We need to make calls TODAY, THIS WEEK: Support Ethnic Studies in Texas NOW!

From Angela Valenzuela:

Support Ethnic Studies in Texas NOW!

Time to put pressure on the legislature to get our Ethnic Studies bills heard this legislative session.  Please call your representatives in the House for a hearing for BOTH  HB1817 and HB366.  Also call your representative on the Senate side for a hearing of SB695.

Contact information appears below for the House and Senate Education Committee representatives, respectively.

If any of you live in the districts of any of the members listed below, do know that you are one of their constituents and call them since a call from you as one of their constituents means a whole lot more than if they receive a call from someone that is not a constituent. If you do not know who represents you, click here to find out. 

If none of the house or senate members represent you, then reach out to the chairs themselves or better yet, tell families, friends, and members of organizations that live in their districts to begin making calls.

One last, very important point.  The Texas State Board of Education may also implement this without being forced by the legislature to do so.  Yes, they are empowered to simply do the right thing.  So if they see that the legislature is getting pressured, they can move on their end without a law making them do this.

 To enlarge, click here.

 To enlarge, click here.

TAKE ACTION FOR ETHNIC STUDIES!

Texas SB No. 695

Relating to elective courses in ethnic studies for middle school and high school students

Good news out of Austin:  A bill requiring the state of Texas to offer ethnic studies courses as middle and high school electives has been introduced in the legislature.  SB695 would authorize ethnic studies electives in Mexican American, Asian American, Native American and African American studies.   Tireless efforts by informed community groups built the coalition behind this bill.  Forward-thinking legislators signed on to sponsor it.

Now we all need to make sure SB695 gets a hearing, gets a vote, and becomes Texas law!  If you were horrified by the bogus “Mexican American studies” book that colonized Mexicans and degraded our collective history, if you admired the scholars and community leaders who successfully fought its adoption, then seize this chance to make our kids’ education match our rich history and cultural assets.  

See Angela Valenzuela’s advice for legislators to contact, copied from her blog (below).   The bill itself is here; share it with your friends, your children’s teachers, your children themselves.  Letters and calls from school kids carry weight:  these are the future voters.

Whom to thank:

• The K-12 Committee of the NACCS Tejas Foco organization.  
• Senators Garcia, Hinojosa, Lucio, Menéndez, Miles, Rodriguez, Uresti, Watson, West, Whitmire, ad Zaffirini for co-authoring this historic legislation.

Whom to contact:

• Senate Education Committee Chair Larry Taylor and Vice-Chair Eddie Lucio, Jr. and members to get a hearing for SB695 as follows:
• CHAIR, Larry Taylor, VICE-CHAIR Eddie Lucio, Jr.
• MEMBERS Paul Bettencourt, Donna Campbell, Bob Hall, Don Huffines, Bryan Hughes, Kel Seliger, Van Taylor, Carlos Uresti, Royce West

Please comment on my post here

COLONIZING BY TEXTBOOK, Part 3
See What Organizing Can Do!

Image source:  http://kxan.com/2016/09/13/rally-says-controversial-mexican-american-textbook-is-inaccurate-offensive/

History was made today! The State Board of Education of Texas rose above its almost caricatured record of questioning whether Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and civil rights labor leader Cesar Chavez are worthy role models for our children by voting unanimously to reject – to not approve – the racist, erroneous Mexican American Heritage "textbook."

While we applaud the good sense of the members of the state board of education, real credit goes to the parents, educators, scholars and friends of Texas children who showed what democracy can do:  they organized, they publicized, they studied, they brought their deepest concerns and their scholarly expertise and their families’ stories into the debate.  They built a coalition to reject racism. They also built that coalition to affirm what is just and inclusive and historically authentic.

I applaud historian Emilio Zamora and his Nuestro Grupo colleagues for doing the  tedious work of a fine-grained review of this proposed book. And I applaud the thousands who became informed, signed the petition opposing this book, and made their opposition known through calls, letters, emails and testimony.

This is what democracy looks like! This is what democracy can do!

Image source:  http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/texas-textbook-dripping-racism-opposed-hearing-awaits-vote-n647911

Here is the board’s decision.  Also check out Professor Angela Valenzuela’s testimony at the hearing, and the testimony of historian Emilio Zamora. 

