It’s been five years since TUSD’s Mexican American Studies program was dismantled by order of Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal. The lawsuit challenging Huppenthal’s order and the statute he based it on is coming to trial in Tucson’s DeConcini U.S. Courthouse, beginning the week of June 26 through June 30. It will continue the week of July 17 through July 21. The courtroom is open to the public. The trial will run from 9am to 5pm.
If the lawyers defending Mexican American Studies win in whole or in part, the statute created to make MAS illegal could be thrown out, or the statute could remain but Huppenthal’s decision that MAS was in violation of the law would be voided.
TUSD’s Mexican American Studies program began in 1998 and continued without a great deal of public fanfare until 2006 when labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta gave a speech to the Tucson High student body. Her speech contained three words, “Republicans hate Latinos” which set off a firestorm of outrage among Republican politicians and commentators in Arizona and around the country. Among those who picked up the anti-MAS banner was Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, who turned the steps of the TUSD administration building into his home away from home, making regular visits to condemn the program. In 2010, the legislature passed HB 2281, a bill whose apparent purpose was to make MAS illegal. Horne’s successor to the Superintendent position, John Huppenthal, decided MAS violated the newly created statute and had to be dismantled or $14 million a year would be withheld from TUSD’s state funding. In 2012, the board voted to accept his decision, and the Mexican American Studies program ceased to exist.
A lawsuit was filed challenging the constitutionality of the statute and legality of Huppenthal’s decision. U.S. Circuit Court Judge Wallace Tashima found the statute to be mostly constitutional. The lawyers working on the suit appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court, which decided that portions of the statute could be considered unconstitutional and the lawsuit had to be brought to trial in Judge Tashima’s courtroom.
That’s where we are now. Both Huppenthal and Horne will be called to testify at the trial, Huppenthal during the first part of the trial in June and Horne during the final part in July.
The trial will revolve around two issues concerning HB 2281 (now ARS 15-112) and Huppenthal’s decision that TUSD’s MAS program was in violation the statute. First, do they violate the equal protection clause with respect to Mexican American students? Second, do they violate the first amendment rights of those who were involved in the program? If Judge Tashima rules that the statute itself violates either of the two issues, it will be thrown out. If Tashima rules only that Huppenthal’s enforcement of the law was in violation of either issue, Huppenthal’s decision which led to the dismantling of MAS will be voided. With either decision, TUSD could decide to reinstate the MAS program in whole or in part, and other Arizona school districts could create similar programs.
This article appears in Jun 8-14, 2017.
Hey P Mason, from the sound of it, it could be a bench trial, not a jury trial.
Juries are finders of fact, not arbiters of law.
MAS may be a good idea, but if run by the same band of activists, it’s a bad idea. Using public money and children to accomplish your social engineering goals is pretty despicable.
In the comment stream on his last blog, Safier was asked to watch the June 13 TUSD Board meeting and to honestly ask and answer for himself these questions: “Are this district’s problems stemming only from insufficient funding? Will additional funding necessarily fix its problems?” I hope he will actually watch the meeting once it’s been posted on the district’s website and answer those questions. Among other things to be viewed in that Board meeting is an extended debate (really, “debate” is too dignified a term for that exchange — “extended bicker” would be better) between Adelita Grijalva and Mark Stegeman about whether and to what extent nineteen administrator contracts had to be understood in detail by the Board before the Board voted to approve them. As usual, the matter was somewhat opaque. It wasn’t entirely clear in what form the contracts had been received by Board members (and when) so that they could understand what they were voting on. Another interesting passage in the meeting was when the African American plaintiffs’ representative spoke in the Call to the Audience, seeming to complain that students were being asked to pay out of pocket for summer coursework that should have been funded by desegregation and / or tax credit funds. It sounded like requests had been made for funding that should have been authorized that had not received a response.
There are parallels in the news coverage of Uber and the London subsidized housing fire with what many of us who have observed TUSD governance and administration hear as a chronic complaint of constituents in the district: whatever is done is done poorly, without following proper professional protocols, without sufficient regard for the truth, and without being responsive to constituent concerns. Those are serious problems in an educational institution serving close to 50,000 students. The community needs to hear constituents’ concerns, understand them, and address them.
In this piece, Safier does the classic pivot to the only card he and other defenders of the district have to play: TUSD is the victim of evil Republicans, of their draconian funding cuts and their punitive and inappropriate response to Huerta’s comment and the MAS curricula.
