Sherman Alexie on Tucson student reading TEN LITTLE INDIANS

[Note: A chronological list of links to AICL's coverage of the shut-down of the Mexican American Studies Department at Tucson Unified School District is here. Information about the national Mexican American Studies Teach-in is here. The best source for daily updates out of Tucson is blogger David Abie Morales at Three Sonorans.]

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This is a screen grab from Sherman Alexie's website:

Do you know someone in a self-involved bubble that insulates them from the fact that our civil rights are under assault by well-funded conservative politicians? If so, tell them about what is happening in Tucson, where the conservative-power-elite wrote, passed, and enforced a law banning the perspectives of Mexican Americans...

Where that same conservative-power-elite is now trying to get a law passed (SB 1202) that prohibits teachers from teaching partisan documents like Barack Obama's 2004 DNC speech in social justice courses...

And where that same conservative-power-elite is also trying to pass a law that prohibits teachers from using words that violate the obscenity and profanity guidelines set up by the Federal Communications Commission. If passed, what will that mean for teachers who teach young adult literature that has the F-word in it?

Who is among that conservative-power-elite? The Chicago Tribune article points to Floyd Brown, the founding chairman of Citizens United. He complained to school administrators that a teacher used the F-word in class, but, he says, they didn't take him seriously. So he went to Klein, and now, that complaint is a bill that has passed one committee and will be voted on by the house and senate in Arizona...  The photo that accompanies the Trib article shows Brown and his now-home-schooled daughter, sitting before a pile of books that includes William J. Bennett's Our Sacred Honor: Words of Advice from the Founders in Stories, Letters, Poems, and Speeches. I wonder if that book would be in violation of the "partisan" documents bill?!

There are people who don't think either bill will pass. They might not, this first round. The Ethnic Studies law didn't pass the first two times it was considered. Third time? It passed and was signed into law by Jan Brewer.

We have to get people around us out of their bubbles of ignorance.

Update: Wednesday, February 22, 9:45 AM ET
Andrew Breitbart's "Big Government" website has a story on SB 1202. It references other states where "liberal agendas" are in place, including actions of teachers in Racine, Wisconsin, and Oakland, California.  The closing line is chilling:

Arizona’s SB 1202 is an encouraging sign that lawmakers are taking the indoctrination issue seriously. Hopefully, the discussion in Arizona will sparking similar public debates in statehouses across the country.

Repeating what I said above: We have to get people around us out of their bubbles of ignorance. 

Stories, essays, speeches, poems, and music banned in Tucson

[Note: A chronological list of links to AICL's coverage of the shut-down of the Mexican American Studies Department at Tucson Unified School District is here. Information about the national Mexican American Studies Teach-in is here. The best source for daily updates out of Tucson is blogger David Abie Morales at Three Sonorans.]

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When the Mexican American Studies Department in Tucson Unified School District was shut down, books on the Cambium audit and referenced in the finding of the administrative law judge could no longer be taught. The volume of materials is far more than those books or the seven books that the district boxed up. For example, the following short stories, essays, speeches, poems and music are no longer being taught. They were used by Curtis Acosta in his social justice course, housed within the Mexican American Studies Department.

Non-Fiction - Personal Reflections

• My Dungeon Shook by James Baldwin
• La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness by Gloria Anzaldua
  

Short Stories

• Selections from Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie
• Eleven by Sandra Cisneros
• Vatolandia by Ana Castillo
• Love in L.A. by Dagoberto Gilb
• Lindo y Querido by Manuel Munoz
• Brisa by Dagoberto Gilb
• Aurora by Juno Diaz
• Lost Girls by Jane Yolen
• Selection from Tuff by Paul Beatty

Counter Story Telling and Cultura Through Teatro 

• And Where Was Pancho Villa When You Really Needed Him? by Silviana Wood 
• Culture Clash in America and Culture Clash: Life, Death and Revolutionary Comedy by Culture Clash

