine so many different values communities and perspectives in one K-12 system. It tends either towards conflict and / or towards incoherence, and neither conflict nor incoherence are educationally valuable climates for students age 5 to 18.
Since you’re in the history reading mode, here’s another history text you might want to crack: Columbia History Department Chair Eric Foner’s Give Me Liberty, a survey text usually used in college American history courses, but which is used in some college prep schools locally, including Salpointe’s. It gives an excellent and complex overview of economic history, variations in the definition of “liberty” in different eras and for different groups, and the growth of America as a nation that defines itself in terms of its conscious cultivation of a values pluralism that implies also an interpretive / epistemological pluralism which you do not seem to be able here to acknowledge is real, and which you definitely don’t acknowledge is problematic when we’re talking about the viability of the Modernist project of creating value-neutral public schools that can serve all comers in a country as diverse as this one is.
David too simplistic? It is a much deeper problem than that.
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Plan_for_Improving_the_Condition_of_the_Free_Blacks
by Benjamin Franklin
As Will and Ariel Durant wrote, history is a matter of interpretation and perspective. It WILL ALWAYS be politicized by one view or another. As long as student recognize these factors, it is positive to see the different views of history and analyze them. Ironic since Horne and Huppenthal both verified the matter of interpretation factor in history study. THEY politicized the ethnic studies issue, to gain a wedge over any opponent. They wanted to strike fear so they could, ” wink, wink,” imply that Marxist, Mexican revolutionaries were indoctrinating Arizona children. Again, ironic, considering Marx also wanted to politically inspire based on his interpretation of history and capitalism. Any other rationale by Huppenthal is nonsense, especially considering his irrational word salads.
Please, learn how to present a condensed version of your opinion.
Better yet, just disappear.
I think more students would be interested in the poor training practices of the various police departments around the country than a who’s who of slave holders in the distant past. The police have a free pass to kill just about anyone. Franklin and Jefferson, not so much.
That is ridiculous.
Well, we have some facts:
Benjamin Franklin himself was indentured servant himself, essentially a slave, although of limited time. His entire adult life he spoke out against slavery.
Also, his older brother was imprisoned for speech violations leading Franklin to be the leader on the first amendment. As a columnist disparaging Franklin and making false statements about him, you should be ashamed.
And, it is a fact that through his influence and by petition, he placed slavery front and center on the agenda of the first first Congress after his influence was critical for the approval of the constitution.
In 1737, Franklin put out Lays All Slave-keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage. In his writings, Lay carried on the moral arguments of Sandiford. He referred to slavery as the Mother of all Sins. He argued that slavery hurt not only the slaves but the whole of the slave owning community.
In 1739 Franklin befriended George Whitefield, a very popular Methodist preacher from England. Certainly, Franklin was drawn to him in part because Whitefield was his own man, an outspoken critic of the Anglican Church and most clergy. In a pamphlet Franklin published in 1740, Whitefield spoke out against the treatment of slaves. He wrote,
Your dogs are caressed and fondled at your tables; but your slaves who are frequently styled dogs or beasts, have not an equal privilege. . . .Nay, some. . .have been, upon the most trifling provocation, cut with knives, and have had forks thrown into their flesh.
He is not referring to the blunt ended table knife nor the dull dining fork but to the field knife and sharpened tines of the agricultural pitchfork. Whitefield called the doers of these deeds, monsters of barbarity, and wrote that if the slaves were to exact any sort of retribution, it would be justified.
But a deeper influence on Franklin was the work of Dr. Thomas Bray who started a group called the Society Promoting Christian Knowledge, and in 1723 founded another group, Associates for Founding Clerical Libraries and Supporting Negro Schools. Franklin never met Dr. Bray but in 1759 joined his association and did meet one of Dr. Brays associates, Anthony Benezet, who started a school for African-American students in Philadelphia. Benezet strongly impressed all who met him as his gentle, charitable nature stood out strongly against the rough, course ways of many in this frontier town. Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of colonial Americas great doctors wrote that Benezet is not only a good man in the full import of those words. He appears in everything to be free from prejudices of all kinds . Rush thought him to be an almost lone example of one who is constantly about the Fathers business.
