This past Friday, the Phoenix Human Relations Commission hosted a brown-bag lunch featuring TUSD’s Augustine Romero to discuss the “oft-criticized Mexican-American Studies program.” Mr. Romero told the crowd “never lie to your friends because they will never trust you so I have to be honest with you all cause I think we have developed a friendship over the year and when you walk out of here you have to have the ability to trust what I say to be true.”
Mr. Romero does not work in the Mexican American Studies department, nor has he worked in the Mexican American Studies department for at least two years.
Mr. Romero told the audience that he was poor.
Mr. Romero makes over $90,000 a year, and two sources report that he lives in a gated community.
Mr. Romero told the audience that “we have a graduation rate of 97.5 percent as compared to about 44 percent nationally what this mean is that about 70 percent of our students go to college, matriculate from college, versus nationally 44 percent now when we do the math on that you will see that our students go to college at a rate that is 197 percent higher than the national average… 197 percent higher than the national average.”
According to the data TUSD’s statistician David Scott released, the overall graduation rate for MAS students is 83%. The overall graduation rate for Mexican American students who never took a MAS class is also 83%. While the low income and very low income students who take MAS classes graduate at slightly higher rates than those who never took such a class, the graduation rates for all other MAS students is lower than the graduation rates for Mexican American students who never took a single MAS class.
The 97.5% figure Romero cites is actually the percent of high school seniors in the MAS program who graduate, while the 44% Romero cites is not derived from the same sort of calculation. This is an example of the way to compute a graduation rate that is designed to mislead the public and has been strongly criticized by Gary Orfield of UCLA Civil Rights Project.
Mr. Romero told the audience that he was tasked by the district to close the achievement gap.
Contrary to Romero’s statement, the achievement gap between Mexican American students has not been reduced by the MAS program. Mexican American students who do not take any MAS classes do not perform any worse than those who have taken at least one MAS class on the AIMS tests.
Mr. Romero used desegregation monies intended to close the achievement gap to visit New Zealand with his two friends Stovall and Andrade. He has used those monies to attend a conference in New Orleans. At least one Governing Board member has yet to receive a requested report on how those trips served the students and closed the achievement gap.
Mr. Romero told the audience that he commissioned at study in 2007 to evaluate all of the district’s Ethnic Studies departments. He told the audience that the study determined the MAS department to be the flagship program for the district.
Mr. Romero commissioned a study in 2006 that was conducted by two of his very close friends and New Zealand travel buddies, Andrade and Stovall. The study was never released to the public until the public school advocacy group TU4SD published it. The district did not publish it because, as is typical of work produced by proponents of critical race pedagogy, it was determined to be anti-Asian.
The study harshly criticized all other departments for failing to focus on the very aspects of the MAS program that so many in the public and the Arizona legislature find objectionable, the creation of resentment among groups of students. At the time it was originally released, all other departments complained about the study. As a result of challenges to the findings, it was unavailable until 2011.
Mr. Romero told the Friday audience that he was “going to get spiritual” and asked their permission to do so. He told a long story about his career, covering almost one third of the lunch hour. The story concluded with his father’s words, “do you know what the apostles called Jesus? And I said No dad I don’t. And he said they called him teacher. And he said, ‘You know that is your legacy to the world. You have to uphold that legacy.”
Mr. Romero has drawn comparisons to himself and Christ before in other presentations.
When TUSD’s MAS classes begin to actually perform the miraculous success that Mr. Romero said they do, his comparison to Christ might be valid.
According to the Urban Dictionary “A person is who is said to have a “God complex”, does not believe he is god, but acts so arrogantly that he might as well believe his is God or appointed to act by God.”
The cult of personality created by the Mexican American Studies supporters has been noted by many professionals. Various characters in the program are strategically put in the spotlight by proponents to create a fan base of sorts to sell the program. In the past, we have seen Huppenthal portrayed as the devil and the likes of Curtis Acosta held up as martyr Christ type figure. Mr. Romero engages in the same behavior, and the uninformed seem to buy it.
“The critical educator cannot wait for the dominant group or the American structure to correct itself. The critical educator must understand that the oppressors cannot see the nature of their ways. Given this understanding, it is my belief that the dominant group is incapable of critical reflection or redemptive remembering….” Culture as a resource: Critically Compassionate intellectualism and its struggle against racism, fascism, and intellectual apartheid in Arizona, Augustine F. Romero, and Sean Martin Arce