This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
UT won an earlier challenge to affirmative action at the U.S. Supreme Court, but this one is in a state court.
Once again, UT alumnus Edward Blum has organized a case against his alma mater.
The use of racial and ethnic preferences in admissions at the University of Texas violates state law and the Texas Constitution, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by a group whose leader who took a similar case to the U.S. Supreme Court twice and lost.
This time, Edward Blum has set his sights on the state courts of Texas rather than making another run at the federal courts. The Supreme Court upheld UT’s use of affirmative action by a 4-3 vote in June 2016.
Blum’s nonprofit, Students for Fair Admissions, which says it has more than 20,000 students, parents and other members in Texas and elsewhere around the nation, contends that UT grants preferences to African-American and Hispanic applicants at the expense of white and Asian applicants. The suit, filed in state District Court in Travis County, seeks a permanent injunction barring UT from using racial factors in admissions decisions.
“It is our belief that the Texas Constitution unequivocally forbids UT-Austin from treating applicants differently because of their race and ethnicity,” said Blum, the group’s president.
Maurie McInnis, UT’s executive vice president and provost, said in a statement that “diversity is central to our pursuit of excellence” and that all students and other members of the campus community reap its benefits.
“The policy is narrowly tailored,” McInnis said. “It complies with state and federal law and the Texas and U.S. Constitutions and has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
UT considers such factors for a relatively small fraction of its entering class. Under state law, UT reserves 90 percent of its freshman slots for state residents, with the remainder for out-of-state and international students. And at least three-fourths of its freshmen from Texas get in under a state law that grants automatic admission based on their high school class rank.
Only the remaining applicants, including those from other states and abroad, are considered under a so-called holistic review that takes race and ethnicity into account along with grades, essays, leadership qualities and other matters. In last year’s Supreme Court majority opinion in Fisher v. UT-Austin, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote “that race consciousness played a role in only a small portion of admissions decisions,” asserting that this was “a hallmark of narrow tailoring, not evidence of unconstitutionality.”
But Students for Fair Admissions contends that the Supreme Court’s ruling has no bearing on its lawsuit, which relies on two passages in the Texas Constitution’s Bill of Rights and one provision of state law.
Section 3a of the state’s Bill of Rights, approved by voters in 1972, says: “Equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed, or national origin.” This amendment provides “more expansive protection against discrimination” than the U.S. Constitution, rendering UT’s use of racial preferences “patently unconstitutional under the Texas Constitution,” the lawsuit claims.
Blum’s group says its case is also bolstered by Section 3, which says in part: “All free men … have equal rights, and no man, or set of men, is entitled to exclusive separate public emoluments, or privileges.”
The state law cited by the lawsuit is the Civil Practice and Remedies Code, which includes a provision declaring that an employee of the state “may not, because of a person’s race, religion, color, sex, or national origin … refuse to permit the person to participate in a program owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of the state.” The lawsuit claims that this creates “a broad statutory right to be free of official discrimination.”
Steven Schwinn, a professor at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago who teaches and writes about constitutional law, said he was “a little puzzled” that the suit wasn’t filed sooner.
“I understand why they challenged the program under the federal Constitution — I’m sure they thought the time was right for bringing the federal challenge,” Schwinn said. “It just smacks of politics to me, but maybe the Texas Constitution and statute give them a little bit more traction than what they got under the federal equal protection clause.”
Mishell Kneeland, a lawyer in Austin with the Culhane Meadows law firm who worked on the Fisher case as an assistant attorney general in Texas, said the new case appears to be designed to wind up at the state Supreme Court. She doubts that the plaintiff will succeed, in part because the state’s constitutional standards are “relatively similar” to the federal version. “The University of Texas’ admissions process is very thoughtfully crafted,” she added.
Blum, a former stockbroker and onetime candidate for Congress who majored in English and government at UT, isn’t a lawyer, but he has made something of a cottage industry out of lining up lawyers, funding and plaintiffs in a 20-year quest to end the use of racial and ethnic considerations in college admissions, voting rights and other aspects of public policy. He has ushered cases into the marble-and-mahogany chamber of the nation’s highest court six times.
