The federal judge in the TUSD desegregation case has ordered the District to begin offering culturally relevant courses. Wasting no time, TUSD Governing Board president Adelita Grijalva has scheduled an “Emergency” School Board meeting for Friday afternoon.
U.S. District Judge David Bury adopted the new plan, known as the Unitary Status Plan, developed by Special Master Willis Hawley.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ordered the 30 year old desegregation case back to Judge Bury’s court last year after it found that the District had acted in bad faith in the last Court Order issued by Bury.
Ignoring the ruling by the Ninth Circuit and the District’s history of bad faith, Bury once again relies on the District to act in good faith while implementing the new multi-cultural classes and changes in hiring practices. Bury writes, “the State, like the Plaintiffs, must set aside what has occurred in TUSD in the past and assume, as does this Court, that the USP will be implemented in good faith by the District.”
Augie Romero, the master-mind behind the Critical Race based “Barrio Pedagogy” which was the foundation of the former Mexican American Studies classes is the District’s current creator of the new multi-cultural curriculum. The court fails to cite any reason to believe that the District has any interest or intention of developing a Mexican American studies curriculum “in good faith.”
The judge notes that the empirical evidence that shows the classes are successful has been found by some to be “weak,” but finds that “the culturally relevant courses in the USP affords the parties an opportunity to continue to study the effects of these types of classes on student achievement.”
Bury denies the State’s “request to intervene as a right,” but allows the State “to monitor the development of the culturally relevant courses and their implementation.” Finding that the State is “free to enforce its laws as it did in 2011 when it took action against TUSD for the MAS courses, if it believes any culturally relevant courses developed and implemented in TUSD violate state law.”
The Court dodges the fact that other courts have found that federal courts may not order curriculum, by finding that this court is not exceeding “its authority by approving and adopting the USP, containing curricular provisions,” because “this Court is not approving nor adopting any specific culturally relevant course. This Court’s ruling does not override State law, and even if it did– the Supreme Court has held that state laws cannot be allowed to impede a desegregation order.”
However, the judge ignored the fact that normally in desegregation cases, when addressing curriculum, the courts have acted to remove offending curriculum when that contain vestiges of or promote discrimination. In the TUSD case, plaintiffs never argued that discriminatory curriculum was a concern.
In fact, for 30 years the focus had been primarily on eliminating vestiges of past discrimination in the areas of discipline, student assignment, student achievement, and school operations until the State of Arizona found that the Mexican American Studies classes taught students to resent people based on ethnicity and segregated students by ethnicity.
The Court noted opposition to the classes by the State, and claimed that it could not ignore the “several hundred comments from members of the general community that MAS courses have merit.” For months, Critical Race Theory activists have conducted a massive letter writing campaign and according to District insiders, the Special Master sought outside support for the MAS classes.
However, when members of the public contacted the Special Master Willis Hawley with objections to the classes, they were met with critical or dismissive responses from Hawley. Later, when confronted about the treatment by Hawley, federal officials involved in the public hearing process said they “didn’t want to know about it.”
The judge also implied that the District’s Governing Board supported the classes, but conceded an end to the classes only based on the State’s ability to withhold funding. In fact, the Court appeared to ignore any authentic opposition to the classes including a letter sent to the Court outlining objections to the classes immediately before the Court’s deadline for public input. The letter was co-signed by nearly 200 Arizona residents.
The Court Order that the “District shall pilot the expansion of courses designed to reflect the history, experiences, and culture of African American and Mexican American communities to sixth through eighth graders in the 2014-2015 school year, and shall explore similar expansions throughout the K-12 curriculum in the 2015-2016 school year.”
Judge Bury reaffirmed his “decision to deny the intervention of the State of Arizona in this action. The State has not satisfied the criteria for intervention as a right.” The State was given 14 days to explain to the Court why is should have a right to intervene in the matter.
A ruling by federal Judge Wallace Tashima is expected soon. Tashima is considering the right of the State to have a say in type of classes it deems lawful.