Yes, no or ‘huh?’ in talk of critical race theory: One O.C. school district finds concept tough to define

Read here about the current Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District  battle over Critical Race Theory taking place right now. I appreciate most in this piece Dr. Theresa Montaño's comments:

Theresa Montaño, a professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at Cal State Northridge who helped craft an early draft of the state’s ethnic studies curriculum, was not surprised to hear that officials couldn’t settle on a definition of critical race theory. School boards looking to ban the concept are often “responding to a body politic that’s attacking critical race theory, but they have no knowledge of what it is,” she said. “Bans have become a means to “attack some of the civil rights gains like ethnic studies, like anti-racist education.”

“You have to look at the underlying messaging and underlying concepts that [these boards] are really trying to negotiate,” Montaño said.

The underlying message is let's NOT talk about race despite the fact that one can't teach history or Ethnic Studies without addressing race. A constructive conversation that they don't want to have is how best to teach these truths.

Clearly, Ethnic Studies teachers in Ethnic Studies classrooms are among those best equipped to do so. In my many years of teaching Mexican American Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and Critical Race Theory, the overwhelming response is "Why didn't I learn this earlier?" "Why do I have to wait 'til college to learn this?" I have heard high school students who have taken Ethnic Studies in high school ask the exact same thing.

Despite themselves obviously never having taken an Ethnic Studies course, these folks don't want to have a constructive conversation. And they're deaf to critical comments like those expressed about being denied the opportunity to learn the truths of American history. It's particularly troubling to hear educated people saying that they do not want to learn or be educated on such matters.

They seek instead to preempt vital conversations that will actually clear the air by naming the elephant in the living room that the recent racial justice movement laid bare. Beyond the importance of naming the elephant, courses like these equip all our youth with the language, concepts, and frameworks that they need to have if they are to navigate well life's complexities that inescapably attach to the viability of a multiethnic, multiracial democracy.

As I have noted throughout this blog [search "Ethnic Studies"], ample evidence further supports the positive benefits of Ethnic Studies to all the outcomes we say we care about in education, namely, grades, attendance, high school completion, and the decision to go to college.

How does this happen? Information fosters both awareness and insight. Awareness and insight reach beyond what we already know so that we might reach new horizons intellectually and spiritually—and in so doing, becoming a better, more self-aware, and more compassionate human being.

Shouldn't we all want that?

I know that I do. There are no shortcuts here. Under any name, we should collectively espouse a curriculum that helps our youth to survive and thrive. Thanks to Jorge Haynes for sharing this piece with me.

-Angela Valenzuela

Yes, no or ‘huh?’ in talk of critical race theory

One O.C. school district finds concept tough to define

By Hayley Smith | L.A. Times | November 24, 2021

Inside a wood-clad meeting room in Orange County, five school board members sat before a sign-waving, opinionated crowd. For more than three hours, the trustees listened, debated and asked questions as they tried to decide whether to ban classroom teaching on a hard-to-define topic not taught in their schools: critical race theory.

The board members of the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District had even turned to the trusted pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica, copying the entry for critical race theory into a public resolution that could become the legal policy of the district.

“I don’t think that this definition is really good,” trustee Marilyn Anderson said after reading the dense entry. “I think it needs to be really specific. It needs to spell out the specific theories that we do not want taught in our district — like that the United States is fundamentally or systemically racist.”

At the end of a long night, the board postponed the vote. But what emerged during their session revealed far more than angst over a “yes” or “no” vote on whether to ban critical race theory. Their meeting offered an up-close look at how an advanced academic concept has been transformed into a politicized slogan framing uncomfortable discussions about how to teach race, racism and equity in schools — and how the quest to define it inside a suburban school board meeting can be a minefield.

Critical race theory is a university- level academic lens for examining how racial inequality and racism are historically embedded in legal systems, policies and institutions in America and is not generally taught in K-12 schools. Yet Republicans have seized on it as a wedge issue painting white people as racist oppressors and people of color as the oppressed. Democrats largely see the conservative drive against critical race theory as racist dog-whistle politics that polarizes broader discussions about reckoning with America’s past.

Against this backdrop, school board members and parents in suburban Placentia-Yorba Linda are trying to figure it all out for their kids.

Although ultimately designed to ban critical race theory, the district’s 14-point resolution was touted as a way to foster a “safe and respectful environment for students.” It said the district “stands by the commitment to teach a complete and accurate account of history while also supporting the cultural integrity of students.”

“Critical Race Theory” Is White History by Kali Holloway

The line in this piece by Kali Holloway in The Nation gets to the heart of the matter: 

"The teaching of history, when grounded in truth, isn’t anti-anything. Instead, it’s a careful consideration of historical facts." 