His Project on Fair Representation, another nonprofit group, underwrote the lawsuit by Abigail Fisher, a white woman denied admission to UT. In its first opinion in that case, a 7-1 decision written by Kennedy in 2013, the Supreme Court set aside a lower court’s approval of UT’s use of affirmative action and told that court to conduct a “searching examination” of whether such considerations are really necessary to obtain the educational benefits of diversity. The lower court concluded once again that UT’s program was legal, after which the high court took the case a second time.
Blum has also organized lawsuits in which Students for Fair Admissions is the plaintiff against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Those cases, filed in federal courts in 2014, contend that well-qualified Asian-Americans are routinely denied admission solely on the basis of race.
No other state has admissions laws precisely like those governing UT.
A 1997 state law offered automatic admission to UT and other public colleges and universities to students ranking in the top 10 percent of their Texas high school class. In 2009, the law was modified for UT, allowing it to cap automatically admitted students at three-fourths of its freshmen from Texas.
Each fall, the university notifies Texas school officials of the class rank that current high school juniors need to attain by the end of their junior year to be automatically admitted; the cutoff is 7 percent for the 2017-18 and 2018-19 academic years.
Blum’s latest lawsuit against UT doesn’t come as a surprise. In March, he began inviting students who were rejected by UT to provide grades, test scores and a list of outside activities to help build the new case.
To ALL Texas teachers, both working and retired, an important message from me, Angela Valenzuela:
The Special Session of the Texas legislature begins this Tuesday. You should really consider getting involved in this since they're going to be talking about YOU and this is only one area, albeit of vital concern to your future. Get familiar with the online portal: http://www.legis.state.tx.us/Home.aspx Search bills under 85(1) 2017 (which stands for special session). Type in a keyword like "Teacher," and then you'll get a listing of bills filed. Doing this took me to this helpful page. I also just posted below a very important agenda item: Teachers health benefits You can also set up a bill alert that will keep you abreast of where/what state the bill is so that you might can consider coming to Austin and testifying in a hearing committee. You can also view archived video House and Senate Hearings in case you miss one and want to see who testified and how. Plus, being involved like this could make your summer interesting, to boot! You can also keep track of bills from state teacher organizations like the Texas State Teacher Association (TSTA) and the Texas Federation of Teachers (Texas' and the nation's biggest, major teacher associations). If you're currently teaching, consider joining these associations as they represent you. And get involved in them, too, so that you can extend or amplify your voice through them. Plus, they need your help.
You can also, of course, always reach out to who represents you. If you do not know who does, visit the Texas Legislature online and plug in your information here, and it'll let you know. No reason to be or feel powerless when there's already so much advocacy to which you can simply attach and become a voice. Hope this helps! Angela Valenzuela
Retired teacher Sue Schnars comforts her disabled daughter, Ivana, at her Austin home on June 27. JAY JANNER/AMERICAN-STATESMAN
After failing to temper soaring health care costs for retired teachers, state lawmakers are considering giving retired teachers up to $1,200 more a year and pumping $200 million into their health care over the next two years.
Starting in January, many retired teachers, particularly those under the age of 65, will see higher premiums and deductibles grow as much as 10 times what they’re paying now. The Legislature approved the changes during the regular legislative session this year as a part of an effort to deal with a $1 billion hole in the retirement system. Lawmakers ended up partially plugging the hole with $484 million and raising costs for retired teachers.
“We have discovered some outliers where some people in the TRS system are getting hit a little harder than others. The good news about a special session is we can fix it. We don’t have to wait a year and a half,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said on Thursday. READ: Retired teachers: Texas lawmakers broke their promise on health care
Patrick said he wants Senate legislation filed for the special session that starts Tuesday that would pump an additional $200 million into the Teacher Retirement System of Texas to help address rising premiums and deductibles as well as give retired teachers who had 20 years of teaching experience a $600 yearly bonus starting in March. The bonuses would eventually rise to $1,000.
In the House, Rep. Drew Darby, R-San Angelo, has filed two bills. House Bill 80 would give retired teachers up to $100 more on their monthly retirement check and HB 76 would boost funding to the Teacher Retirement System by $100 million over the next two years.
