What If Black People Had a 'Green Book' for Finding the Schools Our Kids Deserve? by Carrie Sampson, Ph.D.

Friends,

My Arizona colleague, Dr. Carrie Sampson wrote this cogent piece that not only informs the reader of this historical Green Book published in 1966 and 1967 that allowed Black people to travel safely. You can learn about this from a Smithsonian website titled, "How the Green Book Helped African-American Tourists Navigate a Segregated Nation." There is also a 2020 PBS documentary of this history titled, Driving While Black: Race, Space, and Mobility, streaming for free on PBS.

Hence, Dr. Sampson's phrase, "Green Book-worthy" that she applies to what should be safe schools for Black—and I would add, Brown, children. Such schools are deeply committed to educational excellence for Black and Brown children and youth. And they are deeply committed to "anti-racist practices that affirm the inherent worth of Black children." Expressed differently, parents shouldn't have to pick between high-performing schools and culturally-affirming, diverse and inclusive anti-racist education. What conservatives really need to understand is this isn't about indoctrination or political correctness, this is about safety and truly caring for children.

Here is where "reformers" who think that some combination of charter schools, high-stakes testing—together with the punitive notion that ever more stringent accountability measures will save the day—have it woefully wrong.

How many charter schools are anti-racist, decolonial, and for true inclusion of the historically "othered" children? And does this inclusion apply to special education children and others that might "bring their numbers down?" How many of them are linguistically and pedagogically aligned and appropriate for emergent bilingual children? How many of them are even cognizant of the Indigenous children and languages in their midst and embarked on linguistic and cultural preservation?

I'm not saying that public schools do this enough either. What I am saying is that charter reforms, with a few exceptions, are not reform at all. At best, they re-cast the same colonial, subtractive logics of cultural and linguistic assimilation and Europeanization, particularly through white-washed curricula and mind-numbing tests and curricula that teach toward those tests. N.B. English is a European language. It is not native to "Turtle Island," America's and Central America's original name emanates from the Algonquians and the Iroquois. Moreover, pre-contact America was a model of linguistic diversity (Jaimes, 1992).

I am in full agreement that we need a Green Book, as well as that schools to be Green-Book worthy. I would Though threatening to the status quo, what a wonderful discussion such considerations could entail.

-Angela Valenzuela

Reference

Jaimes, M. A. (Ed.). (1992). The state of Native America: Genocide, colonization, and resistance. South End Press.

Townsend, J. (2016). How the Green Book Helped African-American Tourists Navigate a Segregated Nation. Smithsonian Magazine.

What If Black People Had a 'Green Book' for Finding the Schools Our Kids Deserve?

BY CARRIE SAMPSON, PH.D.

August 2, 2019

Black families should not be forced to choose between schools that challenge them academically and schools that nurture and love them for who they are. Yet, this is the choice so many Black families make every day because very few learning spaces are truly committed to meeting the needs of Black children. 

It is painful to think about the conditions that lead to the creation of The Negro Motorist Green Book. With Blacks regularly facing exclusion, humiliation, and violence on buses and trains, the growth of automobile transport was a welcome liberation. But for Black people, it turned out that "getting your kicks on Route 66" meant getting kicked around and getting kicked out. The Green Book helped “The Negro” traveling by car navigate this issue by sharing safe places "that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trip more enjoyable."

The right to travel is considered a fundamental right. But so is the right to a free and appropriate public education. What if Black families had a guide to tell them which schools would provide them the learning they deserve without getting kicked around and getting kicked out? Until we can send Black children to any school knowing they will learn and thrive, we need an Education Green Book. We know schools that literally beat us down, criminalize our children as early as preschool and have academically failed our kids for decades. Let’s put those aside and ask a more pressing question: where can Black children learn without facing soul-crushing racism?

This is Personal

We were so excited when we found a gem of a school for our young children in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. Arrowhead Montesorri had almost everything a parent could ask for. Beautiful learning spaces. Personalized learning that had our daughter reading at 4 years old. A completely ridiculous outdoor learning environment filled with all sorts of animals and opportunities for project-based learning. 

Like many suburban schools, there was very little diversity. This was not surprising in a city where Blacks make up only 7% of the population. It was surprising, however, for children in this supposedly progressive learning environment to tell our children “I didn’t invite you to my party because we aren’t allowed to have brown people over,” or “that’s why nobody likes brown people” with no accountability or real consequences. 