And this careful consideration of historical facts is what our governor and Republican-led legislature don't want our children and youth to know. And in not wanting our youth to know, the underlying message is that they actually want racism and white supremacy to be "our heritage."

It is in this same vein that Holloway expresses that a slowing in the telling of the truth of history is the primary aim of the anti-CRT movement. At least there's some clarity here. 

Try as they may to slow down the telling of these truths of history, the genie is out of the bottle. Try as they may, they put it back in the bottle. They can't unring the bell of this racial reckoning. And we're all the better for it.

-Angela Valenzuela

“Critical Race Theory” Is White History

Conservatives are rebranding an inclusive, honest 

accounting of American history as inherently anti-white.

By Kali Holloway

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

For more than a year now, conservatives have been waging war against the misdefined conception of critical race theory that they themselves created. The right-wing campaign against so-called CRT largely amounts to a round-robin chorus of hysterical voices asking, Won’t someone think of the poor white children?! “CRT tries to make kids feel bad because of the color of their skin,” Representative Ron Nate, cosponsor of Idaho’s anti-CRT law, stated just after the bill passed in May. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who successfully led the state school board to ban CRT from public school classrooms last summer, tweeted in June that “Critical Race Theory teaches kids to hate our country and to hate each other.” Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a bill muzzling history educators over lessons that might make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of the individual’s race or sex.” 

In pursuit of that goal, Republican senators in Texas recently drafted and approved yet another anti-CRT bill—after ditching language inserted by outnumbered and outvoted Democrats that would have required teaching “the history of white supremacy,” including slavery and the Ku Klux Klan, “and the ways in which it is morally wrong.” “We don’t want to teach those little white children that they should feel guilty because of what previous white people did generations ago,” Senator Bryan Hughes explained to a local news outlet about why he filed the bill.

Eight states have passed laws and 20 more have proposed legislation to outlaw a version of critical race theory that’s wholly of conservatives’ own imagining. In reality, the 40-year-old graduate school framework provides a prism on racism as “a structured reality that’s embedded in institutions,” as law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw described it in an interview with this magazine. But those behind the current anti-anti-racist movement in education have publicly admitted to repurposing CRT to “turn it toxic,” as conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo put it, branding it as anti-white propaganda. The legislative offspring of that misinformation movement is a slew of laws seeking to limit how history is taught. In Tennessee, just after the state legislature approved an anti-CRT measure, a teacher who assigned an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the intersection of racism and Trumpism was fired; in Texas, a Republican lawmaker is currently circulating a list of 850 books on race and other topics he says violate the new anti-CRT law.

What’s become abundantly apparent in watching the CRT social panic unfold is how its adherents steadfastly believe and propagate the idea that a full accounting of history—one that includes long-ignored perspectives and experiences and, consequently, locates the contradictions between American delusions of exceptionalism and the country’s grievous reality of brutal exploitation—is somehow historically inauthentic or a kind of frivolous add-on to the textbook narratives of white benevolence and heroism. In addition to pretending they’re saving white children, conservatives have also issued breathless accusations of national betrayal, variously casting CRT as “anti-American,” “a crusade against American history,” “racist pedagogy and anti-American revisionism,” and—wait for it—“Marxist.” The idea undergirding all this is that an inclusive American history is a specifically Black history. Listen to the throngs of angry white parents at school board meetings and it becomes clear that they believe history is a zero-sum game—that a history that documents Black American existence undermines and erases white American history. Like Blackness itself, these folks see Black history as somehow both insufficiently American and inherently anti-white.

But the history of Black folks in America—through slavery, Black codes, lynchings, redlining, voter disenfranchisement, Jim Crow, racial pogroms, illegal medical experimentation, extrajudicial and state-led theft of Black land, anti-Black policing, racist mass incarceration—is white American history, too. Not only were white people present as that history was being made, they architected the astoundingly sturdy systems of oppression that have organized Black/white social, legal, economic, and power differentials since America’s settler-colonial founding.

This notion that good history should be teased out from bad is a sign of just how poorly history has always been taught in this country. This isn’t even the first time white conservatives and their allies have waged violent protest against truth-telling in history, from the campaign to ensure the dominance of the ahistorical Lost Cause narrative, which saw literal textbook history revised to promote a false narrative of white magnanimity, to the massive resistance strategy of aggressive white opposition to school desegregation. If conservatives didn’t spend so much time zealously defending their version of the past, they would know that.