“Republicans hate Latinos.” Whatever position you take on responsible social justice curricula — I strongly support them — how can we say that that statement is anything but false and defamatory? There are many aspects of Horne’s and Huppenthal’s and the Arizona legislature’s response to the statement and to the MAS curricula that could and should be criticized, but perhaps we should also acknowledge that the statement that initiated the controversy never should have been made to a group of underage students participating in a publicly funded educational program. It is false and it is the kind of statement that will inspire unthinking prejudice rather than critical thinking and awareness of complexity, exactly the opposite of what we need students to learn in school.
I fully expect Safier and his network to use this trial and the mistakes made by the state in handling MAS
to play up their favorite theme: TUSD as a victim, Republicans as its evil persecutors.
Caveat emptor: the drama is a little more complicated than that, and if it’s the best interests of students we hope to serve and defend, we’ll need to learn to see shades of gray, spot malfeasance on both sides of the aisle, and reject attempts to rally the masses around simplistic black-and-white inflammatory statements and narratives.
it’s a bench trial
This has to qualify as one of the most meaningless trials in history. Contrary to your story, TUSD was never under any obligation to dismantle MAS. What they had an obligation to do and what they were given time to do was to clean it up and publicly adopt a curriculum at the board level.
Is this judge really going to give them permission to violate state law again and reestablish a program without school board review and school board control of the curriculum? Allow outside entities to control lesson plans? Allow teaching to go in classrooms that disappeared when the auditors showed up? If you are proud of what you are doing, display it to the world.
It the community really going to be comfortable with what was going on in those classrooms? These weren’t ethnic studies, these were European studies, a guy by the name of Marx. Every single one of the books, all of Paulo Freire works was simply a Marxian framework applied to all social situations and racial relations. As one obviously talented girl who testified in the Senate “I never knew I was oppressed until I took this class”. Where is that framework going to take her in life? No place healthy. It is a philosophy of hate.
It’s toxic and Central and South America are deeply in its grip. Their murder rate is 10 times that of the United States and they have very little prosperity. We have a different philosophy in the United States best summed up by the great coach John Wooden “Time spent getting even is better spent getting ahead.”
For conservatives, this trial is a no lose situation. Even if we lose the trial, we will have a permanent example of why liberals can’t be trusted to run so much as a lemonade stand. Bringing the MAS controversy back will cause a few hundred TUSD students of the 47 thousand to consume the time of the next TUSD superintendent almost certainly causing another leadership failure, further incite the destructive factions on the board and hasten the destruction of TUSD already down 14,000 students since 2000.
That might make for exciting politics but it will not make a good outcome for Arizona or Tucson.
A publicly funded school system in a democracy should present the history of political parties in the U.S. and how they evolved, as well as a representative sampling of ideas from all parts of the political spectrum and the thinkers who have influenced different political camps. Once that has been done, it should be up to students to form their own opinions. “This is the Republican Party platform. This is the Democratic Party platform. This is how Libertarians differ from Republicans. This is how Greens differ from Democrats. This is what Adam Smith thought. This is what Karl Marx thought. This is what Milton Friedman thought. This is what Joseph Stiglitz thinks. Which do you find most persuasive? Why? Write a position paper and explain what you think. Participate civilly in debates with classmates who think differently.
That would be educating citizens effectively for constructive participation in a democracy, keeping in mind that the families utilizing public schools have many different political affiliations and none of them should find themselves in a position where their children are evaluated at school based on whether or not they are willing to “convert” to a different political camp.
Were there different points of view presented in this curriculum and were students allowed to form their own opinions and beliefs? Or was one monolithic point of view promoted as the correct one? They read Marx and Freire? OK. Who else did they read? How were Marx and Freire presented? We hear different things from different people writing in the media and comment streams. Lots of strong opinions on both sides, lots of shrill rhetoric.
Is there a copy of this curriculum and its reading list available somewhere for the public to review?
Response to review the curriculum
Your comment was world class. I don’t know that it would necessarily be an ethnic studies but it lays out an approach to studying economics based on solid principles and an historical perspective.
My African American advisory group took a similar approach to creating an ethnic studies class for teachers. The course traced African American involvement in the southwest from the early 1800’s forward covering the history of successful African Americans all the way through 20th century.
They and my staff not only created it, they taught it. It was something they were extremely proud of.
That work product of curriculum, lesson plans and organized classrooms never existed for TUSD MAS. It was a haphazard mess. If you wanted to create revolutionaries, they weren’t doing a very good job of it. Essentially, these students were victims of a political ideology spun out of control and they were being milked for money, a lot of money.
Even this trial is an example of the money to be made in this business. A wealthy foundation gives a New York law firm $5 million dollars to beat a dead horse in pursuing this case ($5 million gets your very good lawyers, by far the most organized deposition I’ve ever given). There is a management book about this situation, “What to do when your horse dies.”