The supposedly colorblind leadership at Arrowhead Montessori did not have the skills to address this. But sadly, they also lacked the will to address this, ignoring our offer to set up their staff with free training on anti-racist practices after the first incident occurred. To ensure our children will be protected from further unacceptable racist acts, we were forced to pull our children out.  

Education 'Green Book’ Schools

With all of the degrees we have between us, we are utterly clueless when it comes to figuring out how we are supposed to discern the answer to what should be a simple question: where can our children learn and be truly loved at the same time? The truth is, we are in an amazing position of privilege when it comes to answering this question.

Arizona is a 100% open-enrollment state, meaning that we can send our children to any district school we want as long as there is space. Arizona also has the highest number of public charter schools per capita. And we are privileged to have the means to practice the oldest form of school choice by just picking up and moving wherever we want. So, in theory, we have hundreds of options of where to send our children. But there are far fewer options once we consider the two main criteria that ought to make a school Education Green Book-worthy:

• A demonstrated commitment to successfully educating Black children
• A demonstrated commitment to anti-racist practices that affirm the inherent worth of Black children.

To be clear, schools that have mostly Black student populations and mostly Black school and teacher leadership would not automatically be included in an Education Green Book. And schools with mostly White student populations and mostly White school and teacher leadership would not automatically be excluded. 

Whether a school is in a traditional district, a public charter school or a private school would not be decisive either. The deciding questions should be whether this school is truly a place where educators believe in the unlimited learning potential of Black children and whether this school is truly a place with policies and practices that affirm their dignity and inherent self-worth.

As the 1948 printing of the Green Book stated in its introduction, "There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States." We are not there yet; definitely not in education. So, until we can send Black children to any school knowing they will learn and thrive, we need an #EducationGreenBook. Who’s in?

Photo by luismolinero, Adobe Stock-licensed.

Carrie Sampson, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University. Her research focuses on educational leadership, policy and equity from three interrelated perspectives—democracy, community advocacy and politics.

I appreciate University of Massachusetts Amherst, College of Education professor Dr. Warren Blumenfeld's focus on book bans and censorship, while pointing in this piece very appropriate connections to Nazi Germany as well as to our own recent history in Arizona with the banning of the district's Mexican American Studies program in the Tucson Unified School District. This banning similarly also involved the banning of many books, some of which Dr. Blumenfeld lists below. Go to this Banned Books Link to see all of the books banned by the Arizona Department of Education.

I love this pertinent piece by the late Dr. Roberto Cintli Rodriguez titled, Why ban Indigenous philosophies in the classroom? Actual philosophy that is as relevant to our times today as it was to our ancestors is what happens, as well, when we ban books.

Another great read by Dr. Blumenfeld is titled,  "Are We in Higher Education Reverting to the Pitfalls of the Banning Books and Classroom Discussions Movement of K-12?"

I so appreciate the connections that Dr. Blumenfeld makes to higher education that I myself have always referred to as a "slippery slope." By this I mean the importance, as a policy maker or advocate to attend to K-12 issues as these migrate to higher education, as we are all witnessing at this very moment.

If this is something you care about, see today's earlier post about being present to protect literature at the December 13th meeting of the Texas Board of Education.

-Angela Valenzuela

Banning Courses for Political Purposes Violates Students Rights To Learn

 

The bill bans the teaching of Critical Race Theory and other discussions around the topic of the country’s racial history in the schools and diversity and inclusion training in corporations.

January 31, 2023 by Warren Blumenfeld Leave a Comment

 

Under the guise of “freedom” to determine “their children’s” education, though not a new phenomenon, we are seeing some parents, legislators, and school administrators attempting to place severe limits on the teaching of our nation’s past and the legacies of this history upon the lives of people and the functioning of institutions today.

Republican legislators throughout the U.S. have enacted new laws and policies intended to define the narrow parameters of what and how students will discuss our country’s past and our present.

Many of these efforts have attempted to ban Critical Race Theory, even though CRT is not taught in the public school and is generally discussed in selective college and university graduate level courses.

Possibly because the notion of Critical Race Theory is so vague to most conservative voters, then Republican candidate for Virginia’s next Governor, Glenn Youngkin, calling himself the “parents’ rights candidate,” has attempted to instill further fear on the part of the electorate.

Youngkin has raised his racist bullhorn by declaring not only his intent to ban Critical Race Theory the day he was elected, but also to outlaw the reading of the critically acclaimed and award winning novel by author Toni Morrison, Beloved, which was turned into a major feature film.

