Posted on 09/16/2012 4:04:08 PM PDT by reaganaut1
TUCSON — The forecast for the year ahead is dire, so officials in the public school district here, the oldest in the state, summoned parents to an urgent meeting one evening to lay out the options: close schools and increase class sizes or impose across-the-board pay cuts, making it harder for the district to recruit quality teachers.
In the auditorium at Cholla High Magnet School, Bryant Nodine, the planning program manager for the Tucson Unified School District, peered into the audience and pleaded for suggestions. “We need your help,” he said. The district needs to find at least $17 million in savings, about 7 percent of the money in its general fund, he said, to balance its budget for 2013-14 school year.
Meanwhile, at the district’s central offices, Maria Figueroa was busy sifting through résumés and rearranging her calendar to squeeze in one more interview. As the director of a new program intended to help the district’s perennially struggling Hispanic students, by far the majority of the enrollment, Ms. Figueroa enjoys a rare distinction: she has jobs to fill and money to hire.
She also has a big task — mending the fences broken by the dismantling of the Mexican-American studies department last school year after an acrimonious debate over the politics of its curriculum and the type of activism it had promoted. A 2010 law banning lessons that fostered racial resentment and solidarity among members of a single ethnic group, drafted as legislators worked to frame the state’s controversial immigration bill, eventually killed the program. Facing persistent financial problems, the school district buckled under the threat of millions of dollars in fines.
Instead of classes about historical realities and the everyday experiences of Mexican-Americans, once a hallmark of the department, Ms. Figueroa’s program will offer tutoring to Hispanic students
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Years ago, when the Vietnamese refugees were coming into the Houston school district, teachers were aghast at how they would manage their education. They arrived not knowing a word of English. Many were orphaned by the war or pirates that attacked them at sea and killed their parents in front of them.
But the teachers needn’t have worried. These students joyfully tackled the language and moved on to excel in their studies. In spite of working many hours to help their families or to support themselves, many graduated at the top of their high school graduating classes.
The lazy and the coddled will never succeed because they’ve been given excuses to fail all their lives.
Tucson schools can’t seem to get over pushing that Hispanic Ku Klux Klan La Raza Astlan/Reconquista nonsense.
They would serve their Hispanic students much better by teaching them the subjects that would make them successful in America....not by teaching them the Hispanic/Mestizo version of “Lebensraum”
What an uplifting story. Thank-you!
Get government out of education. Privatize! That is the only thing that will cure education’s woes.
But...But...how are they supposed to know that it's Whitey's fault that they're stupid, lazy and violent if they cancel the "Hate Whitey" classes that Whitey is paying for?
We have to pressure Republicans to stop birthright citizenship.
Where do they get those spiffy uniforms?
No idea...
And without the expensive programs needed to make them successful students.
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