The teaching of history, when grounded in truth, isn’t anti-anything. Instead, it’s a careful consideration of historical facts. There’s no way to get around the reality that Black chattel slavery built America’s elite colleges, that the state largely sanctioned anti-Black pogroms committed by white mobs, that many of our most prized national landmarks sit atop bulldozed Black communities, that our white supremacist racial order provided well-documented inspiration to a rising German political star named Adolf Hitler. Another reason this backtracking effort is futile is that this history defines our present. Ruby Bridges, the tiny 6-year-old Black girl who had to be escorted by US deputy marshals into a New Orleans school to keep her safe from frothing white anti-integration mobs, is only 67 years old today. It’s hard not to suspect that a significant number of white folks gnashing their teeth over the teaching of our horrific racial history played an integral part in making it.

Condoleezza Rice, a childhood friend of one of the four little Black girls murdered in the 1963 white terrorist bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church—who should therefore know better—recently denied there is a current effort to suppress history and aired concerns that “how we teach history” threatens to “make white kids feel bad for being white.” It sounded like she was trying to assuage white fears. But that’s nonsense. In truth, white people are finally learning their own history. And in a nation where the majority of public school children today are non-white, opponents can slow progress on telling the truth. But history will prove they were unable to stop it.

Kali HollowayKali Holloway is a columnist for The Nation and the director of the Make It Right Project, a new national campaign to take down Confederate monuments and tell the truth about history. Her writing has appeared in Salon, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Time, AlterNet, Truthdig, The Huffington Post, The National Memo, Jezebel, Raw Story, and numerous other outlets.

"The people claiming to be ‘freethinkers’ in the pandemic might actually be sheep," By Dominic J. Packer & Jay J. Van Bavel

Here is a piece to chew on. In captures a paradoxical feature of North American identity, namely, that "individualistic norms can create a 'herd of independent minds.'” What mediates this tension between the individual and the herd is the following: Inasmuch as so-called individualism leads to a nation of specialized roles, we become more—not less—dependent on one another. 

The pandemic should have served as a reminder of just how dependent we are on each other, translating into actions that support the well-being  of the whole. Countries that have gone down this path have fared better in terms of COVID infection rates and deaths. Those that have not, like the U.S., have paid a high price for the illusion of independence that is itself a manifestation of conformity. It's helpful to see how research supports this.

-Angela Valenzuela

Op-Ed: The people claiming to be ‘freethinkers’ in the pandemic might actually be sheep

A demonstrator at a protest against vaccine and mask mandates near the state Capitol in Santa Fe, N.M., on Aug. 20. Social researchers find that American individualism is just another norm determined by the group.

(Cedar Attanasio / Associated Press)

BY DOMINIC J. PACKER & JAY J. VAN BAVEL | Nov. 15, 2021 | Los angeles times

Now two years into the pandemic, we continue to hear constant fights about the fundamental antagonism between being an independent individual and being a good group member. You must be either a “freethinker” or a “sheep”!

But research suggests this is not the case and that the two often go hand in hand. Indeed, individualism may be the ultimate form of American conformity.

Individualism is a core part of American identity, with individual rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. This contrasts sharply with the collectivism expressed in other parts of the world, where the needs of the group are often prioritized over individual rights.

Yet even in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville in “Democracy in America” noted an apparent paradox in the American way of life: an unprecedented individualism was combined with mass involvement in “voluntary associations.” Far more than citizens in his native France, Americans were joiners, belonging to “associations of a thousand … kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.”

As we found in our research, the groups we identify with, including our nation, shape our understanding of what it is to be a person. The ways in which we strive to be an independent self are influenced by the norms of the groups we care about. Over time, these values fundamentally become part of who we are. As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has said, “In constructing an identity, one draws, among other things, on the kind of person available in one’s society.”

American identity has strong norms of independence, emphasizing personal autonomy, responsibility and individual rights. Does this mean that American individualism is just another norm determined by the group?

Research suggests that indeed it is. In one study, for example, social psychologist Jolanda Jetten and her colleagues measured how much American and Indonesian citizens identified with their respective countries. Respondents were asked, for example, how glad they were to be an American or Indonesian and how connected they felt to their fellow citizens. The researchers then assessed these citizens’ levels of individualism by asking them how much they agreed with statements like, “One should be independent of others as much as possible” or “When faced with a difficult personal decision, it is better to decide yourself rather than follow the advice of friends or relatives.”

American citizens were more individualistic than Indonesians, which aligns with a large body of research on cultural differences. Crucially, Americans who were strongly identified with their country reported higher levels of individualism than Americans who identified less. It was the opposite in Indonesia, where citizens who identified strongly with the nation were less individualistic than those who were weakly identified.

In other words, it was identification with their nation — intersecting 

with the nation’s social norms — that determined individualism.