By his own admission, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has also attempted to prevent residents, schools, and corporations in Florida from becoming actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice) in his rhetoric and his support for the state’s so-called “Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act.”

In addition to demonizing Latinx and black immigrants coming from the U.S. southern border and using their bodies as props to promote himself and his far-right agenda, conservative Republicans in the state legislature, along with the Governor’s absolute backing, passed the act to supposedly provide businesses, employees, children, and families the legal means of opposing alleged “woke indoctrination.”

“DeSantis” in Italian means “of the Saints” or “of the Holy,” but Governor Ron is certainly no saint. The bill bans the teaching of Critical Race Theory and other discussions around the topic of the country’s racial history in the schools and diversity and inclusion training in corporations.

DeSantis announced during his second inaugural address, January 3, 2023:

“We reject this woke ideology. We seek normalcy, not philosophical lunacy,” he reiterated. “We will not allow reality, facts, and truth to become optional.” And then he pledged, “We will never surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.”

Now, DeSantis is attempting to cancel Florida students’ attendance into an AP course on African American studies because, according to the governor, it “significantly lacks educational value,” even though the College Board, the association that administers standardized test like the SATs, has dedicated over a decade in developing the AP African American studies course, which has been pilot tested across the nation in over 60 high schools.

Actually, in his statement and actions, DeSantis is not allowing reality, facts, and truth to enter the public sphere.

DeSantis is not only criminalizing discussions of race and racism, but he is also preventing Florida residents from actively attending to important societal facts and issues of sexuality and gender as well.

Florida’s so-called “Parental Rights in Education” law, called by opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” law, was to take effect weeks later on July 1, 2022.

Passed primarily by Republicans in the state legislature and signed into law by DeSantis, the new law reads in part:

“Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

Though Florida has positioned itself at the tip of the spear to cut and bleed to death school curricular materials on topics of race, gender, and sexual identity, school contexts, as reproductions of the larger society, function on an overarching system of racism, heteronormativity, and other forms of oppression.

We must never forget, however, the prophetic words of German poet, Heinrich Heine: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.”

Arizona as Case Study

By comparison, I ask how these attitudes and actions are any different from the draconian practices enacted by Arizona state officials in 2010 in stripping away primarily the Mexican American Studies programs from Tucson public schools? Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, John Huppenthal, suspended the highly successful and student empowering program.

Then Arizona School Superintendent, Tom Horne, in 2010 when the state legislature passed the measure, House Bill 2281, asserted that the law is necessary because Tucson, Arizona’s Mexican American, African American, and Native American studies courses teach students that they are oppressed, encourage resentment toward white people, and promote “ethnic chauvinism” and “ethnic solidarity” instead of treating people as individuals.

Huppenthal released a list of books he had banned from classrooms throughout the state, including The Tempest by Shakespeare, Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years (1998) by Bigelow and Peterson, The Latino Condition: A Critical Reader (1998) by Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001) by Delgado and Stefancic, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000) by Freire, United States Government: Democracy in Action (2007) by Remy, Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History (2006) by Rosales, and Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1990) by Zinn.

Anyone who believes in academic freedom and cultural liberty must find practices of censorship offensive. Students previously enrolled in the Mexican American Studies program achieved a 94% high school graduation rate, up significantly from around 50% of Latino/a students not enrolled. The program had given students a sense of cultural pride, a passion and joy in the learning process, and a feeling of hope for their futures.

Unfortunately, however, Arizona politicians placed social and cultural conformity as the major considerations. This reflects educational researcher’s, Kochman, in Black and White Cultural Styles in Pluralistic Perspective (1994) contention that dominant society mandates linguistic and cultural assimilation as a requirement for social support:

“The nonreciprocal nature of the process of cultural assimilations of minorities does not permit the mainstream American culture to learn about minority cultural traditions nor benefit from their official social incorporation. It also suggests an unwarranted social arrogance: that mainstream American society has already reached a state of perfection and cannot benefit from being exposed to and learning from other cultural traditions” (p. 287).

Censorship as Cultural and Physical Genocide

As wisely and eloquently stated by English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in his 1839 play, Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy, “the pen is mightier than the sword,” this adage holds that the written word acts as a powerful tool in the transmission of ideas. Why else would oppressive regimes and other avid enforcers of the status quo engage in censorship and book bannings and burnings throughout the ages?