“Each member of the Legislature (has) been receiving comments from retired teachers from the effects of health care premium increases and their fixed income,” Darby said.
Retired teachers and advocates said that they welcome any relief from their rising premiums and deductibles. But Gov. Greg Abbott has not included the Teacher Retirement System, which faces at least a $200 million shortfall by 2021, as part of the special session agenda.
“It is a good faith effort on their part if the bills pass. But we have been down this road. This game is not over until the ink is dried,” said 67-year-old Ella Wetz, who retired from the Pflugerville school district in 2005. Wetz, along with fellow retiree members of the Texas State Teachers Association, have been calling lawmakers for relief.
Wetz’s deductible is increasing from $300 to $3,000. She suffers from fibromyalgia as well as metal toxicity, which requires an out-of-network specialist. She said that with no increase in her retired teacher annuity and ballooning health care expenses and cost of living, she is looking to sell her Northeast Austin home within the year.
Other retired teachers, most of whom don’t receive Social Security because their school districts didn’t pay into it, have taken on jobs to supplement their monthly retirement checks.
The last pension cost-of-living increase was in 2013 when only teachers who retired prior to Aug. 31, 2004 qualified. Darby’s HB 80 would expand that cost-of-living increase to those who retired on or before August 31, 2015.
“When a person retires that’s all that they get. We take a sort of ad hoc approach to do raises,” said Tim Lee, head of the Texas Retired Teachers Association, adding that more money “for our retirees means that they can more easily afford the things that seniors are having trouble paying for whether it’s medicine or getting around town or just to continue to enjoy a life of retirement.”
None of the legislative proposals would make any structural changes to the health insurance system for retired teachers that advocacy groups say ultimately should happen. RELATED: Teacher groups, school advocates bracing for Abbott’s special session
It’s unclear how the $100 million in HB 76 and the Senate’s $200 million extra in the retirement system would be used to drive down health costs for retired teachers. Patrick said that he would like the money to be prioritized for retired teachers with children with disabilities and spouses, and to reduce drug costs.
The state established the retired teacher health care plan in 1986 with enough funding to last through 2000. Since then, the system, which covers 270,000 retirees, has been at risk of going unfunded, requiring legislators nearly every two years to tinker with the system to keep it funded for the short term.
Advocacy groups say that instead of teacher salaries, contributions should be tied to insurance costs, which is more like how the state funds the Employees Retirement System of Texas. But that change would push up costs and so far has not been popular with lawmakers.
Thanks to Bonnie Lesley for sharing this November 7, 2016 piece from the Houston Chronicle. It speaks the truth about how Texas' schools are starving no thanks to Lt. Governor Dan Patrick who does not support equitable school funding while simultaneously backing charter school and Education Savings Accounts (vouchers) legislation that he knows will bring public education to its knees in Texas. That IS the whole point as this piece by Cort McMurray observes. Yet here's what a credible Stanford study finds (that's consistent with other studies in the field):
The reality, as reported by
Stanford economist Margaret Raymond in her CREDO study of math
performance in charter schools, is that just 17 percent of charter
students outperform their traditional public school peers. Thirty-seven
percent of charter school students underperform the public school kids,
and 46 percent achieve levels identical to the students in the
traditional schools.
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick was in town this week, talking schools, school finance, and property tax reform. These are favorite topics for Patrick, who, before becoming arguably the most powerful man in state government, was a Houston media personality, best known for undergoing an on-air vasectomy during a live radio talk show. In his 2015 inaugural address, tucked between the Stetsoned hubris and the cowboy booted jingoism and the liberal quotation of Scripture, Patrick bemoaned the failure of "our inner city schools" and invoked Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech to articulate a dream of his own, a "dream of the day every child gets a quality education so they can break the binds of poverty and live the Texas and American dream."
It was a "conversation" in which a middle-aged white man was having a “conversation” in a room filled with middle-aged white men and women, talking about “people in the inner city.” Mr. Patrick likes to talk about the “inner city.” It’s a phrase he uses often. He talks about “inner city” schools, which are invariably “failing,” and inner city residents, who are “losing their homes” because they can’t afford to pay the gosh-darn property taxes: It’s not the lousy economy or the drugs and gangs or the relentless tectonic grind of decades of tone deaf public policy that’s ruining the places where the poor folk live. It’s property taxes.
