Our Opinion: Horne needs to leave TUSD ethnic-studies program alone
by Tucson Citizen on Nov. 26, 2007, under OpinionMemo to Tom Horne: Butt out. Horne, Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction, this month asked the Tucson Unified School District for “all training materials used in the Ethnic Studies programs at TUSD, a syllabus including ethnic studies books, DVDs videos, films, teachers’ guides, audio recordings . . .” He also wants to see the department’s budget.
Horne said he’ll personally look over the teaching materials of the program, known in TUSD as the Mexican-American/Raza Studies Department. It offers an optional curriculum for teachers who wish to supplement and enrich their kids’ education.
The key words are “optional” and “supplement.” The K-12 program’s goals, according to its Web site: cultural pride – think Mexican artist Frida Kahlo – and the pursuit of social justice. Pretty unobjectionable, right?
Not to Horne. In an interview, the Republican said he made the request after hearing “anecdotal reports” that the program is indoctrinating students with a philosophy he labels “ethnic chauvinism,” a school of thought in which ethnicity trumps character in the formation of the individual.
Citing one of those “anecdotal reports,” Horne said students allegedly were told that they live not in the southwestern United States but in “occupied Mexico.” He says he’ll also attempt to divine whether the program “creates a hostile atmosphere” in schools where it’s taught.
Part of Horne’s inspiration for his investigation, he said, is the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., particularly King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. Horne believes “what matters most in a person is character, not ethnicity.”
Justifying one’s position by invoking the Rev. King is never a bad idea. But in this case, it obfuscates the real issue.
Local control is a cornerstone of educational policy. The assumption is that teachers, principals and counselors who live in a community should be allowed a little leeway in crafting a course of study, because they know what their community’s kids need to learn. At least they know better than an educational bureaucrat who lives and works 100 miles away.
Tucson is only 45 minutes from the Mexican border, and Hispanics are TUSD’s largest ethnic group. Given those realities, shouldn’t TUSD educators – aware that so much hatred and lies are being spewed as part of our current immigration “debate” – be allowed to offer, as a counterweight, academic studies in the rich cultural heritage of Mexico?
Horne apparently doesn’t think so. If he finds evidence of “ethnic chauvinism” – a vague term, at best – he’ll issue a report and use his bully pulpit to strike out at the program, because “it’s not what the public wants.”
Wrong. It’s clearly what TUSD’s kids, parents and educators want. It may not be what the “public” wants in the conservative enclaves of, say, Paradise Valley. But what that public wants isn’t relevant.
In fact, it was in Paradise Valley that Horne, as a member of the school board in the 1990s, said he successfully quashed a proposed women’s studies program in a high school. How would he have appreciated it if the state’s school superintendent had intervened and forced the school board’s hand?
That Horne understands he can’t affect any aspect of the TUSD program makes his probe more questionable.
After all, he does have plenty of more pressing issues on his plate. Arizona’s high school dropout rate, which has improved to the point where it’s solidly below average, for example. Or the achievement of Arizona eighth-graders in science and math, which was below the national average, according to a report issued this summer.
Incidentally, while poring over the program’s suspect textbooks and syllabuses, the superintendent likely will come across a Web site for the Social Justice Education Project. On its home page, tucked into the right-hand corner, is an image of Horne’s hero, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
