HB 2732 Takes effect this year, hurting latinos , and costing tusd over 6 million.

Very briefly; Arizona killed Bilingual Education as a result of Prop 203 in the year 2000. What resulted was a shift into ELL and SEI that were codified in 2006 legislation with the help of Tom Horne to implement the forced segregation of Latinos into what are now known as “Mexican rooms” throughout the state, where Spanish-speakers are put into a classroom with other Spanish-speakers and they speak Spanish to each other for 4 hours a day, missing out on Algebra and Chemistry and History and all the other classes, and in the end not even learning English, and ending up with an abysmal graduation rate that is FAR BELOW the already horrible graduation rate nationwide for Latinos at 50%.

In 2010 we had three anti-Latino bills passed in Arizona. The most famous was SB1070 which become law later that year. HB2281, the Ethnic Studies ban, effectively killed the Mexican American Studies program in TUSD last year, and the third, HB2732 takes effect this year and will be devastating.

Of course, just as the other bills, it contains what appears to be race-neutral language, but when you think about who it targets, the reason Arizona passed such a bill becomes apparent.

HB2732 is now known as ARS 15-701 ”Move On When Reading” and it is lengthy (the definition of reading proficiency is in ARS 15-704 ”Arizona Reads”), but I include and excerpt from the beginning of it just you can get a flavor of what these harmless sounding bills attempt to do:

A. The state board of education shall:

2. Notwithstanding section 15-521, paragraph 3, the competency requirements for the promotion of pupils from the third grade shall include the following:

(a) A requirement that a pupil not be promoted from the third grade if the pupil obtains a score on the reading portion of the Arizona instrument to measure standards test, or a successor test, that demonstrates that the pupil’s reading falls far below the third grade level.

Once you put all the pieces of the puzzle together, you can see what will happen to Latino and Native students once this takes effect in Fall 2013.

First of all, ignoring the TEA Party’s grasp of English as demonstrated on their posters, it should be clear that students who are Spanish speakers or students on the reservations will be far more likely to be affected by this bill. So how do we remedy this?

We could use research which shows us that Bilingual Education is the best way to get these students speaking English, but that is banned in Arizona now, and furthermore students are being forcibly segregated in a way that ensures they don’t learn English in schools.

In effect, what Arizona is telling schools as a result of their draconian policies based on xenophobia and anti-Latino sentiment, Arizona is going to both hinder the learning of English for students and then punish them for failing to learn English by holding them back in the third grade indefinitely!

In a few years we will have 10-year olds in third grade, and then 12-year olds in third grade, especially in poorer communities were students cannot get access to private tutoring and instead must rely on the very school that is banned from teaching them English in the most effective way.

This also comes at a time when the state is cutting education funding, so having these added policies from Big Brother, which are fine this time since they are not restricting guns but Latinos’ access to education, has a double impact since districts will have to spend more to solve this problem at the same time that their budgets are being cut.

How much money?

Let us consider TUSD for example. At a time when we are facing a budget shortfall of $17 million dollars, which has led to the closing of 11 schools, and that was only to save about $4 million dollars, leaving $13 million that will have to be made up with massive teacher layoffs…

The TUSD board, the “pro-Latino” and “pro-Union” board run by Democrats, will approve spending $6.3 million on the SuccessMaker v5.0 software which will teach students how to read without the need of human teachers!

Following Mark Stegeman’s idea to have more of the Khan Academy in TUSD, perhaps we should just shut down all the schools in TUSD and just buy students software to work from home, or perhaps just have schools that are mere computer labs where students go to turn on, tune in and drop out.

Programs such as PE and Band are unnecessary expenses and both can be accomplished with a simple purchase of Guitar Hero.

At the TUSD meeting on January 15th and in upcoming meetings we will find the Democratic board firing teaching and replacing them computers and software. And in the end Latinos will still suffer.

The state of Arizona wants third-graders to be able to read, but when Latinos finally find books they are interested in reading, TUSD bans them from the classrooms.

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