New Arizona Bills Continue Targeting of Minority Groups, Critics Say
by: Yana Kunichoff, t r u t h o u t | Report
Tucson students stage a sit-in at the Tucson United School District's administration building, protesting the recently passed bills that ban ethnic studies classes and prevent teachers with accents from teaching English courses. (Photo: detritus / Flickr)
Tucson's Unified School District is 56 percent Latino, but you may not know it by the changes in the curriculum. According to billsrecently passed in the Arizona state legislature, the Mexican-American studies program may no longer be offered, and you certainly won't be hearing any Spanish-inflected vowels in English-language classes.
Arizona has banned the school district from offering any courses that are designed for students primarly of a certain race, "promote the overthrow of the U.S. government . . . or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals" at the risk of losing up to ten percent of their funding, and told schools state-wide that teachers with "heavy" or "ungrammatical" accents are no longer allowed to teach English classes.
Governor Jan Brewer signed these bills into law less than a month after penning her name to some of the most restrictive immigration legislation