This study is entirely consistent with what social scientists and commentators have long noted about a paradox in American identity. In the memorable phrasing of art critic Harold Rosenberg, individualistic norms can create a “herd of independent minds” — people who strive for independence are often doing it to fit in.

It also turns out that autonomy and interdependence are highly intertwined. A study of 42 nations (as well as comparisons across the 50 U.S. states) found that in places where people are more individualistic, they also become more dependent on others.

This counterintuitive pattern might appear surprising. But it occurs because the more individualized and specialized our roles, the more dependent we become on other people to function effectively.

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a stark reminder of just how interdependent we all are. Our individual vulnerability to COVID-19 is highly dependent on the actions of the people around us and, with the rise of variants, responses around the world. As we noted in an April 2020 study, fighting a pandemic requires large-scale cooperation — which means having people get vaccinated, wear masks and take other precautions to protect their communities.

A major problem with public health communication during this pandemic has been the failure to dispel the false choice between personal freedom and collective well-being. New Zealand, for instance, found that the populace acting collectively to mitigate the virus early on has actually allowed far more freedom overall during the pandemic.

Evidence suggests that countries with norms that place greater value on independence, like the U.S., (what the social psychologist Michele Gelfand calls “loose cultures”) have had a harder time coordinating their citizenry and slowing the spread of the virus, ultimately suffering higher rates of infection and mortality. Yet the autonomy people believe they are proving by refusing to conform to health protective behaviors is largely an illusion, itself a type of conformity.

Independence and interdependence are not antagonistic, and we need to exercise both at the same time. It is our collective strength that allows for our individuality to flourish. There’s no clearer example of this fact than what we’re living through now.

Dominic J. Packer is a professor of psychology at Lehigh University and Jay Van Bavel is an associate professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. They are authors of “The Power of Us: Harnessing our shared identities to improve performance, increase cooperation, and promote social harmony.”

Fight the School Culture Wars by Embracing Parents [and Supporting Ethnic Studies]

This piece provides good food for thought. I agree with BloombergQuint columnist, Andrea Gabor, that McAuliffe sent the terribly wrong message that "parents shouldn’t be "telling schools what they should teach.'” Such a terrible message to send in a democracy. We all pay the taxes that fund our schools. We all have a voice. I also agree that parents, school districts, and school boards shouldn't take the bait by people who enter these spaces with the intention of polarizing and weaponizing discourse.

As mentioned herein,  school-family partnerships and partnerships with community-based organizations, in general, can provide excellent vehicles through which to address parents' concerns.

Regrettably, Gabor fails to mention that parents, educators, and community are indeed speaking up throughout the country and they are advocating for Ethnic Studies curricula so as to be more culturally inclusive of children's lived experiences, cultures, and identities. Why is it so hard even for liberals to vocalize this, much less lend their support?

Ethnic Studies is a positive agenda that liberals themselves need to understand so that they can more effectively "talk back" to what really is a contrived agenda that seeks to limit the teaching of the truths of history. 

If we can't name racism, classism, sexism, ableism, or homophobia or their intersectionalities, we'll not only shut down honest conversations and explorations in what it means to be human, we'll be forever condemned to our toxic, polarizing thoughts and emotions. And what a massive disability for our youth, all of whom must be prepared to navigate a multiracial democracy in an increasingly complex, highly diverse, and yes—polarized, world.

-Angela Valenzuela

Fight the School Culture Wars by Embracing Parents 

Andrea Gabor 06:30 PM IST, 13 Nov 2021 01:10 AM IST, 13 Nov 2021

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- When Republican Glenn Youngkin won the gubernatorial election last week in Virginia, the first statewide GOP victory there in more than a decade, it was widely seen as vindication of a political strategy to weaponize the school-board culture wars. In truth, the school-board warriors around the U.S. weren’t as successful as some high-profile Democratic defeats suggest. Even in red states like Missouri and Wisconsin, many candidates who advocated bans on mask mandates and the supposed teaching of what culture warriors tendentiously call “critical race theory” were defeated.

But there’s no denying that Virginia parents were angry at Democrats. That was partly because a former Democratic governor had rebuffed their demands to reopen schools during the pandemic, even as children from neighboring Maryland, and even New York City, returned to classrooms with little ill effect.

Most galling of all, though, was the incendiary and misguided statement by the eventual losing Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe,  that parents shouldn’t be “telling schools what they should teach.”

To suggest that parents have no place in school decision-making is to deny the fundamental role of public schools as places for the teaching and practice of democratic values. Schools should want more parental involvement, not less, a matter of equal concern on both sides of the cultural divide. For example, in New Orleans, the nation’s first all-charter-school city, where charter organizations ba

To suggest that parents have no place in school decision-making is to deny the fundamental role of public schools as places for the teaching and practice of democratic values. Schools should want more parental involvement, not less, a matter of equal concern on both sides of the cultural divide. For example, in New Orleans, the nation’s first all-charter-school city, where charter organizations backed by Democrats and Republicans sought to marginalize parent and community engagement in schools, the backlash has been fierce.