Shakespeare, Colonization, and Critical Race Theory

• The Tempest by William Shakespeare

Immigration - La Lucha Sigue

• The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea

Resistance Through Rhetoric

• The Puerto Rican Dummy and the Merciful Son by Martin Espada
• Jesse Jackson's speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention
• Barack Obama's speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention
• Speech at the Afro-Asian Conference by Ernesto "Che" Guevara
• "Women, Power, and Revolution" by Kathleen Cleaver
• "Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation" by Angela Davis
• Message to Aztlan by Corky Gonzales
• Message to the Grass Roots by Malcom X
• "Beyond Vietnam" and Where We Go From Here by Martin Luther King Jr.
• "Does 'Anti-War' Have to be 'Anti-Racist', too? by Elizabeth "Betita" Martinez

Resistance/Revolution in Spoken Word, Slam Poetry, and Hip Hop
Poetry

• Selections from William Carlos Williams, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Ana Castillo, Tracy Morris, Paul Beatty

Hip Hop

Selections from Olmeca, Sihuatl-De, Dead Prez, Common, Kanye West, KRS-1, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Rage Against the Machine, etc.

Arizona Republicans propose legislation to "prohibit public school teachers from using partisan books or any partisan doctrine."

[Note: A chronological list of links to AICL's coverage of the shut-down of the Mexican American Studies Department at Tucson Unified School District is here. Information about the national Mexican American Studies Teach-in is here. The best source for daily updates out of Tucson is blogger David Abie Morales at Three Sonorans.]
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On February 6, 2012, I wrote about a new bill being drafted in Arizona that said, in part:

A teacher who uses partisan books and/or partisan materials or teaches any partisan doctrine or conducts any partisan exercises in school is guilty of unprofessional conduct and his certificate shall be revoked.

Earlier this week, Arizona's Committee on Government Reform approved the bill with a vote of 5-2. It will have to make it through the House and Senate, too, and then be signed into law by Jan Brewer.  I speculated that the bill was aimed at MAS teacher Curtis Acosta because his syllabus for a Social Justice class he taught is on the website for the group that wrote the bill: Tucsonans United For Sound Districts.

News reports out of Arizona  provide additional context.

Gabriela Saucedo Mercer is a Republican who is running against Raul Grijalva for his seat in the US House of Representatives. She testified that even though the MAS classes have been shut down, teachers are ignoring the law by being political in encouraging students to walk-out of school.

The language of the bill is ambiguous. Who will determine if something is partisan? What does that mean for social studies and history classes that study politics, elections, etc.? On its face, it seems ridiculous, but so did the Ethnic Studies law that got passed. We'll see. Will saner minds prevail this time?

Yale holding Teach-in to support Mexican American students in Tucson

This coming Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012, there is a Teach-In at Yale in support of the Mexican American students in TUSD.

William L. Harkness Hall

Organized by Theodore Van Alst, Dean of Native Students at Yale, the Teach-In is a panel composed of the following individuals:

• Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Associate Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Race & Migration
• Stephen Pitti, Professor of History & American Studies, Director of Ethnicity, Race & Migration
• Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Assistant Professor, American Studies
• Debbie Reese, American Indians in Children's Literature

The panel begins at 7:00 PM at William L. Harkness Hall, room 119.

Though New Haven is a long way from Tucson, I think Yale would be smart to send someone to TUSD to encourage students from the now-banned MAS program to apply to Yale.

Critical thinking about Thanksgiving? Not allowed in Tucson Unified School District

[Note: A chronological list of links to AICL's coverage of the shut-down of the Mexican American Studies Department at Tucson Unified School District is here. Information about the national Mexican American Studies Teach-in is here. The best source for daily updates out of Tucson is blogger David Abie Morales at Three Sonorans.]

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On their website, Tucsonans United for Sound Districts (TU4SD) posted a series of items taught in the now-banned Mexican American Studies program in Tucson's public school district.

The first is Robert Jensen's "No Thanks to Thanksgiving", published at AlterNet on November 23, 2005.  Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He writes:

In the United States, we hear constantly about the deep wisdom of the founding fathers, the adventurous spirit of the early explorers, the gritty determination of those who "settled" the country -- and about how crucial it is for children to learn these things.

But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable...