Patrick speaks about “the inner city” with the smooth confidence of a man who’s never experienced the challenge but knows the precise solution. He’s the loudmouthed guy at the end of the bar, explaining how to hit a Clayton Kershaw slider. He’s the clueless uncle, giving an expectant niece his sure-fire, drug-free tips for managing pain during childbirth. He’s the eternal talk show host, all honeyed words and callus-free hands.
What Patrick wants has little to do with bringing hope or light to the shadowy spots in our benighted inner cities. What Patrick wants is the evisceration of the Texas public school system, replaced with a quasi-public collection of “charter schools.”
Property taxes are the primary means of financing public education in the state. Earlier this year, Education Week, a highly respected newspaper, published Quality Counts, its 20th annual analysis of performance in U.S. schools. Texas ranked 42nd out of 50 states and the District of Columbia in student performance, 42nd in “student chances for [post-high school] success,” and 45th in quality of school funding.
Patrick’s solution to a stretched, struggling, woefully underfunded system? Cut the funding. Starve the schools. Starve them to death.
Link here to see Public School Expenditure levels for the 50 states.
Patrick’s alternative, the charter school system, presents its own
set of problems. The popular perception, pushed by charter school
boosters ranging from Dan Patrick to Bill and Melinda Gates, is that
charters are able to provide educational opportunities public schools
cannot, and that charter school kids routinely outperform their public
school peers.
The old propagandist’s adage – Lie big and lie often, and eventually your lie becomes what everyone believes –
is at play here. The conventional wisdom is that charter schools
produce better results than public schools. The reality, as reported by
Stanford economist Margaret Raymond in her CREDO study of math
performance in charter schools, is that just 17 percent of charter
students outperform their traditional public school peers. Thirty-seven
percent of charter school students underperform the public school kids,
and 46 percent achieve levels identical to the students in the
traditional schools.
But the most powerful man in state government keeps selling the
charter school magic. In a display of faux sincerity that would have
made Eddie Haskell grimace, Patrick told his Houston audience that
without immediate school reform, “we are going to have a have and
have-not population,” as if he hadn’t noticed that Texas split into
haves and have-nots several generations ago.
While some charters — KIPP Academy and YES Prep are leading
lights here in Houston — do very good work, the charter system is rife
with questionable curricula, underperforming students, and gross
malfeasance. Last year, the founders of the Varnett Public School, a
Houston charter serving predominately poor, minority students, were
indicted by federal prosecutors, charged with embezzling $2.6 million
from the school. Harmony Public Schools, one of the largest charters in
the state, has been investigated for everything from bias in admissions
to accounting irregularities to ties to a controversial cleric in
Turkey. Charters may be an aid in improving educational opportunities
for some students. They are not a panacea.
All over our city, teachers and administrators struggle against those
twin Dickensian nightmares, Ignorance and Want, as they try to prepare
their students to be productive citizens. They struggle with budgets
wholly inadequate to their classroom needs. They struggle to inspire
kids who have never known a family member — not an aunt, not an uncle,
certainly not a parent — to attend college, much less earn a diploma.
Kids who face pressures that would buckle the knees of most adults —
you have not experienced the whole of Houston until you’ve sat down with
a 16-year-old who’s taking all AP classes while holding down a
30-hour-a-week busboy job, because without his paycheck, the family
would lose their home — find solace and sanctuary at school. Every
single public high school in Houston has kids like that. And every
single kid like that has teachers and principals who are killing
themselves to give those kids every chance to succeed.
Photo: Laura Skelding, MBO
Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, French-cuffed
Pharisee.
All of them, teachers and administrators, teachers and
students, struggle against the easy fixes of our state leaders, those
French-cuffed Pharisees who breeze into town from time to time,
attending special invitation “conversations” in rooms filled with
middle-aged white people just like them, where they solemnly shake their
jowls and bemoan the problems in “the inner city” and announce that
vouchers and charter schools will make everything all better.
