The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
All the talk about angry parents showing up at school board meetings reminds me of the good old days in Tucson when students would actually commandeer school board meetings, chaining themselves to chairs in protest and lauded by board members.
Of course, I am referring to the controversy over the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican American Studies (MAS) program of around 10 years ago. The MAS courses were developed to inspire Latino students to achieve better academic outcomes by including more Latino historical figures in the curriculum.
While I was glad to see the continued undoing of the “whitewashing” of American history, which began over 50 years ago during the civil rights era, I thought it a mistake to create two separate tracks. That does not really undo the whitewashing; rather, it creates a competitor.
Now, 10 years later, there is controversy around the alleged teaching of the tenets of critical race theory (CRT) in public schools.
The beginnings of CRT can be found in the writings of Derrick Bell, the first black tenured professor of Harvard Law School, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. His ideas have been developed over time.
I found a paragraph in the Legal Theory section of The Bridge on the Harvard University website that describes CRT as it is today. It states, “The scholars pursue individual routes, methods, and ideas. Nonetheless, they converge around the belief that racism is endemic, not aberrational, in American society; that liberal legal ideals of neutrality and color-blindness have replicated rather than undone racism; that analysis should be informed by personal experience and contextual, historical studies; and that pragmatic and eclectic strategies should be pursued in the struggle for racial and social justice.”
It is the pop-culture version — the Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi version — that is often taught in schools today. The idea that race is a significant, if not defining, characteristic of an individual. It is this that has parents, who teach their kids to see others as equals who should be “judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin,” showing up at school board meetings and pounding the lectern.
Defenders of this stuff dismiss parental concerns usually by changing the subject and accusing them of not wanting to teach honest American history that includes all the evil stuff such as slavery and Jim Crow laws. Not only is that a different issue, it is not true.
Bari Weiss wrote an article titled “The Miseducation of America’s Elites” about a group of mothers who send their children to expensive elite prep schools so they will have a better shot at getting admitted to expensive elite universities. The article ends with an anecdote. The last sentence reads, “One day at home, in the midst of the application process, she was drawing with her daughter, who said offhandedly: ‘I need to draw in my own skin color.’ Skin color, she told her mother, is ‘really important.’ She said that’s what she learned in school.”
As someone who was around during the civil rights era, I teared up when I read that.
It was members of the Arizona Legislature who came down hard on TUSD for its MAS program. When Jonathan Paton heard that Dolores Huerta (co-founder of the National Farm Workers Association and contemporary of Cesar Chavez) told Tucson High students in a speech that “Republicans hate Latinos,” the spotlight was turned to MAS, which eventually led to its demise.
Today, the Arizona Legislature is aware of this current anti-American lunacy and actually passed a law banning its teaching in district schools. It was thrown out by the courts, on a procedural error. I suspect the bill will come back around.
While all this stuff is very interesting, and no doubt would make a great Netflix TV series, we should really sacrifice some of the recurring drama and teach students to read. How about doing that?
In a KGUN 9 report about student reading levels, Lydia Camarillo reported, “Digging deeper, we looked into Arizona’s reading crisis. Currently, only 4 in 10 students can read on grade level. That breaks down to 60% of our students that cannot read on grade level. Arizona also ranked 45th in the country on how well our children are reading.”
If we just teach kids to read well, we will liberate them, because at that point — even if we fail them in every other category — they will have the power to learn on their own.
