TUSD’s MAS social engineering exposed

Arizona Republic columnist Doug MacEachern exposes the tangled web of social engineers behind TUSD’s Mexican American Studies program in column that appeared this weekend. MacEachren outlines the recent federal court decision will paves the way for ideologues to grab classrooms away from educators and place it in the hands of indoctrinators.

Bit of leftist engineering in Tucson expensive
by Doug MacEachren for the Arizona Republic

Federal Judge David C. Bury has released his plan for dispatching racial segregation in the Tucson Unified School District, and, as expected, it includes all manner of social engineering and good intentions.

At a cost of $60 million per year, the judge’s plan — just the latest in this 37-year-old desegregation case — will have unpleasant, unplanned consequences, the worst of which almost certainly will include what Judge Bury seeks to avoid: an inferior, ideology-ridden education for the mostly poor, mostly minority students at woebegotten TUSD.

Before Bury’s decision on Wednesday, TUSD already had spent about $158 per student more on administration overhead than the state average. Now, per Bury, it will hire dozens of minority advisers, counselors and recruiters. The district will spend still more on adults busying themselves outside TUSD’s classrooms.

Student discipline in an already chaotic environment will worsen, given Bury’s order that disciplinary discrepancies between minorities and Anglos must magically disappear. There is no real-world way for that to happen except with unspoken policy of ignoring bad behavior by some students and punishing others.

And … yes … TUSD’s ethnic-studies program is about to make its triumphant return.

Bury now identifies the courses as “culturally relevant” classes. It is a euphemism. Bury’s culturally-relevant curricula are being designed for TUSD by Augustine Romero, the same person who designed the courses identifying the genocidal, disease-spreading “European invader” as the usurper of Hispanic students’ Aztec legacy.

For all those giddy Marxists and Friere-ians at the Mexican-American studies department, this is going to be like May Day in Red Square.

Judge Bury assured that pre-ordained outcome when he hired Willis Hawley as the “special master” to oversee the process of constructing a new, non-segregationist TUSD.

A professor emeritus in education at the University of Maryland, Hawley is a well-established advocate of race-conscious education policies. Hawley’s ideas of “culturally responsive pedagogy” are largely interchangeable with those of Romero and the entire cast of education revolutionaries and university activists supporting Romero’s vision.

They are of a tight circle of race-centric education theorists. They cite each other. They feed off each other. And, as we see now at TUSD, they prop up each other’s missions.

In a paper that Hawley wrote on culturally-responsive pedagogy in 2011, he cited as reference the work of Romero and the University of Arizona’s Julio Cammarota, a zealot on behalf of Romero’s program at TUSD.

Reference citations in Hawley’s writings on race and education amount to a Who’s Who of invitees to the notorious summer “transformative” seminars co-sponsored by TUSD’s Mexican-American studies program and its activist-supporters at nearby UA.

Hawley has written supportively regarding the radical race-education theories of academics like Jeffrey Duncan Andrade, Jason Irizarry and David Stovall — all of whom (according to TUSD records) were compensated, featured speakers at the transformative seminars sponsored by MAS. Hawley is a member of that tribe.

Nowhere is the evidence of Hawley’s prejudices clearer than in his selection of Nolan Cabrera and Jeffrey Milem, both of UA, to perform an allegedly independent statistical study of the performance of the Romero-designed MAS program at TUSD.

Whatever its academic efficacy (and it has been resoundingly trashed by experts), their “Empirical Study of the Effects of Mexican American Studies Participation on Student Achievement” is anything but independent.

Milem testified in 2011 in behalf of the MAS program during the investigation into whether the program broke state law. He has been an enthusiastic booster of both the MAS classes and the department’s “transformative” seminars for years.

Cabrera, meanwhile, is not merely an on-the-record advocate of Romero’s program, he identifies himself on his own resume as being under contract with MAS.

Under “Academic Activities/Service,” Cabrera cites himself as: “Statistical consultant, Department of Mexican American Studies, Tucson Unified School District, 2010- present.”

Cabrera contends……  for the rest of the article click here.