In Houston, the “inner city” is everywhere. Dan Patrick
doesn’t seem to understand that. It’s in Sunnyside and Denver Harbor.
It’s in Aldine and Spring, a blown kiss (or a waved middle finger, take
your pick) away from the forested affluence of Kingwood and The
Woodlands, places where the Dan Patricks of the world congregate. It’s
in Alief and Galena Park, Rosenberg and Galveston, Spring Branch and
Pasadena.
For thirty years, we have fidgeted and wrangled over equitable school
finance. We have filed suits and countersuits. Our leaders have turned a
deaf ear to teachers, parents, and administrators, and left two
generations of our kids to twist slowly in the new digital economy. We
have slowly starved our schools. And we’ve built football stadiums.
There’s always money for football stadiums. Now, when the crisis is
ripe, our lieutenant governor comes to Houston, cooing soft words about
our troubled inner cities, and declaring that the solution is “school
choice.”
This state, like the rest of the United States, was built on the
notion of universal public education. The school was the center point
of the community: It was the one building in the neighborhood that
belonged to everyone, no matter their race, their creed, or their
gender. We all had a place there. We all had a stake there. And that
common stake, that sense of place, enabled a collection of farmers and
factory workers to raise children that became scientists and poets and
world-changers. The public school gave us hope. It inspired people to
look past the troubled places, to believe that there was a reason to
believe. It made us America.
Dan Patrick needs to think about that the next time he comes to town for a conversation.
Cort McMurray is a Houston-area businessman and a frequent contributor to Gray Matters.
I published this awhile back in the Rio Grande Guardian and can no longer find it on their website. So I am re-publishing it here. It speaks to the elder epistemology that informs our work in Academia Cuauhtli, and in Ethnic Studies, in general.
-Angela
A Reflection on Age and Generation: Last Weekend’s Raza Unida Party
Reunion in Austin
by Angela Valenzuela
July 14, 2012
I had the wonderful opportunity of being able to attend the
40-year anniversary of the Raza Unida Party at a reunion in Austin last
weekend.I have been reflecting on a
comment made by a young person attending the reunion: “You older folks need to make
way for the younger generation.”“In
whose way are they standing?” I thought to myself.Mal
educado, ese muchacho. Poor
manners.What a silly thing for a young
person to say, generally, but particularly at a Raza Unida Party reunion
attended by activists.
Just prior to the conference, one of our elders, the
renowned Martha Cotera, shared this dicho
with me in the context of a conversation that we were having about our
political identities and nurturing the next generation:"Al que a buen árbol se arrima, buena
sombra le cobija." ("If we get close to a good tree, a good shade
covers us.")This is a statement
about mentorship.We shouldn’t bask in
someone’s shadow, but rather in their shade.Mentorship experiences should be that nurturing and fulfilling.
We need our elders. They offer much wisdom, knowledge, and
experience that the younger generation can still benefit from. As I spoke to members of this earlier
generation before and during the conference, what became evident is how the
movement energy lit an unquenchable fire for social justice, with many holding
leadership positions and positions of high esteem within our communities to
this very day. Martha Cotera is a great
example of one of them.
This was and remains a formidable generation that has left
our community and the world with a continuing and enduring legacy in the
righteous struggle for civil and human rights.This was a generation that decided that being Mexican and speaking
Spanish was not only a private identity, but a public one, as well.
This generation used arguments about history and identity to
lay claim to their charter member status, not as immigrants but as natives to
this land of the Southwest.
This generation talked back to oppression and said: “We didn't cross the border; the border
crossed us."
Like Gloria Anzaldua says in her landmark text, BORDERLANDS/LA
FRONTERA, there isn’t a Tejano or a Tejana alive who doesn’t know that the
lands were taken away.
A lot of these persons—if not most—have continued to be civically
engaged in one way or another.And many
of them are now retired and with more time on their hands.They were young activists forty years ago;
they are young, retiring Baby Boomers today. This was and remains and exceptional
generation regardless of their age and we need them now more than ever.