For example, Pope Gregory IX in 1239, in his quest to maintain the Catholic Church’s economic and ideological stranglehold, ordered all copies of the Jewish holy book, the Talmud, confiscated, and one of his successors, Pope John XXI, commanded that the Talmud be burned on the eve of the Jewish Passover in 1322.

Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, in his 1526 treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, argued that “First, their synagogues should be set on fire.” Jewish prayer books should be destroyed, and rabbis forbidden to preach. The homes of Jews should likewise be “smashed and destroyed” and their residents “put under one roof or in a stable like gypsies, to teach them they are not master in our land….These “poisonous envenomed worms should be drafted into forced labor. The young and strong Jews and Jewesses should be given the flail, the ax, the hoe, the spade, the distaff, and the spindle and let them earn their bread by the sweat of their noses.”

As Luther’s dire pronouncements make perfectly clear, what begins as banning then torching of books and other property eventually results in the denial of civil liberties, torture, and eventually murder of people scapegoated by dominant social groups and by their government leaders.

This was certainly the case in Nazi Germany. Nazi storm troopers, in 1933, invaded, ransacked, and padlocked The Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, founded by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish sexuality researcher.

The Institute conducted early sexuality and gender research, the precursor of the Indiana-based Kinsey Institute in the United States. Storm troopers carried away and torched thousands of volumes of books and research documents calling the Institute “an international center of the white-slave trade” and “an unparalleled breading ground of dirt and filth.”

Soon thereafter, Nazis and conservative university students throughout Germany invaded Jewish organizations, and public and school libraries and confiscated books they deemed “un-German.” The German Student Association, (Deutsche Studentenschaft) declared a national “Action against the Un-German Spirit.”

On May 10, 1933, the students along with Nazi leaders set ablaze over 25,000 volumes in Berlin’s Opernplatz. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, “fired” up the crowd of over 40,000 sympathizers by declaring “No to decadence and moral corruption. Yes to decency and morality in family and state.”

Joel Spring, in his book Deculturalization and the Struggle for Equality: A Brief History of the Education of Dominated Cultures in the United States, addresses “cultural genocide,” which he defines as “the attempt to destroy other cultures” through forced acquiescence and assimilation to majority rule and cultural and religious standards. This cultural genocide works through the process of “deculturalization,” which Spring describes as “the educational process of destroying a people’s culture and replacing it with a new culture.”

An historical example of “cultural genocide” and “deculturalization” can be seen in the case of European American domination over Native American Indigenous nations whom European Americans viewed as “uncivilized,” “godless heathens,” “barbarians,” and “devil worshipers.”

European Americans attempted to deculturalized indigenous peoples through many means: confiscation of land, forced relocation, undermining of their languages, cultures, and identities, forced conversion to Christianity, and the establishment of Christian day schools and off-reservation boarding schools where they took youth far away from their people.

The U.S. government under President Hayes approved and developed off-reservation Indian boarding schools, the first in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879 run primarily by white Christian teachers, administered by Richard Pratt, a former cavalry commander in the Indian Territories.

At the schools, officials stripped Indigenous children from their cultures: cut short the young men’s hair, forced all to wear Western-style clothing, prohibited them from conversing in their native languages and made English compulsory, destroyed all their cultural and spiritual symbols, and imposed Christianity on them.

As Pratt related to a Baptist audience: “[We must immerse] Indians in our civilization, and when we get them under, [hold] them there until they are thoroughly soaked.”

As Santayana reminds us: “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” We now, though, have an opportunity to avoid the mistakes of the past by speaking out against the racism and cultural genocide that surrounds us.

Standing together and standing firm, we can reverse the tide of ruthless censorship engulfing our educational system.

—

This Post is republished on Medium.

The Texas GOP has Declared War on Books. I've Seen This Before," by Lupe Mendez, the Texas Observer

Great read by librotraficante Lupe Mendez in this Texas Observer piece. Many of us have seen this before, as well.

As Yogi Berra famously said, "It's deja vu all over again."

With Arizona as the test case for how to respond to banned books, we need to re-ignite the Librotraficante movement in Texas again—but this time, for Texas instead of Arizona. 

So prescient of Librotraficante founder, Tony Diaz, who brought a lot of imagination and motivation to the fight over the dismantling of Mexican American Studies in the Tucson Unified School District back in 2010 that involved a court battle and subsequent victory. These struggles not only give us hope, but they chart a path toward success against those that would deny us our First and Fourteenth Amendment Rights to our precious knowledge and curriculum.

