The Tucson Unified School District administration allowed its students to enroll in Mexican American Studies classes which will resume January 3, despite the fact that they had been found to violate Arizona state law. TUSD Board member Michael Hicks is demanding that the district, “act with the district’s students’ best educational interests in mind” and has told Dr. Pedicone that he believes the district should immediately suspend the MAS classes “until such a time as they conform with the laws of the state of Arizona.”
“Since the district did not take prudent steps to change the classes, we must now act swiftly in the best interest of the districts’ students and stakeholders.”
Contrary to the request for an injunction by the MAS teachers and their children in federal lawsuit, based on their claim that they need the court’s protection from losing their jobs, Hicks says that “the Mexican American Studies teachers must be reassigned to classes which comply with the law, and which they are qualified to teach.”
Hicks says “that we must not surrender to the political agendas of small factions of ideologues. An unbiased finder of fact reviewed the materials and found the classes validated three of the four sections of the law.”
“I approved the appeal to allow an objective fact finder to determine in an unbiased and apolitical manner if and how TUSD is out of compliance”. We must now honor the judge’s ruling and have a public discussion of the issue before allowing anymore children to be harmed by these classes and putting all of our students and stakeholders at risk of losing millions of precious educational dollars.
The district’s own expert witness testified that the classes create disequilibrium in students. The expert then told the judge that he did not know if the district offered a remedy for the disequilibrium. The state’s expert, Dr. Stotsky testified that creating “disequilibrium” is not and should not be used as a pedagogical practice. Instead educators should use “scaffolding” to introduce new information that “may jar” students.
Despite the evidence, Board member Adelita Grijalva wants to appeal the judge’s decision. To date the district has spent approximately $180,000 on the defense of their Mexican American Studies classes, which is the equivalent of 5 teachers’, or one and a half administrators’ salaries, or utilities for one year at Richie School, which the district closed for lack of funds.
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TUSD’s MAS curriculum for grades K-12 includes Aztec spirituality Part II
Social Justice Math for TUSD’s Mexican American Studies third graders