Read more at: https://www.bloombergquint.com/gadfly/culture-war-in-the-schools-fight-back-by-embracing-parents
Copyright © BloombergQuint

How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education by Nancy MacLean

People need to know the history of "school choice" rhetoric and policy agendas as linked to white supremacist designs to maintain segregation in the South and neoliberal designs to de-democratize public education via privatization and corporatization schemes. 

These histories are important not just to our understanding of the past, but to ongoing school privatization agendas that are currently at play in our state and nation. If you've not read Nancy MacLean's book, Democracy in Chains, I encourage you to do so. It's a chilling read that examines the history of the neoliberal agenda. It should serve as a wake-up call to this anti-democratic agenda.

Relatedly, check out these additional pertinent posts the first of which is about MacLean's book:

• The Corporate Plan to Groom U.S. Kids for Servitude by Wiping Out Public Schools
• What Is the Far Right’s Endgame? A Society That Suppresses the Majority

-Angela Valenzuela

How Milton Friedman Exploited White Supremacy to Privatize Education

“School choice” aimed to block the choice of equal, integrated education for Black families

This paper traces the origins of today’s campaigns for school vouchers and other modes of public funding for private education to efforts by Milton Friedman beginning in 1955. It reveals that the endgame of the “school choice” enterprise for libertarians was not then— and is not now—to enhance education for all children; it was a strategy, ultimately, to offload the full cost of schooling onto parents as part of a larger quest to privatize public services and resources. Based on extensive original archival research, this paper shows how Friedman’s case for vouchers to promote “educational freedom” buttressed the case of Southern advocates of the policy of massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education. His approach—supported by many other Mont Pelerin Society members and leading libertarians of the day —taught white supremacists a more sophisticated, and for more than a decade, court-proof way to preserve Jim Crow. All they had to do was cease overt focus on race and instead deploy a neoliberal language of personal liberty, government failure and the need for market competition in the provision of public education.

Download paper here.

A Personal Message on Why I Blog and a Word of Thanks by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

A Personal Message on Why I Blog and a Word of Thanks

by

 Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

November 10, 2021

This blog passed the two-million-page-views mark sometime over the weekend. I take this to mean that I am providing an important service that clearly, the public wants and appreciates. I want to thank all of you who follow this blog for your interest in what is today a respectable digital archive on issues that I have followed over the years, including high-stakes testing, civil and human rights, voting rights, Ethnic Studies, Indigeneity, bilingual education, and an array of social, cultural, and environmental issues that get my attention.

Prior to running this blog, I had a listserv for seven years. A former colleague, Dr. Susan Empson, who teaches now at the University of Missouri said to me one day in 2003, "You should consider having a blog." Back then, the Cloud didn't exist and was thusly always in need of space to house items that I had been gathering over the many years of operating the listserv. A blog was the solution. Here is a brief history on blogging that situates this blog in the early period of "Mommy blogs" and live blogging just before YouTube got launched. Can we even imagine a world without either Youtube or the Internet?

Pardon the cliché, but I sensed this as a "brave new world." 

What did it mean for someone like myself, a university professor, to blog? There's something curiously safe when producing knowledge for narrow audiences. It's yet another to "put yourself out there" for the world to see.  Moreover, I wasn't sure at the time how it would impact my career, especially since I didn't progress to full professor until a year later in 2005. 

Might I jeopardize my chances for promotion to full professor status? I asked myself. After blogging for a few years, I remember a former university provost friending me on Twitter  (where all my blogs get posted) four months prior to his taking the position. He couldn't have known me from Adam. Was I on some list? I suppose so. I ran into him months later and he said, "I follow you," in a friendly voice. "I follow you, too," I said, exchanging smiles.

There were clearly some bumps in the road but all in all, my blogging experience has been very positive. I do encourage those around me like students and fellow faculty to set up their own blogs and cultivate their own public voices. After all, as we know now, independent authoritative voices contribute to the maintenance and deepening of our democracy. We all not only want good information and knowledge, we also want it to come from a studied standpoint and a trustworthy place. Moreover, authenticity in the blogosphere, I have learned, is gold.

So much pulls at everyone's attention such that I have come to see how blogs can occupy a special place in social media by anchoring progressive policy agendas like the important fight today against extremism, the ongoing struggles for Bilingual Education, culturally sustaining curriculum, Ethnic Studies, school finance, and the never-ending fight against not assessment, but high-stakes testing, and other public policy battles at local, state, and national levels.