In the meantime, students must continue to gain access to the liberatory knowledge that they're being denied by fearful zealots and bullies. 

More immediately, we all need to show up to the SBOE the first week of April to get involved in the conversations taking place right now on the social studies standards for the state of Texas. 

El movimiento continua! The movement continues.

Sí se puede! Yes we can!

-Angela Valenzuela

The Texas GOP has Declared War on Books. I've Seen This Before," by Lupe  Mendez

Jan. 14, 2022

A decade ago, in March 2012, a group of writers, artists, educators, and activists banded together to combat the deplorable actions of Arizona’s state legislature. The state’s lawmakers had recently passed a bill making the teaching of “Ethnic Studies” illegal, along with banning courses that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people” and “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.” The bill also created a list of banned books. Of the more than 80 books that were eventually added to the list, many of the authors were Black and Latinx.

The Arizona law was so restrictive that it made news here in Texas, where we created the Librotraficante Movement in order to highlight the attack on books, educators, and education by “conservative” politicians. Librotraficante means “book smuggler,” and that’s what we did: collect books in Texas and “smuggle” them to Arizona, where those same titles had been abruptly banned. We used all of our book nerd talents to create an old-school freedom ride, collecting 35 bus riders and caravanning to six cities: Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, Mesilla, Albuquerque, and Tucson. We collected more than 1,000 copies of Arizona’s banned books and disseminated them to community libraries through book bundles to Arizona high school students. The Librotraficante Movement has been crucial in giving a voice to students of color across the nation.  

A decade later, that work stays with you. Now the attacks are happening right here in the Lone Star State.

In the last legislative session, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 3, which banned the teaching of “critical race theory” in Texas classrooms. Governor Greg Abbott and other Texas Republicans have also called for bans of school library books that might make students “uncomfortable.” State Representative Matt Krause, a Fort Worth Republican, has named 850 books he’d like to see removed from libraries. Like in Arizona, the lists seem to target non-white and LGBTQ authors. This much is clear: The Republican Party intends to deny children access to books, authors and an education that would spur their intellectual growth. And in an effort to satisfy their base, Republicans in Texas are pushing away the one population that needs their attention the most: youth—and more pointedly—youth of color.

LUPE MENDEZ

 State Republicans’ run on libraries and classrooms comes as the state’s demographics continue to shift. In the 2019–2020 academic school year, Hispanic students accounted for the largest percentage of the state’s student enrollment with roughly 53 percent. White students made up only 27 percent of the student body; Black students represented 13 percent, and Asian students represented 5 percent. Each year Texas schools get more diverse, but the same can’t be said for the state legislature.  

It’s worth noting that at the same time the Legislature was cooking up Senate Bill 3, the body quietly shot down another bill that could have created a whole new set of possibilities for youth in Texas. House Bill 1504, filed by state Representative Christina Morales (D-Houston), would have allowed school districts to create an Ethnic Studies course as an alternative to World Geography and World History courses. The bill made no mandates but would have granted the thousands of school districts across the state the ability to adapt coursework to their specific student bodies. It was a beautifully fair bill that gained both Republican and Democratic sponsors. 

The bill couldn’t survive the state’s intensifying culture wars, however. It was placed on the Senate’s intent calendar in May before dying.  

That brings us to the present. For a playbook of how to combat the troubling new actions in Texas, I think back to the last days of the Librotraficante caravan. As we arrived in Tucson, where the school district had shut down a Mexican American Studies course, a few of us were assigned the task of sorting the more than 1,000 books amassed during the caravan. It was early morning—7:30 or so—when we noticed that a tiny group of teens had come by. They quietly approached to see the books and grabbed some, retreating without a word. Later, a young lady grabbed a book and took it away to the corner to read it. 

As the day went on, the young lady returned, saying, “Thank you for giving me this moment. I was just about to finish this book on the day the district personnel came to forcibly take the books away from us.” Wise beyond her years, she left us with some parting advice: “I want you to have this book back. Give it to somebody else. I hope somebody can learn from this book.”   

As an educator and a writer, those words were especially powerful. If you can get a kid to pick up a book that they haven’t seen in three months, then read it like it’s a sacred text—hell, you have witnessed all that is good in education. 

Now, 10 years later, I’m still a Librotraficante. And I’m ready to do it all over again.

Beautiful 2012 piece by Dr. Rudy Acuña. His powerful words on the purpose of Chicana and Chicano (or Mexican American) Studies still resonate. Liberation is simply not achievable without a vigorous life of the mind that a critical education provides. Expressed differently, literacy gets corrupted when it's about testing companies making tests, young people hopefully scoring highly on them, and even internalizing the results as saying something meaningful about them.

