Hours before stepping down from his office, Arizona’s top public schools official threatened to cut state funding to some schools because they continue to teach ethnic studies classes.
John Huppenthal, the state’s superintendent of public instruction, issued a Notice of Noncompliance to the superintendent of Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) on January 2, claiming the district’s curricula violates state law and standards on English language arts and social studies.
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“While TUSD’s original violations related to classes taught from the Mexican-American perspective, it now appears that some TUSD classes taught from the African-American perspective also violate the law,” Huppenthal wrote in the letter.
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In 2010, the state passed a law making it illegal to teach classes that promote “ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals,” “resentment toward a race or class of people,” and promotion of “the overthrow of the United States government.”
The law is currently being examined in a federal lawsuit that will be heard by a 9th Circuit court next week.
Huppenthal’s predecessor, Tom Horne, issued the Tucson schools district a similar letter claiming it had contravened the law on his last day as superintendent on January 2011, according to the Courthouse News.
Later that same year, TUSD reached a settlement with the state for alleged violations of the 2010 statute, and agreed to stop teaching Mexican-American studies and present its revised curricula to the education department, according to Huppenthal’s letter.
The new letter claims the schools district failed to comply with the agreed terms and broke the law again by not providing adequate information on its classes. It goes on to list samples of materials the school submitted that apparently violate the terms of its settlement and the law.
One particular sample that was offensive to the department is a response to an essay seeking the students’ views on “the impact of European colonization of the ‘New World’,” to which the essayist hypothesized European colonization “has a horrifying and negative effect on the natives that have been here for thousands of years.”
Huppenthal went on to say such “objectionable material” must be removed from the curriculum, and threatened TUSD with a 10 percent cut in funding if it “failed to provide complete information to [the Arizona Department of Education] regarding its revision to its curricula for culturally relevant English, United States History, and United States Government classes.”
TUSD Superintendent Heliodoro Sanchez did not immediately respond to VICE News’ request for comment Tuesday, but has earlier defended the teaching of ethnic classes, telling the Arizona Republic Friday the district must offer them to satisfy a federal order on desegregation.
“That order — the Unitary Status Plan — requires us to develop and implement culturally relevant courses taught from both the Mexican-American and African-American perspectives,” Sanchez said.
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