Our work isn’t finished.   Bills are already being drafted to shift our tax dollars from the public’s schools to the corporate charter chains as soon as the legislative session opens in January.    Our kids deserve strong public schools.  We can stop the charter movement.  

We’ve seen what organizing can do!

To comment on this post click on the word "comment" below

COLONIZING BY TEXTBOOK, Part 1

What my students saw in a Spanish class

Tejano Monument, Austin, TX
Image source:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/8069642490

Two students burst into my course on the American High School, angry to the point of tears, theirs the anger of righteous indignation.   Forget the syllabus and the assigned lesson: we had to hear their story.

These two Rice students had observed earlier that day in classrooms at one of the city’s predominantly Latino high schools:  95% Latino, some recently immigrated, most long-time Texans.   The subject of their fury:  a Spanish I textbook.  The kind that goes chapter by chapter introducing grammar rules, verb conjugations, and vocabulary. The interesting stuff is found in those sidebars,-- you know the ones that are in color and talk about the countries and cultures where this new language is spoken. 

My students were almost shouting, “It keeps saying ‘they’!”  “’They’ eat this, ‘they’ wear that….it keeps saying ‘they’!”

Seated in a Spanish class among Mexican American students, my Anglo students were shocked to find that these “cultural” sidebars described Spanish-speakers as an exotic “other.”  The “they” were all native speakers of Spanish wearing rebozos and singing Mariachi; “they all” eat tacos and enchiladas, with corn as the staple in their diet.

The “they” assumed the book – and the class – would be exclusively for non-Spanish speakers.

The problem of “othering” non-Anglo students is larger than the book: the district had vetoed several principals’ attempts to add Spanish-for-Spanish-speakers to their course offerings. Those courses in Spanish and Latin American literature, in advanced composition and conversation, were seen as electives “we can’t afford”  despite a Latino majority in the district’s student population. Thus students who were fluent in Spanish were having to sit through Spanish 1 and 2 to get “foreign language” credits on their transcript.

My students were very upset at what they came to see a form of cultural colonizing in the selection of the book. Even more upsetting was the silence about those “cultural” sidebars: the teacher did not mention them, nor did the students speak up against  this objectification of themselves and their families and their language.   Angela Valenzuela’s path-breaking book Subtractive Schooling:  US-Mexican Youth would suggest that by high school these students had probably absorbed this colonizing, this culturally subtractive curriculum, as normal, as the way we do school.  My students, preparing to be teachers, wanted assurance that this othering is not normal, will not be inevitable. They wanted to learn ways to teach respectfully, drawing on what students bring to class. They aspired to amass culturally rich and authentic instructional materials and, most important, they wanted to not hurt their students. And they wanted to work in schools that supported that vision and made it, not subtractive schooling, the norm.

That old textbook is not likely to still be bouncing around in our city’s high schools. But the colonizing continues and in very dangerous ways.

The newest instrument of colonizing is a proposed textbook that is as startling in the audacity of its racism as in the utter falseness of its content.  Whether as a cynical backlash against the hard-fought victory for Mexican American Studies courses to be approved by the State Board of Education in Texas or as a brash and opportunistic commercial venture, “Mexican American Heritage” produced by uninformed Anglo writers and a conservative former member of the state board of education – does far more damage than those references to a “they,” to the “them” in those Spanish I textbooks that so upset my students.  The "Mexican American Heritage" book didn't sit well with the State Board of Education committee that reviewed it, either:

"Jamie Riddle and Valarie Angle failed to meet the professional standards and guiding principles for the preparation of a textbook worthy of our teachers and youth in Texas classrooms. They failed to engage in critical dialogue with current scholarship and, as a consequence, presented a prolific misrepresentation of facts. This means that the proposed textbook is really a polemic attempting to masquerade as a textbook."

You can learn more about this book here.  Its errors and racist messages are documented by scholars and activists, as well as journalists. It does not take historians to know that a book that calls Mexicans “lazy” is toxic, racist, and frankly ridiculous.

But this racist text is not being met with silence.   Critiques have emerged from historians, activists, community groups, and most important from the state’s Mexican American community – the “we” of this story.

And this book can be stopped.  In fact, the book has catalyzed a movement.  When the State Board of Education meets later this month to vote on this book, the opposition will be organized, vocal and most of all, present.  Add your voice to opposition to having this fake history book in our schools.  See my next post for ways you can speak up against colonizing the Mexican American children of Texas. 