Franklin became involved in the school in the late 1750s by contributing money.
He also visited it regularly.
This school changed Franklins view of Africans and African-Americans in a deep way. After a visit in to the school 1763 he wrote of the children as having made considerable Progress in Reading for the Time they had respectively been in School . He also remarked that they learned as quickly as white children and that he didnt see any difference intellectually between the two groups. This was a radical idea even among some opponents of slavery. The overwhelmingly accepted opinion of the time was that all Africans and African-Americans were without a doubt possessing of fewer qualities of character and intellect than Whites. Here is where he begins to change his negative views of them writing that he now had a far more favorable opinion of their intellectual capabilities and, more importantly, the content of their characters.
By 1769 Franklin is viewing the more negative characteristics of slaves as being a product of the negative environments and experiences of slavery rather than of their natural traits.
In 1772 the Someset case decided the fate of slaves in England. James Somerset, a runaway slave had been living in London when his former master, Charles Steuart found him and attempted to send him to Jamaica. The court ruled in Somerset’s favor and in doing so, in the favor of thousands of slaves throughout Britain by establishing that any slave, once on British soil, was free.
Franklin was moved by this decision. In that same year he wrote a piece for the London Chronicle called The Somerset Case and the Slave Trade in which he condemned both slavery and the slave trade. In it he laid out the brutalities of the trade from the Atlantic passage and poor working conditions which he described as excessive labour, bad nourishment, uncomfortable accommodation and broken spirits. In an undated manuscript in the American Philosophical Library in Philadelphia it seems Franklin is writing on this case. He cites Deuteronomy 23, 16, which states that an escaped slave should not be returned to his master. Franklin comments, This is manifestly, a moral law, which be ever binding as the will of God. He further states it is a maxim of the common Law of England that the inferior law much give place to the Superior [law].
The Marquis de Condorcet supported equality and liberty for all, individuals and groups. Some of his ideas were very extreme for his time like in his support for what we call gay rights. Trained as a scientist, Condorcet is considered one of the pioneers of modern social science though he impressed in many sciences like his work in setting up a coherent system of weights and measures to improve commerce. In 1773 he wrote Franklin without having met him before. Of course, when writing the world’s most famous scientist and being one himself, Condorcet touched on science, but he also asked much about the condition, not only of slaves, but also freedmen in America. Franklin responded that the freedmen are not deficient in natural Understanding, but they have not the Advantage of Education. This remark shows that Franklin was still influenced by what he saw in that school in Philadelphia. They became friends, and as the Marquis continued his work to end slavery, the two remained friends until the end of Franklin’s life. In 1781 Condorcet wrote his first major work on slavery called Reflections of Negro Slavery. He wrote
To reduce a man to slavery, to purchase him, to sell him, to keep him in servitude, these are veritable crimes and they are crimes worst than theft. In effect, we strip the slave, not only of all mobile and financial property, but his ability to acquire it, including everything that nature has given him so he may conserve his life or satisfy his needs.
He further stated that slavery was a criminal act and those who participated in the slave trade should be prosecuted. In the 1780’s with Jacques-Pierre Brissot he formed an abolitionist society allowing him to continue to correspond and work with Franklin on this issue after Franklin returned from France in 1785.
Franklin also wrote in his “Maritime Observations,” about slavery questioning whether the employment it affords is equal to the mischief of hazarding so many lives on the ocean. Further he writes that “it is clearly the means of augmenting the mass of human misery.” Franklin marvels at “the ships and lives risked in fetching tea from China, coffee from Arabia, sugar and tobacco from America, all which our ancestors did well without.” He also cites “an eminent French moralist” (perhaps Condorcet) about whom he says, “that when he considers the wars we excite in Africa to obtain
slaves, the numbers necessarily slain in those wars, the many
prisoners who perish at sea by sickness…and how many afterwards die from the hardships of slavery, he cannot look on a piece of sugar without conceiving it stained with spots of human blood!”