Still, the question of why I blog, especially in light of my earlier insecurities about my own voice in the public sphere merits further elaboration. 

I remember that what was happening in the early 2000s when the idea of blogging first entered my imagination, the immigrant rights DREAMer Movement of which I was, and have been a part, was in full swing. I witnessed all these young, fearless Millennials using the full measure of their tech-savviness and political astuteness in messaging to push their federal DREAM Act agenda out into the public sphere. 

By any measure, the DREAMers were hugely successful in what we in policy term, "agenda setting." They were brilliant and motivated. They achieved national and international notoriety, resulting in the Federal DREAM Act. And that's a big deal.

They motivated and inspired me to similarly be courageous. After all, I am privileged to be a researcher and scholar at the University of Texas and relative to these students and the many risks they took and continue to take, I had little to lose and much to gain. 

I owe it to people like Montserrat and her sister, Julieta Garibay, and all the DREAMers I've come across over the years who are a testament to what can get accomplished if we get in front of an issue as opposed to cowering behind it. So, I ventured forth and here you have it, a 17-year-old blog. 

I owe so much, as well, to my undergraduate, masters and doctoral students over the years, whose energies and passions have nourished within me an ongoing sense of renewal. My family, too, had their own questions about all this in the early years and thankfully, have supported my incessant blogging throughout.

In Greek, my name means "messenger." It certainly aligns. It's that pull, and occasional yank. It's that push, if not an impulse, that whisper in the ear, that impels thought and action. What also aligns is that today, 16 years ago, my beautiful mother and best friend passed away. I love you, Mom! ❤️

For those of you who would like to know a little bit more about me, I share below a bio, versions of which I make available when asked. Again, thank you for your interest in this blog and in our collective struggle for justice and a better world that simultaneously harnesses Earth's power to heal herself and affirms the notion of a shared humanity.

-Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

#UndocumentedAndUnafraid

***

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Biography

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the director of the Texas Center for Education Policy. Previously,  she taught in the Department of Sociology at Rice University in Houston (1990-98), and she was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston (1998-99). She completed her Ph.D. at Stanford University and is the author of the award-winning book, Subtractive Schooling: U.S.-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring (1999), as well as Leaving Children Behind:  How “Texas-style” Accountability Fails Latino Youth (2005), and Growing Critically Conscious Teachers: A Social Justice Curriculum for Educators of Latino/a Youth (2016). 

Dr. Valenzuela served as an expert witness on curriculum in Arce, et. al. v. Douglas,793 F. 3rd 968 (2015) where Mexican American Studies plaintiffs prevailed and the dismantling of Tucson Unified School District’s MAS program was found unconstitutional both in enactment and enforcement by Judge A. Wallace Tashima. 269 F. Supp. 948 (D. Ariz. 2017), citing violations to the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the First Amendment.

Locally, Dr. Valenzuela co-founded Academia Cuauhtli, a language and cultural revitalization project that is currently in its eighth year of operation. This work has involved the development of a professional, Spanish and English, culturally sustaining curriculum and pedagogy for fourth- and fifth-graders attending eight East Austin schools. We host  professional development workshops for Austin Independent School District dual language/bilingual education teachers. Over the years, we have enjoyed the service of hundreds of volunteers, including graduate students and faculty from the University of Texas at Austin, Texas State University and Houston-Tillotson University. A special feature is a danza Mexica (Aztec dance or ceremonial) curriculum that inspires our youth even as it invokes a deep, joyous sense of the sacred in education.

Currently, Dr. Valenzuela co-chairs with Dr. Theresa Montaño the LULAC National Higher Education Committee and is the Executive Director of the National Latina/o Education Research and Policy Project (NLERAPP), a consortium of ten member institutions that enhances teaching for high school youth in Texas, California, Wisconsin, Chicago, New York, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. She also founded and operates an education blog titled, Educational Equity, Politics, and Policy in Texas.

A previous Fulbright Scholar, Valenzuela spent her 2007-08 academic year in Mexico where she taught in the College of Law at the University of Guanajuato in Guanajuato, Guanajuato and conducted research in the areas of immigration, human rights, and binational relations. Most recently, she was honored to have been selected to be a scholar in residence in the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In 2019, she received the Henry H. Trueba Award for Research Leading to the Transformation of the Social Contexts of Education from the American Educational Research Association. 

In 2020, she was winner of the 2021 Elizabeth G. Cohen Distinguished Career in Applied Sociology of Education Award. This award is presented every other year by the Sociology of Education special interest group of the American Educational Research Association "in recognition of a research career that is an exemplar of how to successfully bring rigorous research to bear on solutions to problems in practical settings." 