Once we relax these assumptions about students' test scores, we must ask not only why they have such a grip on both students' and educators' lives, but also what they say about students' education? 

Dr. Acuña provides some key insights that link pedagogy to the practice of freedom.

-Angela Valenzuela

Rodolfo F. Acuña: The purpose of Chicano Studies was “to liberate students through literacy”

By Rodolfo F. Acuña

June 13, 2012

LatinaLista

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”
-Paulo Freire. Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I always start a meeting with the farm worker handclap in a tribute to University of Arizona Professor Mark Stegeman, the former president of the Tucson Unified School District, who as a pretext for eliminating the TUSD’s Mexican American Studies (MAS) Program, said that he went after MAS because after listening to Mexican Americans use the clap, he knew that Mexican American Studies was a cult. Stegeman’s statement proves my mother’s saying that “Para pendejo no se estudia. Se nace.”

I joined the struggle to Save Ethnic Studies in Arizona because the stupidity of xenophobes and their intent to destroy all the educational reforms that Mexican Americans have struggled for.

In this context I pay tribute to Paulo Freire who has become a legend so much so that we know the legend, but have contesting views of Freire. Our understanding of Freire and his relevance differ due to the fact that several generations separate us and time has a way of distorting reality. In other words, we do not have a common epistemological base, although we are all concerned with education.

Not everyone wants to be educated, however. The forces who benefit from the status quo want this generation to conform to their interests. Consequently, they see Freire as a subservice and worse, according to them, un-American. This is at the crux of the inquisition in Tucson.

When I first read Freire, it was in the context of another time. He was not a legend yet but one among other progressive educators.

The Sixties were a time when we wanted to transform society and create the underpinnings of a democratic and just society. Educators such as Freire were the antithesis of today’s “No Child Left Behind” which reduces learning to indoctrination with subject matter drilled into students.

Education today is reduced to “Roses are red and violets are blue” with no other answer acceptable.

As a junior high school teacher, my education included the great John Dewey who wrote, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” The purpose of teaching was to educate – to motivate, to engage students to learn – and if they did not, it was your fault not theirs.

Dewey gave literacy a meaning beyond reading the bible. Dating back to the days of Plato and the birth of the notion of democracy literacy has been associated with citizenship.

An American myth is that what makes this nation exceptional is its commitment to public education. The reality is that while Massachusetts Bay Colony had schools, eligibility was limited to race – blacks and Indians could not attend them. As the nation developed, former colonies became states. Compulsory education became more common.

Yet this changed with the growth of cities and the growing number of immigrants; by the second half of the 19th century, education was neither compulsory nor available to the children of immigrants. Reformers fought for compulsory education for the newcomers and the various states passed compulsory education laws — California in 1874 and Texas in 1915. However, the laws were not enforced, especially in the case of migrant children.

As the number of Mexicans grew, organizations such as the Alianza Hispano-Americana and the League of United Latino American Citizens pressed for educational reform. After World War II, educators such as George I. Sánchez demanded better education for Mexican American children and advocated for pedagogies such as bilingual education.

In 1960, the median education of Mexicans in Texas was the third grade and in California the eighth. However, teachers knew that this was an illusion and that large numbers of Mexican Americans were functionally illiterate. They knew that the schools were not teaching Mexicans rather warehousing them.

Reformers were also motivated by Vatican II which began in 1962; it gave birth to Liberation Theology. The poor had the right to enjoy the bounties of the earth – salvation was communal.

This environment produced giants such as Ivan Illich who in 1960 established a center in Cuernavaca, Mexico — CIDOC (Centro Intercultural de Documentación). It was a watering hole for educators and intellectuals throughout the Americas. His books Deschooling Society and Tools of Conviviality were anchors.

Many educators, myself included, looked at a lasting transformation emanating from education. Literacy was not the possession of communism or any other ideology, although note was taken of Mao’s literacy campaign in China.

Educators knew that literacy had broken the isolation of Helen Keller, a blind child with a limited vocabulary. Words freed Keller and words made her a world intellectual.

It did not take much to look around the schoolyard and recognize students mired in poverty and hopelessness. Many would go to jail because of a lack of literacy. I remember teaching literature from Classic Comic Books and occasionally motivating students to read.