Many unpublished letters in Yale University’s archive of Franklin’s papers show him to be a very involved president. Franklin sent and received scores of letters as he corresponded with abolitionist societies in England and in France continuing his relationship with the Marquis de Condorcet. He sent a letter to the Pennsylvania Assembly urging the passing of a bill that would put money to the improvement of free blacks. On February 3rd 1790 he wrote a letter to the young nation’s Congress stating,
>From a persuasion that equal liberty was originally the Portion and is still the Birthright of all Men, and influenced by the strong ties of Humanity and the Principles of their Institution, Your Memorialists conceive themselves to use all justifiable endeavors to loosen the bands of Slavery and promote a general Enjoyment of the blessings of Freedom. Under these Impressions they earnestly entreat your serious attention to the subject of Slavery; that you will be pleased to countenance the Restoration of liberty to those unhappy Men, who alone in this land of Freedom are degraded in to perpetual Bondage, and who amidst the general Joy of Surrounding Free men are groaning in servile subjection, that you will devise means for removing this Inconsistency from the character of the American People, that you will promote Mercy and Justice towards this distressed Race, and that you will step to the very verge of the Powers vested in you, for discouraging every Species of Traffick in the person of our fellow Men.
David, like the ethnic studies teachers, you are trying to deceive people about Benjamin Franklin.
Few can completely escape the culture that they are born into but Franklin did a better job than all but the very best of us.
So Jhupp, where did you copy this stuff from? Certainly you did not get this from your own knowledge. After all “I don’t recall” was your most common statement under oath.
So, David let’s turn that intellectual gun that you are shooting at Benjamin Franklin and aim it at you. Let’s go to the year 2037 and look back at you. Not 250 years, just 20 years.
This year, poor Black and Hispanic students in Arizona will gain 20 to 25 points on the AZmerit test when you compare their previous year’s test with this years. The problem? They were 65 points below College trajectory last year and they are still 65 points below this year. 25 points does not close the gap.
This year, I moved 5 of my students, 3 African Americans and 2 Hispanics 100 points. These are students, most of them from the highest crime zipcode in the state. This moved them from below the 35th percentile to above the 80th percentile in one year.
Typical students from poverty spend two minutes a day reading and two minutes a day doing math. Because of my studies on student motivation I was able to create a system and my students averaged 36 minutes a day of math work, mind on task, actual work.
These students ended the years doing over a 1,000 math problems a day (that’s not a typo). I am moving with them to the next grade level. My typical student is doing over 500 math problems a day. My slowest student is doing over 240 math problems correctly a day.
Within 20 years, systems like this will be everywhere in Arizona. Otherwise, you will lose your students overnight.
What my work means is that our 200 year old school system is an unbelievably racist institution holding poor Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans down to a fraction of their potential.
And, you David, are its biggest defender. That will be your legacy. You did everything in your power to hold these most vulnerable students captive to a horrible system that condemned almost everyone of them to a lesser future.
You are the Bull Connor of education.
Mr. Huppenthal –
Leaving aside your debate with Mr. Safier, on the topic of your work with elementary math students: curious to know whether you ever studied pedagogical methods in math as well as “student motivation.” You don’t specify your students’ age or grade level, just, for some of them, what standardized-test-result “percentiles” they were at before and after your instruction. Does completing 1,000 or 500 or 240 problems a day represent the type of work students at this stage of cognitive development should be doing to gain a sound conceptual understanding of math? Or is the goal just to promote the ability to do huge quantities of simple math algorithms as quickly as possible — algorithms disconnected from real world situations where the math is applied? Does this “system,” which you say in 20 years will be “everywhere,” involve problem solving, concrete modeling and applications? From what you write, I am picturing students at desks filling out worksheet after worksheet after worksheet, with the difference between “bright,” “typical,” and “slow” students just a difference in speed / number of worksheets completed, and the only pedagogical goal to move the needle on the students’ standardized test results.