Dr. Valenzuela is particularly proud of recent recognition in the community, including earning the La Campana Award by the Mexican American School Board Association, as well as the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center in Austin, Texas. This week of November 10-12, Dr. Valenzuela also celebrates getting inducted into the 2021 cohort of the National Academy of Education. 

Valenzuela's research and teaching interests are in the sociology of education, minority youth in schools, urban education reform, culturally relevant curriculum, Ethnic Studies, and Indigenous education, as well as educational policy studies and analysis. 

You can find many of my published articles in Google Scholar, Academia.edu, and ResearchGate.net

Twitter: @vlnzl

It is demonstrably problematic for Senate Bill 3 to supersede House Bill 3979 in Texas. Whereas the latter applied to the social studies curriculum that focused on "hard patriotism," Senate Bill 3 applies to the entire K-12 curriculum. The other issue is with respect to Rep. Michael Krause's textbook inquiry that focuses not on state-level textbook adoption processes, but on local decision-making that is appropriately in the hands of local school boards and teachers with such selections based to some extent on context and interests organic to those communities.

This violates republican notions of "big government" and the principle of local control. That said, we do appear at this moment to be at least going down the path of self-censorship which may be the chief aim of such requests. It all still has to play out. If there's any silver lining, it's the reading list that should give us all good ideas for good reading.

-Angela Valenzuela

Will Texas repeat a McCarthy-like investigation into what students read in schools?

A 1962 House Committee delved into textbooks until rancorous hearings upended their process.

“Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson, “New Kid” by Jerry Craft, “Perfect on Paper” by Sophie Gonzales, “This Book Is Anti-Racist” by Tiffany Jewell and “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates photographed on Friday, Nov. 5, 2021, at the Morning News studio in Dallas. (Juan Figueroa/The Dallas Morning News)(Juan Figueroa / Staff Photographer)

Heightened scrutiny over how schools teach history -- and whether it was patriotic enough or indoctrinating kids -- spurred the Texas lawmakers to investigate.

Five House members were charged with studying the state’s textbooks with the desire that they emphasized the “glowing and throbbing history of hearts and souls inspired by wonderful American principles and traditions.”

The year was 1962.

Now new fears about censorship in Texas classrooms have reignited as a state lawmaker opened an investigation into districts that carry any of the hundreds of books he’s listed that largely deal with race, gender identity or sexuality.

But even six decades ago, at the height of schoolhouse scrutiny, a former House member charged with investigating textbooks cautioned against state overreach.

“When the time comes when the State Legislature dictates selection of library books in our local school districts, a serious blow will have been dealt to freedom and democracy,” Rep. Ronald E. Roberts, D-Hillsboro, wrote then.

Roberts served at a time when the textbook approval process was mired in controversy and protests against specific sections of books were frequent. Some feared Texas’ textbooks were obscenity-filled or designed to subvert America’s youth.

This was just a few years after Sen. Joseph McCarthy famously held investigations into Communism’s influence on the media and federal government.

Texas’ House Textbook Investigating Committee held hearings across the state, which were suddenly halted after they became so rancorous and the lawmakers received threats.

The legislators couldn’t agree on any conclusion. Each eventually submitted their own individual reports to the Legislature in a move that reflected the heightened discord over what students should learn in school.

Now recent maneuvers at the Texas Capitol to investigate books and curriculum echo this era, historians and educators say. Lawmakers spent months on anti-critical race theory bills that restricted how teachers discuss racism and current events in the classroom or promoted “patriotic education.”

And in late October, Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth, launched an investigation into whether schools have purchased or stocked any of the more than 800 books he’s identified. He also asked schools to identify any content or curriculum that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress” because of their race or sex.

Krause has declined to comment on how he chose the books on his 16-page list, which districts are under investigation or on any possible repercussions for schools that admit to carrying such texts.

In a recent radio interview, Krause said the list of books was not exhaustive and noted that even if a book is on the list, it may not mean it is “problematic.” It could mean that it has some content that may be touched by new laws passed by the Legislature, he added.

But educators see the Fort Worth Republican’s investigation as “akin to the Red Scare, but this time with scurrilous accusations against our teachers and librarians,” said Zeph Capo, the president of the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, in a statement.

Fighting communism, glorifying American history

Texas lawmakers continued to worry about eliminating communist themes from the classroom and bolstering the teaching of American history well into the late 20th century.

During the late 1940s, the State Board of Education unanimously voted to hold up the distribution of a geography textbook until the publisher took out sections that seemed to glorify Russia.