I remembered my mother who had been legally blind since the age of four reading the Encyclopedia Britannica peering through the largest magnifying glass I had ever seen. Although she could not help me, she wanted me to read.

In this context I read The Invisible Minority (NEA) in 1966. An essay by a 13 year-old Mexican girl caught my senses:

Me
To begin with, I am a Mexican. That sentence has a scent of bitterness as it is written. I feel if it weren’t for my nationality I would accomplish more. My being a Mexican has brought about my lack of initiative. No matter what I attempt to do, my dark skin always makes me feel that I will fail. Another thing that “gripes” me is that I am such a coward. I absolutely will not fight for something even if I know I’m right. I do not have the vocabulary that it would take to express myself strongly enough…

How could someone who looked at herself in this way learn?

I looked for inspiration to the work of humanist psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. His writings gave me goose pimples:

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

When students created an opening in 1968 and 1969, I became part of the first wave of hires. The mission was to set up a Chicano Studies Department.

My epistemological underpinnings differed from most activists — I did not consider the disciplines to be at the core of Chicano Studies. For me, its purpose was to liberate students through literacy. Its purpose was pedagogical.

This discipline-pedagogy dialogue consumed the next forty-two years. No one seemed to be listening until one day I was invited to speak at the 12th Annual Institute for Transformative Education sponsored by the TUSD Mexican American Studies Department.

I had written about the Arizona-Sonoran Border and published Corridors of Migration (Arizona 2008).

In the early 2000s I accompanied Armando Navarro and others to the border to protest the growing violence against Mexican immigrants. But participating in this conference and witnessing their resurrection of Freire reminded me of an encounter I had had in the 1980s when I got a call to go up to La Paz, the United Farm Workers headquarters.

I was not thrilled at the prospect of spending time there, I was not into rabbit’s food. However, I greatly admired César Chávez.

Much to my surprise when I go there I was introduced to Paulo Freire; César and he were to have a special encuentro. César arrived late and immediately launched into dialectic on how he was in the middle of union business and as a poor man could only control his time so it was a duty to use that time for the union.

I had feared that César was going to get blown away. However, after he finished, Freire got up emotionally and pointed to him and said only one word “praxis.”

My emotions so overwhelmed me at Tucson that I too could only think of the word “praxis” when I met Sean and the MAS teachers. These people were teachers.

So when the “rose are red” people tried to eliminate them I had no other choice but to enlist.

In this struggle I have often recalled the words of Fanon,

Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)

I understand this but as a teacher I also understand that everyone has the right to be “Me” and feel proud of themselves. Roses can be blue and violets red.

Dr. Rodolfo Francisco Acuña, called the “father of Chicano Studies,” is a historian, professor emeritus, activist and the author of 20 titles, 32 academic articles and chapters in books, 155 book reviews and 188 opinion pieces. Currently, he teaches Chicano Studies at California State University, Northridge.

Check this out, everybody. We're headed into the Dark Ages given how Medieval this is. So reminiscent of the Arizona Department of Education that banned books in the wake of the dismantling of the Mexican American Studies (MAS) program in the Tucson Unified School District in 2010.

Readers of this blog might remember  that in May 2001, State Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal called for the Arizona Department of Education to conduct an evaluation of the literature that had been used in the MAS classrooms. I read the review and discovered just how shoddy it was and how it was indeed a witch hunt that served as a justification, however incorrect and tortuous, that the program was in defiance of ARS 15-112 as follows:

15-112. Prohibited courses and classes; enforcement

A. A school district or charter school in this state shall not include in its program of instruction any courses or classes that include any of the following:

1. Promote the overthrow of the United States government.

2. Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.

3. Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.

4. Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.

Like Senate Bill 3, this is the reincarnation Arizona State Policy. We'll see if they go as far as actually banning these books. 

I hope not. But these guys have little imagination left for how they can win their races, especially when providing greater resources to children in our public schools, helping low-income people survive this economy, or bringing and end to environmental destruction caused by Texas' oil and gas industry never seem to register. And these should not require any imagination.

They require love, caring, and concern for fellow Texans and residents. One shouldn't hold political office if one doesn't love the people of Texas.

-Angela Valenzuela

Texas House committee to investigate school districts’ books on race and sexuality

State Rep. Matt Krause, a candidate for state attorney general, asked school superintendents to confirm whether any books on a list of 850 titles are in their libraries and classrooms.