Interesting. Re-reading Safier’s piece, I note that he writes, “A lawsuit was filed” in response to the State Department of Ed ruling / TUSD Board decision, and after the judge’s ruling did not get the result the filers of the suit wanted, Safier writes, “The lawyers working on the suit appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court…”
101 level composition courses warn about the “hide the agent” feature of the passive voice. (“A lawsuit was filed”… BY WHOM?) Also suspect: failures to specify name / affiliation of parties in a case: “The lawyers working on the suit”: who would they be?
When attorneys are involved, always find out who they are and, more importantly, who is paying them.
Perhaps Safier will do some research to provide the background for his next blog piece: what is the “wealthy foundation” behind the case; who provided and / or provides its funding; who makes decisions about how its funds are allocated; why was this case selected as a funding target?
But don’t hold your breath on that. Safier’s “follow the money” instincts seem to taper off into nothingness when it comes to who is funding initiatives originating on his side of the political fence. Cf. the 2016 TUSD Board elections and his MIA coverage of the well-documented, serious matter of the ESI marketing exec donations VS. copious crap-quality speculative coverage of the supposed motives of donors to TUSD Kids First, e.g.:
https://m.tucsonweekly.com/TheRange/archives/2016/10/10/more-on-the-financial-backers-of-tusd-kids-first
Whatever the case, Safier is right about one thing: this trial will be worth watching. How do our local and state level institutions function and what is the quality of oversight and decision-making in the “education” system some families in Southern Arizona must use?
We already know the answer, but why not accumulate more evidence? Great material for a book-length treatment. The genre would be farce.
There are individual excellent high school government/history teachers who indeed teach what bslap is calling for. Speak up if you know some. I know when my son and others were in high school they were given a test which sorted them as to political party that matched their views. We talked about it afterwards. In 6th grade, I provided that kind of information as well as speakers from elected officials of both parties to make certain students were provided a balanced set of information. It is not unheard of, at all. The problem is the kids who choose not to engage when they graduate, and they are more interested in other things. Most adults remember very little from their high school civics classes unless they are political junkies, and few news reporters are useful on this topic.
Incidentally, the whole point of schooling is social engineering, plain and simple. Teach the masses the way we should think and should act, whether in homeschooling, charters, private schools, religious schools or public schools. It’s how we transmit our culture.
Tashima messed up first time around… Arizona government is racially toxic and who can forget nutty Huppenthal’s crazy racist blog posts/comments … Huppenthal, you are a joke wrapped around layers of Lies… and please go back to school and retake spelling and grammar. The Republicans proved Dolores Huerta’s comment 100% correct. MAS was a caring, dynamic and highly successful program that even Huppenthal cambium report proved correct as have numerous education studies. Your supporters’ racial stereotypes just come out … the great irony of all this is that Chicano and ethnic studies would be a TREMENDOUS HUMAN benefit to people like you and them … if you could only understand …. or care. La lucha continua.
Interesting that a commenter who seems to be a MAS supporter writes, “The Republicans proved Dolores Huerta’s comment 100% correct.”
Please explain what method could be employed to prove the statement “Republicans hate Latinos” correct. Could we survey all Republicans and definitively determine each individual Republican’s attitude towards all people of Latino heritage? Just among the Republicans in AZ, it seems likely that we would find that registered Republicans have a wide range of views and feelings on race / ethnicity, some inclusive and tolerant of diversity, some not. We would also find that Republicans are themselves of many different ethnicities, including Latino/a.
It’s valid for civics and history teachers to compare and contrast specific policy initiatives on both sides of the aisle, providing data on what the tangible consequences of certain policy priorities are for people in a certain demographic, but when it comes to stereotyping people by political affiliation and making unfounded assumptions about how all members of that party must necessarily FEEL about an ethnic group, how can it be said that it is constructive to model and teach that kind of biased, inaccurate speech in publicly funded schools in a democracy?
There’s an important contrast to be drawn between cynically using schools to try to convert students to a particular point of view and / or political party — what seems to be meant by those who refer to “social engineering” — and helping them explore the joy and power of mastering a set of facts and drawing their own conclusions, i.e. thinking for themselves. If those who consider themselves solidly in the “support public schools as necessary to democracy” camp don’t draw a clear, bright line between those two types of pedagogy and express a firm commitment to the latter, that is actually quite troubling.
Was MAS political indoctrination or the teaching of valid forms of critical thinking? I still don’t know, because as much as I’ve read of the polemic assertions on both sides, no one here or in the various sources I pulled up in a web search of media reporting on the topic has ponied up evidence in the form of a CURRICULUM OUTLINE and READING LIST.
If there is one available, please provide a link.