Is that what’s going on? If so, in what institution and under whose oversight? What you describe, if I understand the goals and methods correctly, wouldn’t be considered a valid program of math education by most administrators and teachers who had studied math pedagogy and earned reputable K-8 math teaching credentials, but perhaps that’s part of the goal of demolishing the credentialing system: to get rid of people who have the knowledge base necessary to recognize the shoddy character of the kinds of algorithm- and worksheet-cram programs some “back to basics” textbook companies want to sell to some charter chains.
Safier’s problem is not that he supports democratically controlled school districts or teacher credentialing, but that he supports and excuses a corrupted, degraded school district and the political network that feeds on it. In this context, the fact that state level elected officials and Department of Education staffers can’t or won’t see the difference between the two — between the validity of the idea of democratic control and teacher credentialing and what is actually going on in TUSD, which does not realize either of those ideals properly — is deeply troubling and does not bode well for students. Tens of thousands of young people are caught between a local political machine that does not serve their best interests and state agencies peopled by politicians and bureaucrats who don’t understand what kind of regulatory and oversight actions are necessary, in this context, to help students.
Here’s one thing that’s certain: whipping up a national political firestorm while focusing too narrowly and punitively on perceived problems with MAS was not at all the type of response that stood any chance of promoting system-wide improvement and ultimately requiring and enabling TUSD to start better serving its students.
John, I have a great deal of respect for Ben Franklin. He’s probably my favorite among the country’s founders for his brilliance, innovative mind and wit. He was one of the most interesting and talented men of his time. But I don’t think he was a perfect man by any means. The facts in your bio above are accurate, so far as I know. Can you show me anything I wrote in my post which contradicts anything you included in the bio?
What I was reacting to wasn’t Franklin but the short, inaccurate picture you painted of Franklin in the passage I quoted from your talk at the 2010 candidate forum. If you presented this remarkable American flaws and all, I would have no objection to your praising his most noble qualities. His personal flaws, including his owning slaves, are extremely important parts of his bio. They help illuminate parts of this country’s history and heritage we have to come to grips with if we hope to come closer to realizing our county’s motto, E pluribus unum: Out of many, one.
And do you mean to tell us, David Safier, that when you are involved in the down-and-dirty of electoral politics, you have not suppressed portions of the truth to put a glossier sheen on the candidates you are promoting than they deserve to have, given their actual behaviors in office?
Provide us with a link to your coverage of your friends on the TUSD Board voting to outsource substitute teacher labor to ESI. (Or their recent vote, with their new “friend” (toady) Michael Hicks, to renew that arrangement, a filthy arrangement that is damaging both to the best interests of labor and to the best interests of poor students in the district.) Provide us with a link to your coverage of Juarez and Foster receiving $5K campaign donations from the wife of an executive at ESI, shortly after they voted to award that company a $21 million contract that Stegeman voted against. (Stegeman did NOT receive a campaign donation from the wife of that executive, making the relationship between the votes and the donation pretty hard to deny.)
Choose one: your high toned philosophizing about education and “truth in history” and your condescension towards Huppenthal for engaging in the same sort of manipulative behavior you yourself are frequently guilty of during election season, OR choose to maintain your political network and relationships, which for you, as for any other political “player/propagandist” will frequently cause you to distort the truth and drag yourself and those of your readership too weak-minded to see through your shabby act through the filth of lies, distortions of the truth, significant omissions of relevant facts, and, to put it plainly, BULLSHIT.