SBOE member Vernon Singleton cautioned at the time that one of the chief dangers was the loss of faith in democracy because of writings that teach “our nation’s accomplishments are insignificant, our heroes were selfish, that strong centralized government is more important than the opportunities for personal freedom and initiative.”

Such fears appeared to fuel a 1961 resolution where lawmakers declared the need for textbooks to teach the traditions and philosophy of America “to inspire young people to revere our fundamental principles of this greatest Country in all the world.”

The front page of The Dallas Morning News on March 3, 1962 shows the growing strive over Texas' textbook selection process.(Emily Donaldson)

When the five-member committee was appointed to study content in textbooks and began holding hearings, lawmakers recognized the complex nature of the committee’s task from the start.

“I felt that, in the wrong or fearful hands, this committee could become an instrument to undermine the confidence of the people of Texas in our public schools,” Rep. John C. Alaniz, D-San Antonio, wrote in his final report.

When the committee started hosting hearings in January 1962, meetings were dominated by “the ultra-right and the John Birchers,” and educators were largely absent, Alaniz wrote. The John Birch Society was founded during the time of the Cold War as a far-right group that fought against signs of communism in American society.

Testifiers complained that books mentioning the United Nations were “communistic or socialistic” and texts that “failed to mention or glorify our early American heroes” were part of a communist plot, Alaniz wrote.

Many of those commenting appeared not to have read the textbooks they discussed, he observed.

In his own final report, Rep. Nelson Cowles, D-Hallsville, wrote that American history textbooks showed a pattern of portraying America’s flaws and failures.

“A history book which fails to create a feeling of pride in our nation and a love of country, should not be adopted for use in our public schools,” Cowles wrote. “Every textbook used in our schools should be prejudiced and biased in favor of individual freedom, freedom of enterprise and our Republican form of government.”

Eventually, each of the five committee members submitted their own recommendations about how the textbook approval process should change and what flaws existed with the stock of available texts.

Today, the primary power to approve textbooks remains with the elected State Board of Education. And the SBOE itself has often been the source of intense debates over political hot-button issues such as evolution, sexual education and ethnic studies.

More local than before

How far lawmakers should weigh into local matters has long been at issue.

Over the summer, a Leander ISD mother asked Texas legislators to add teeth to legislation that sought to restrict how teachers talk about race and current events. She said she didn’t trust local school boards to enforce the anti-critical race theory law.

A December 21, 1962 Dallas Morning News article shows the decision of lawmakers on a House textbook investigating committee to submit their own individual reports to the Legislature, rather than submit one common report.(Emily Donaldson)

Diane Birdwell, a Dallas history teacher, testified against the bill in Austin and found the mother’s testimony troubling.

“That is McCarthyism, pure and simple,” Birdwell told lawmakers. “That should send a shiver to any conservative who believes in local control, who believes in holding back government overreach, who believes in the power of educators that they all say they respect.”

Now while Krause’s inquiry reminds scholars of the 1962 investigation, it is distinct in that it narrowly focuses on local decisions, the texts that local school boards, campuses and teachers have a hand in picking. The 1962 committee’s work centered more broadly on textbooks, which have state oversight.

Historian Jeremi Suri, a professor in the University of Texas at Austin’s history department and at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, has found the recent statewide interest in classroom matters out of line with most of Texas history.

In general, most Texans don’t want state lawmakers delving into local school affairs, Suri said.

“This is a member of the state Legislature from Fort Worth, who seems to think that the Legislature should tell people across the state what they should read and what they shouldn’t read,” Suri said. “I can’t think of anything that’s more un-Texas.”

Texas parents or organizations have previously confronted school boards with concerns over individual books, but those were dealt with at the local level, Suri said.

Evaluating classroom books is not a simple or straightforward task, so determining their place in a district should be done community by community, educators say.

Many of the books on Krause’s list are novels or literature that don’t necessarily deal with hard facts or truth the same way that historical textbooks do, said Jonna Perrillo, an associate professor of English Education at the University of Texas at El Paso.

“You can’t really say whether novels are factual or not,” Perrillo noted, giving the example of the current debate over the novel “Beloved” by Toni Morrison.

The novel is set after the Civil War and recounts the story of a family of former slaves. While it deals with historical events, it is not about chronicling the past. Rather, it’s about what those events and characters mean to readers, which is much harder for any one person -- or lawmaker -- to define, she said.

“So much of this debate has been focused on history and hard patriotism curriculum, and I think English teachers have been waiting on this,” Perrillo said. Krause’s investigation and Texas’ new law restricting classroom discussion in all subject areas are “putting a whole other sort of classrooms and teachers at risk and under the spotlight.”

Digital archivist Spencer Bevis contributed to this story.

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