Note: If you would like to cite this piece, here is how I have cited it:
Valenzuela, A. (2012)
Reflection on age and generation: Last weekend’s Raza Unida Party reunion in
Austin. Rio Grande Guardian. Retrieved
October 31, 2014 from http://www.riograndeguardian.com/archives_results.asp
"Personalized learning" is a trendy topic right now. A multi-year RAND analysis that the Gates Foundation that you can read in full here is behind this large study of 40 schools that have embraced the idea of personalized learning (PL) defined as:
Learner profiles, which provide a record of each student's "strengths, needs, motivations, progress, and goals;"
Personal learning paths, which allow for variability in the content and instructional approaches that each student experiences;
Competency-based progressions, in which each student's progress is determined by mastery of key skills and ideas; and
Flexible learning environments, in which schools can adapt their use
of staff, space, and time in order to support greater personalization.
Net effect? Modest gains. Based on what this piece suggests, this study was otherwise blind to cultural, social, economic, and political dynamics that inform the schooling process. Some think that these gains are sufficient to move forward with the personalized learning agenda. I think so, too, because PL isn't just a variable of interest, but an important value that should inform ALL student learning. However, how they define and theorize it is key. I think that they would get much more bang for their buck if they went beyond their focus on "minority students from low income families" receiving PL and defined it to include programs that implement Ethnic Studies and bilingual education since these approaches, if well designed, staffed, and remunerated, are already second to none in terms of what the research says. What makes them "personalized" is that they speak at once, albeit to varying degrees, to the personal and social, political, cultural, and economic aspects and dimensions of being bilingual, as well as members of ethnic and racial groups in U.S. society. The research community needs to read the Ethnic Studies and bilingual education research literature before they invest another trillion into this research trajectory. Schools that implement authentic assessment is another area worth incorporating in light of its known successes. Though not surprising, it's still odd to me that such highly germane concerns like race, ethnicity, language, difference, and power are left entirely out of the equation. We should have learned by now the limits of de-contextualized, abstracted empiricism and methodological individualism which fail to systematically take structures and interlocking systems of oppression into account at the outset, rather than at the end as a policy implication based on teacher reports of structural difficulties in implementing personalized learning environments. (Where's my yawn emoji?) This stubborn myopia pervades so much education research. When will they learn?
There's
new evidence to suggest that customizing instruction for every student
can generate modest gains in math and reading scores, according to a
report released today by the RAND Corp.
Despite the promising signs, though, the researchers behind the most
comprehensive ongoing study to date of personalized learning describe
their latest findings as a "cautionary tale" about a trend whose
popularity—and backing from philanthropists, venture capitalists, and
the ed-tech industry—far outpaces its evidence base.
"It's important to set expectations," John F. Pane, a senior
scientist and the distinguished chair in education innovation at RAND,
said in an interview. "This may not work everywhere, and it requires
careful thought about the context that enables it to work well."
Pane is a lead author of "Informing Progress: Insights on Personalized Learning Implementation and Effects,"
the third and most recent study in a multi-year RAND analysis being
funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (The Gates Foundation
has provided support in the past for coverage of personalized learning
in Education Week.)
How Personalized Learning Plays Out in Reality
In the world of K-12 education, personalized learning generally
means using software and other digital technologies to tailor
instruction to each student's strengths and weaknesses, interests and
preferences, and optimal pace of learning. The idea has gained
significant traction with groups such as the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, which has given more than $300 million to related
initiatives since 2009, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which says
it intends to invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually into efforts to bring its own vision of personalized learning to scale. Research evidence to date has been thin, however.
And on the ground, the RAND team found that personalized learning
remains hard to distinguish, harder to implement, and even harder to
expand and replicate across schools. Continue reading here.
Big news coming out of El Paso. They are launching a "Chicano Studies" online program out of the University of Texas El Paso (UTEP). If you are not from the U.S., it is important to know that there is a direct tie of the self-referent, "Chicano," to the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement that took place in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s in it hey day. Names and labels are complicated, as I've commented previously here on this blog before.
Among the other names for Chicano Studies, by the way, are "Mexican American Studies," "Tejano Studies" (in Texas), and "Mexican American and Latino Studies" (as we have here in Austin at UT).