It is a depraved, no-holds barred version of PARTISAN POLITICS that is destroying both the teaching of history and, more generally, the sound management of the education systems in this state. And you are as depraved an actor in that partisan fray as the worst of them, including the figure you have frequently schemed to sabotage, hounded and derided, Huppenthal. You have ZERO credibility as someone fit to pontificate about TRUTH and NOBILITY and UNITY. Your own behavior degrades and undermines those values, systematically and regularly. You chose this character for yourself and continue to choose it, month after month and year after year.
OWN it. It is yours.
…and in case anyone should mistake these matters as pertaining only to adults and how they relate to one another in blogs and comment streams: think again.
On the receiving end of our state-level ignorant policy agendas and our local level filthy quid-pro-quo political networks surrounding public school districts are children who deserve a sound education.
The right starves the schools, destroys teacher credentialing requirements, allows for-profit charters and insufficiently regulated and overseen privates to receive public funds, while the left excuses mismanagement, employs incompetent, overpaid, and self-interested administrators, and outsources the management of many of the low-SES classrooms in Southern Arizona to underpaid, unqualified substitute teachers. (That list of sins is selective, not comprehensive.)
Ultimately, what matters is what happens in the classrooms. And the validity of what happens in the classrooms is being systematically undermined by both sides in this filthy partisan war.
Their tone sickens me: they bicker back and forth about Benjamin Franklin and pose as THE NOBLE, THE PHILOSOPHICAL, THE TRUTH SEEKERS, while the depraved scheming and mutual sabotage of BOTH political parties destroys our schools, distorts the truth, and puts very real limitations on our children’s prospects for a good education and a bright future.
The problem with pedantics .. they’re pedantics, like Safier. MAS as a body of study may be of interest to a dilettante dabbling in sophistry, but after that? So far the convo spans about 2-3 hundred years, meanwhile in the real world, Mexico a self hating nation in it’s own right, rots in the “pedantic” adulation of itself: Poverty. Corruption. Stagnation. Why in gods name would anyone conceive to want to teach that in a classroom?
Calling people of Franklin’s era “bad” because they owned slaves is like castigating people of this age for owning smart phones, or supporting abortion (or opposing it – depending on how history turns out). Everybody does it and there are plenty of people to tell you there is nothing wrong with it.
You can’t escape the times in which you live.
The Mexican-American studies program in Tucson was in the hands of extreme political ideologues. It was a bad program and it’s ending was a good thing for Tucson. Not that our children couldn’t benefit from some sort of ethnic studies program, just not the one we had.
I listened to Huppenthal’s testimony for two days. I was struck by how often he could not recall, how often he passed the buck, how often he tried to deflect, and how often he contradicted himself. But what really struck me as a lifelong educator who actually knows something about learning and teaching and how to evaluate it, was his description of his own teaching. No context, no facts, just claims of superiority based on 5 kids doing 50,000 math problems in an unspecified period of time. No description of the type of problems, no source material, no info as to reward systems, no time periods or other curriculum involved. This man is an educational charlatan who benefited from a classical education with little critical thinking and lots of memorization. He began his “observation” of MAS with a bias and made no effort to refute it. He demonstrated that he really doesn’t like being questioned by anyone he doesn’t consider his equal, and there seems to be very few in that category. The man was most definitely not a compelling or even credible witness. I wish I had seen him on the third day. And I have listened to a LOT of witnesses over the last 25 years, so I think I am a reliable judge.
Order a transcript of Friday’s testimony by the curricular expert in the Department of Ed who requisitioned and supervised the Cambium Audit, gcb1.
One irony is that if the same standards the Department of Ed was attempting to apply to MAS were applied to some of TUSD’s US History and US Government courses, a systematic audit would probably have found some questionable instructional practices and politicized statements there as well, coming in some contexts from different parts of the political spectrum, ones less likely to draw the ire of a Department of Ed controlled by Republicans.
Regulatory oversight and enforcement cannot just be complaint driven. Only one camp will complain to a Department of Ed under one party rule. Oversight has to be proactive and systematic. In the absence of systematic, responsible oversight, any portion of a statewide system of education may deteriorate into the Balkanized free-for-all, the chronically unweeded garden we see in TUSD.