To register your thoughts on this book or share experiences with other ways our schools and our instructional materials may be colonizing our kids, click on the word “comments” below.

Educando Todos Nuestros Niños

Who are the children in our schools?  What does ‘diversity’ mean when we’re talking about educating children?

One person I rely on to teach me about the children, their families and their cultures – and the policies we need to give every child a powerful education, is Angela Valenzuela, whose blog consistently challenges our often limited vision for our schools and our teaching.   

A recent post on her blog, Educational Equity, Policy and Politics in Texas, shows the need to look behind the official “diversity” categories if we want to understand our students, their families and the ways they experience school.  Most recently, Valenzuela highlights important findings on the languages spoken by people in our country officially designated as “Hispanic.”  “English Proficiency on the Rise Among Latinos,” a report by the Pew Research Center on Hispanic Trends, shows that even the languages we speak, and use on a daily basis, can’t be automatically assumed by typical demographic designations such as age, educational attainment, or country of birth.  


I highly recommend the full report to anyone working in our schools or setting the policies that shape them.  These are just two of the interesting findings from their analysis of 35 years of Latinos in the US:

• "As of 2013, 73% of Hispanics spoke Spanish at home, a share little changed since 1980 (75%), but down from its peak of 78% in 2000. Nonetheless, the number of Hispanics who speak Spanish at home continues to grow, as the Hispanic population continues to grow."

• "Fully 95% of foreign-born Hispanics spoke Spanish at home in 2013....But among the U.S. born, this share has declined from 67% in 1980 to 60% in 2013." 

And of course I highly recommend Angela Valenzuela’s blog, always insightful and informative.

CINCO DE MAYO, or
Imagine how many teachers we could have hired with all that money they spent building that border fence!

All across the southwestern United States, previously known as Mexico, the fifth day of May, Cinco de Mayo, inspires parades, huge spreads of Mexican foods, margaritas of course, and vague explanations of some kind of independence day.   Actually, the day is special because the "they" is now "we." Mexicans -- both recent arrivals and those with generations of family history in "el norte" -- are, along with immigrants from Central America, becoming our new majority.   These children are the children in our schools, the coming face of the nation beyond this southwest region.

Indeed, we have much to celebrate -- and much to learn.

One cause for celebration:  finally, finally some dual language Spanish-English schools in Texas. Embarrassingly late, rarely fully funded, but immediately in high demand.

Another cause for celebration:  the always informative, insightful and unabashedly challenging blog by my colleague Professor Angela Valenzuela at the University of Texas-Austin.   A reliable and timely source for policy analysis (and monitoring of the Texas legislature), and today offering a story that explains what Cinco de Mayo is and is not, along with a creative celebration of the day by a group in Arizona.

Cinco de Mayo captures in one day the ambiguities and legacies of colonization, making us ask who is being colonized today? And who (and what) are the colonizers?   Here is one story, one answer:

"Now we make you ugly, my mother said...In the mirror I watched her move the piece of charcoal across my face.  It's a nasty life, she whispered. 
It's my first memory. She held an old cracked mirror to my face.  I must have been about five years old. The crack made my face look as if it had been broken into two pieces.  The best thing you can be in Mexico is an ugly girl."

With this powerful image, novelist Jennifer Clement introduces us to the lives of girls and women in rural Mexico, tenacious in their dreams, fierce in their mutual protection, and caught in the cross-border violence of US demand and Mexico's drug cartel supply chain.   The minute I finished reading Prayers for the Stolen, I read passages a second time to hear again the voices of the girls in the Guerrero region of Mexico.  (I won't give away the name of the narrator, which completely unexpectedly evokes the British royals.)   I added it to my course syllabus and bought copies to give away.

A poetic account of courage, fear, resilience, absurdity, and hope,  and a portrait of the long shadow of colonization that carries into the lives of the youth who are our neighbors, not across an international border, but down the street and in our classrooms.

I heartily recommend you rush out to your nearest independent bookstore and grab a copy of Prayers for the Stolen -- and let me know if it raised your hopes, made you angry,  and maybe sparked your imagination for ways we can take down those border walls, celebrate a shared history and imagine a more just future.