BY BRIAN LOPEZ OCT. 26, 20212 PM CENTRAL

His list of titles includes bestsellers and award winners alike, from the 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Styron and “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates to last year's book club favorites: “Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot” by Mikki Kendall and Isabel Wilkerson's “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”

But race is not the only thing on the committee chair’s list. Other listed books Krause wants school districts to account for are about teen pregnancy, abortion and homosexuality, including “LGBT Families” by Leanne K. Currie-McGhee, “The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to their Younger Selves” edited by Sarah Moon, and Michael J. Basso’s “The Underground Guide to Teenage Sexuality: An Essential Handbook for Today’s Teens and Parents.”

Krause, a Fort Worth lawmaker and founding member of the House Freedom Caucus, is running for state attorney general against Ken Paxton. Krause declined to comment and no explanation was given as to how these books were chosen.

Krause sent notice of the investigation to Lily Laux, the Texas Education Agency deputy commissioner of school programs, as well as some Texas school superintendents. His letter did not specify which school districts Krause was investigating.

Krause informs districts they must provide the committee with the number of copies they have of each book, on what part of campus those books are located and how much money schools spent on the books, as well as information on any other book that violates House Bill 3979, the so-called “critical race theory law”designed to limit how race-related subjects are taught in public schools. Critical race theory, the idea that racism is embedded in legal systems and not limited to individuals is an academic discipline taught at the university level. But it has become a common phrase used by conservatives to include anything about race taught or discussed in public secondary schools.

The law states a teacher cannot “require or make part of a course” a series of race-related concepts, including the ideas that “one race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex” or that someone is “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive” based on their race or sex.

School officials have until Nov. 12 to respond. It is unclear what will happen to the districts that have such books.

The letter did not give a specific reason that Krause was launching the investigation, only that “the committee may initiate inquiries concerning any ‘matter the committee considers necessary for the information of the legislature or for the welfare and protection of state citizens.’”

Lake Travis Independent School District officials received the letter and are trying to figure out what the next steps are, a spokesperson said. Officials in that Austin-area school district are speaking with other school districts to figure out what this means for them. In nearby Round Rock Independent School District, the district spokesperson, Jenny Caputo, texted that it will "take significant staff time to gather the information to reply to this request." The district's legal team is still reviewing the request.

State Rep. Victoria Neave, D-Dallas, who is vice chair of the committee, said she had no idea Krause was launching the investigation but believes it’s a campaign tactic. She found out about the letter after a school in her district notified her.

“His letter is reflective of the Republican Party's attempt to dilute the voice of people of color,” she said.

Neave said she doesn’t know what Krause is trying to do but will investigate the motive and next steps.

The TEA and the rest of the Committee on General Investigating members did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said it doesn’t surprise him that Krause has taken initiative on a conservative item, especially since there is crowded field in the Texas attorney general race.

“He's not well known statewide, and so he needs to put down a pretty tall conservative flag to get notice,” Rottinghaus said. “As a political statement, it certainly conveys the clear message that the Republicans are watching.”

Rottinghaus said he doesn’t recall a time in recent memory when legislatures have taken the role of investigating school districts.

“The monitoring of this definitely is a political statement and so the fact that the legislature is attentive to it definitely implies that they're not going to drop the issue,” he said.

Jim Walsh, an attorney who often represents school districts, pointed out there is nothing in the law that says books must be removed and Krause’s investigation also doesn’t call for books to be removed. For now, it’s up to school districts to decide how they will respond, but what’s certain is that it will add more workload to Texas schools that are already struggling from the effects of the pandemic.

Texas State Teachers Association President Ovidia Molina said in a statement that the investigation is a “witch hunt” and that nothing in state law gives lawmakers the right to go after educators.

“This is an obvious attack on diversity and an attempt to score political points at the expense of our children’s education,” she said.

Krause’s investigation comes after several school districts across the state removed books from libraries because of parental outcry.

Earlier this month, the Carroll Independent School District board in Southlake reprimanded a fourth grade teacher who had an anti-racist book in her classroom after a parent complained about it last year.

Then, in a separate incident this month, a Carroll ISD administrator asked teachers to provide materials that presented an “opposing” perspective of the Holocaust in an effort to comply with HB 3979. The law, which comes with little to no guidance, has caused confusion and fear among teachers and administrators, who have seemingly misinterpreted the law.

In the Katy Independent School District, a school removed a book after parents claimed it promoted “critical race theory,” which the district later found to be untrue and reinstated the book.

Disclosure: Texas State Teachers Association and University of Houston have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.