As for MAS itself, I am generally sympathetic to social justice and ethnic studies curricula, but I have never been able to get a clear, comprehensive view of what exactly was taught in that program. Excerpts here and there taken out of context don’t tell you what you need to know to assess the validity of the program as a whole.
Response to gcb1
My point is not about the work I am doing, the point is that minority students have so much more potential than our current system achieves, hugely more. For these students to be advancing 15 SAT points a year when they can move 60 points a year or more is ghastly. And, do it while enjoying school immensely more.
The only way to reveal that potential is to allow thousands of different approaches to education and to see which are more successful.
My observations about our current math classes and minority students. These students are drowning in failure while the research clearly says that they should be experiencing 5 to 9 successes for every failure.
That’s all I did in my class was to design a system where students would experience success at that ratio.
The research also says that students experience a glucose consumption pattern in their brain about the size of a quarter when they first tackle a new skill. With enough practice, that glucose consumption pattern drops to the size of a pin prick and students can achieve lightning speed and fluency with enough practice. They are like sponges.
Minorities and students from poverty hate school because they don’t experience enough success and as a result, it is impossible to motivate them to practice enough to get high fluency in math and reading.
Education culture has just thrown up its hands and given up on these kids instead of solving the problem.
And, you can’t solve this problem with the classical classroom. Impossible. Impossible. Totally impossible.
That’s why we need school choice.
I note that Huppenthal still does not divulge the # of students in his “class,” how long they are there, what mode of instruction is used for delivery, what other subjects they are studying in tandem, or what level of interdisciplinary instruction is used. This makes a trained evaluator skeptical. I taught minorities and students from poverty in K12 public schools and brought many of them to love school and seek advanced degrees. No one has given up, despite the massive efforts of those of his party who refuse to provide the means and opportunities to ALL students that he provides to his 5 African-American students who each solved 50,000 math problems. Whoop de doo! Not impressed, and not very credible without facts such as I delineated. About 35 years ago we all played Number Munchers and Fraction Munchers but the kids still couldn’t transfer the scoring on the game to real life problem solving in context.
Yes, it’s clear from what Huppenthal writes about his math “program” that he doesn’t understand what the goals and methods of K-12 math instruction should be and that he doesn’t want to acknowledge that standardized test percentiles should not be viewed as exclusive, 100% reliable judges of the comprehension level of a student or of the success of an educational program.
But I note that you, gcb1, do not divulge the # of TUSD classrooms currently covered by uncredentialed long-term substitute teachers. That and other data were requested of you in the comment stream on this Safier piece:
https://m.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2017/06/19/carpe-diem-charters-are-failing-to-seize-the-day-or-the-students
TUSD is not, as it is currently constituted, providing “the means and opportunities to ALL students” that staffing classrooms uniformly with fully credentialed educators can and should provide. In spite of more than 40 years of desegregation funding supplements and court oversight, lower quality conditions and resources, faculty and otherwise, are STILL disproportionately occurring in high minority, low-SES TUSD schools. And the reason for that has as much to do with sell-outs and unacceptable compromises made within the Democratic party as it does with what you attribute it to: “the massive efforts of those of [Huppenthal’s] party.” Add the massive, persistent, and depressing failures of a so-called “party of labor and the common man” that has become entirely ineffective in opposing the agenda of “Huppenthal’s party” and you might have a clearer picture of what’s actually going on:
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/25/ralph-nader-the-democrats-are-unable-to-defend-the-u-s-from-the-most-vicious-republican-party-in-history/
Meanwhile, REALISTS raising children in this region will be well advised to evaluate the quality of programs in their local public school and consider that it may be in their children’s best interests for them to step outside of a public system that both parties continue to degrade and damage while they focus on partisan warfare that does not have STUDENT BENEFIT as its goal, but rather how to advance self-interested, campaign-funder-influenced political agendas.