Reading his words reminds me of the things that John Huppenthal, Arizona's Superintendent of Public Instruction said on NPR on January 18th, 2012. He says he was "challenged" to visit a classroom. Maybe he was invited. Here's what he said on NPR:

And one of the students challenged me. Come on down to our class and sit in our class, so I sat down in the class and up on the wall there's a poster of Che Guevara, and I said - well documented historical fact – Che Guevara helped run the communist death camps. They put 14,000 people to death down there, many of whom their only violation was free speech violation. So you're sort of glorifying him by having that romantic picture of him up there.


Simultaneously one of the creators of Mexican-American studies, right while I'm in there, characterizes Benjamin Franklin as a racist. So I'm, whoa, time out. Benjamin Franklin was the president of the Abolitionist Society in Pennsylvania. Directly he argued and was successful at making Pennsylvania the very first state to ban the slave trade.

Huppenthal was definitely uncomfortable with a full picture of Benjamin Franklin, and I have no doubt he'd object strenuously to Jensen's essay, too.

The second item on TU4SD's site is from Rethinking Columbus, one of the books the district "boxed" up and removed from classrooms because, they assert, the courses are no longer being taught, and the books are no longer needed.  The item is "Plagues & Pilgrims: The Truth about the First Thanksgiving" by James W. Loewen.

Loewen's article begins with:

Textbooks spin happy yarns about the Pilgrims and the "First Thanksgiving." Here's is the version in one high-school history, The American Tradition: 

He quotes from that history text and then does analysis of Thanksgiving and how it is presented in history texts.

These two items are at the top of the list at the TU4SD site. Seems to me members of TU4SD put them at the top because they find those two particular lessons especially inappropriate. Critical thinking about Thanksgiving...  No way! Not in Tucson.

District officials say it isn't the books themselves that are the problem. If that was the case, they could have left those books in the classrooms. District officials say it was the way the Mexican American Studies teachers were teaching the material in the books that is the problem.  Other teachers, apparently, weren't committing the violations the MAS teachers were.

I think those who shut down the program are ignorant of what is taught in schools. I wonder if any teachers in the district use Michael Dorris's Guests or Morning Girl. Both are the perspective of Native children who observe newcomers to their lands. I wonder if any teachers use Louise Erdrich's Birchbark House? It, too, offers a Native perspective on those newcomers.

Political leaders in the state of Arizona, speaking from their officially elected positions, have said that the reason they targeted the MAS program and not the other ethnic studies programs is that nobody complained about the other ones.

Complaints led to the dismantling of the MAS program. What else is at risk? Who else is at risk? If I was an elementary school teacher there, I'd be very worried about my job and my curriculum.

Debbie Reese reading from Delgado and Stefancic's CRITICAL RACE THEORY

[Note: A chronological list of links to AICL's coverage of the shut-down of the Mexican American Studies Department at Tucson Unified School District is here. Information about the national Mexican American Studies Teach-in is here. The best source for daily updates out of Tucson is blogger David Abie Morales at Three Sonorans.]

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I read from Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic's Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, on page nine.

Director/teacher of "suspended" Mexican American Studies program in NYC March 2-3, 2012

[Note: A chronological list of links to AICL's coverage of the shut-down of the Mexican American Studies Department at Tucson Unified School District is here. Information about the national Mexican American Studies Teach-in is here. The best source for daily updates out of Tucson is blogger David Abie Morales at Three Sonorans.]

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If you are in or near New York City on Friday, March 2nd or Saturday, March 3rd, head over to Teacher's College at Columbia University and learn about the Mexican American Studies program that was found guilty of violating Arizona Law Statute 15-112 that prohibits courses or classes that:

1. Promote the overthrow of the United States Government
2. Promote resentment toward a race or class of people
3. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group 
4. Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of treatment of pupils as individuals

 

Find out what happened directly from Sean Arce, who served as a teacher and then director of the MAS program.

 

 

 

 

And, from Maria Federico Brummer, who taught in the now-shuttered program.

 

 

 

In preparation for your visit, read Brummer's article 'My Other Me: Why Ethnic Studies are Good for All' at the website of the National Education Association.