Though from a disciplinary perspective, there is overlap, Chicano Studies is not the same as Latin American Studies which focuses largely on Latin America instead of the domestic. U.S. population. This is, of necessity, a broad stroke since many scholars' work overlaps. That said, these are very distinct disciplines with distinct intellectual concerns, frameworks, bodies of knowledge, conferences, scholarly identities, journal/publishing outlets, and so on.
Back to UTEP. I would think that the decision to name themselves was an involved ordeal like it usually is. Regardless, what should not get lost in the mix are at least the following three items that are worthy of note:
First, the enduring affinity to that moment in history when our 60s and 70s activists first called for culturally inclusive curriculum in our public schools as part of a larger struggle for transforming the challenging social, cultural, political, and economic conditions that they faced.
Second, this is occurring in the context of what truly is a robust revival of the movement's call for Mexican American Studies curriculum in the current moment—and not just in Texas, but also in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Oregon.
In Texas, to the best of my knowledge, the following districts—all very large—have endorsed Ethnic Studies and are in the process of developing curriculum: Austin ISD, El Paso ISD, and Fort Worth ISD.
Lastly, all of this is happening in the wake of the successful #RejectTheText battle involving a racist textbook, against the Texas State Board of Education that has roots in an earlier statewide initiative in 2012 by the Mexican American community, spearheaded by South Texas banker, Renato Ramirez and the Tejano Monument Committee, to establish a Tejano Monument on the grounds of the Texas State Capitol.
So now Texas, UTEP, in particular, boasts an on-line Chicano Studies curriculum. It is encouraging and inspiring to consider that now the world has access to Chicano Studies (Note: see this website scholar-led website, MAS Texas Education , for additional curriculum and other resources). It is not only a new day, but a long-awaited one.
Remember that, as bellwether states, so goes California and Texas, so goes the nation. Rather than resisting this, our school boards, school districts, schools, and states should embrace it and join the movement for Ethnic Studies. If done well, you and your children will be the better for it anyway. I promise. 😀
The Chicano Studies Program at The University of Texas at El Paso has recently launched a new online Bachelor of Arts in Chicano Studies option enabling students across the United States and around the globe to have access to one of the oldest and most respected Chicano Studies programs in the nation.
In 1971, UTEP became the first university in Texas to introduce a Chicano Studies program.
UTEP’s online option will follow a similar curriculum to that of the University’s on-campus Bachelor of Arts in Chicano Studies program with one major difference: online students will be able to attend classes from anywhere in the world they have a computer and Internet access.
“There are large concentrations of ethnic Mexicans residing throughout the country who hunger for knowledge about history and culture, who want to see themselves in the grand narrative of the United States,” said Dennis Bixler-Márquez, Ph.D., director of Chicano Studies. “This program provides them with that space.”
The multi- and interdisciplinary Chicano Studies program is 100 percent online and is ideal for aspiring professionals seeking to work in positions (both in the private and public sector) that require knowledge of the Mexican origin population together with literacy and digital communication skills.
The curriculum emphasizes the dynamics of the U.S.-Mexico border and the Latino presence throughout the nation and provides an opportunity for students to link that knowledge with other disciplines and professional careers. Chicano Studies majors will complete 30 hours of core courses in Chicano literature, cultural diversity, immigration, social justice and more.
UTEP’s strategic location on the U.S.-Mexico border will enable students to gain substantial expertise on the historical, cultural and geographic context of the Mexican origin population – the largest ethnic minority group in the U.S.
Chicano Studies majors will engage with students from different backgrounds through online group work and discussion boards. They also will also develop team, organizational and planning skills and become proficient with computer software programs.
Chicano Studies graduates often continue on to law school, public health administration, social work, national security, and master’s and doctoral programs in these areas and more.
The online program is offered through UTEP Connect, the University’s collection of fully online baccalaureate, graduate and certificate programs.
For information about the online Bachelor of Arts in Chicano Studies, visit their website.
To learn more about the UTEP Connect suite of programs, visit utepconnect.utep.edu.
There's
new evidence to suggest that customizing instruction for every student
can generate modest gains in math and reading scores, according to a
report released today by the RAND Corp.
