State officials have won a significant legal battle in a long-running saga over a controversial Tucson schools ethnic-studies program, with a federal judge ruling that a law designed to ban it is constitutional.
Authorities instrumental in the law’s passage said Monday that they feel vindicated in their efforts to ban what they deemed to be racially divisive courses in public schools.
Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne, who helped craft the law and personally argued the case in Tucson, called the decision “a victory for ensuring that public education is not held captive to radical, political elements and that students treat each other as individuals — not on the basis of the race they were born into.”
The challenge to the new state law was initially launched in 2010 by teachers of the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American studies program, which offered a slate of history, government and literature classes at four high schools. They had claimed the law infringed the constitutional rights of Hispanic teachers and students to free speech and equal protection.
The program was discontinued by the Tucson Unified School District’s governing board in January 2012 after an administrative law judge determined that the program presented material in a “biased, political and emotionally charged manner.”
Proponents of the curriculum said the classes connected students — including those with Native American, Mexican-American, Asian-American and African-American heritages — to their cultural past and their roles in American history. District data showed that students who took the courses performed better on standardized tests.
A former student of the program intervened to carry the case on the teachers’ behalf when they were dismissed as plaintiffs.
Judge A. Wallace Tashima, in a ruling released Friday, said objections to the law did not “meet thehigh threshold to establish a constitutional violation.”
But Tashima said a subsection that prohibits courses designed for a particular ethnic group is “unconstitutionally vague” and could have a chilling effect on “legitimate and objective ethnic studies courses.” The judge declined to issue a permanent injunction on that portion of the law and said the court has jurisdiction on any future proceedings, if warranted.
The state law, which took effect in January 2011, prohibits Arizona school districts and charter schools from offering classes that promote overthrowing theU.S. government, promote resentment for a certain race or class of people, are geared for students of a particular ethnic background, or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of recognizing students as individuals.
TUSD was not a party to the case, but spokeswoman Cara Rene said Monday that the ruling allows the district to move forward with curriculum requirements of a recently finalized desegregation plan. The plan was the outgrowth of a 40-year-old case in which several families had accused the district of discrimination.
Rene said the district can now implement its plan without fear that any classes created in the plan would violate the subsection deemed unconstitutional. All future classes, including those created to meet the desegregation plan’s requirements, are subject to the other sections of state law.
But those who want to reinstate the Mexican-American studies program say Tashima’s order is not the final word.
Challengers of the law released a statement through Tucson-based Ethnic Studies Group, a coalition of educators, students and community members who want to save the TUSD program, saying they were considering whether to seek reconsideration of the decision or file an appeal with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Whatever it decides, the group said it will continue to seek an end to Arizona’s prohibition of certain ethnic studies. In its statement, the group said the law “is the product of fear and a profound misunderstanding of the role of culture, language and history.”
“These are areas of learning that do not divide us as a nation but provide a vehicle to promote understanding, respect and success,” the statement said. “We cannot allow this fear to spread to other jurisdictions and eliminate important programs that already exist or the development of new programs.”
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal, who wrote the law as a state senator with help from then-Superintendent Horne, had declared the TUSD program illegal after a state Education Department review and subsequent validation from an administrative law judge. In the face of punitive funding cuts, TUSD’s governing board “suspended” Mexican-American studies in January 2012.
In a statement issued Monday, Huppenthal’s office said, “This decision best serves the educational interests of students, teachers and parents while upholding the important tenets of the state law.”
