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Title : Ethnic Studies in Seattle Schools
link : Ethnic Studies in Seattle Schools

Ethnic Studies in Seattle Schools

 (Editor's note: you are welcome to chime in with ideas, feedback, whatever.  You are welcome to disagree with my viewpoint.  You are not welcome to personally attack me.  I should not have to say that but there are a few people who have made it their mission to deny my own ethnic background for their own purposes.  This thread is about this subject, not me.)

You may have seen the article on KUOW that the district is considering a proposal from the NAACP for ethnic studies throughout Seattle schools and that it be a graduation requirement. 

"In Washington state, it’s mandatory that you have to teach Native American history, but it’s not mandatory that you have to teach ethnic studies for other cultures," said Rita Green, the NAACP Education Chair. (Tribal history became mandatory in 2015.)

Given that Native Americans were here for a much longer time than anyone else, that 2015 date is not all that impressive. 

The NAACP proposal does not strictly define ethnic studies, but the subject is often described as an interdisciplinary study of power, race, ethnicity and national origin, often including gender and sexual orientation, from the perspectives of marginalized groups.

Last year, Portland Public Schools made ethnic studies part of the required high school curriculum. And there’s a bill in the Washington state legislature to create a model ethnic studies curriculum for middle and high school students. That’s something California will soon do for its high schools.

The NAACP’s model would go further, and make ethnic studies part of required courses at every school in Seattle, and a graduation requirement. The roll-out would begin in 2017, and be in full effect in 2019. 

Director Rick Burke, Chair of the Curriculum and Instruction Committee, has said the committee will review the proposal.

I totally agree that the history of our country and our state should have ALL its history - the good, the bad and the ugly -the contributions and the challenges and the sorrows and injustices.

But I believe that it should be embedded in history classes and not as a standalone course.  Why?

1) Teaching history is not going anywhere.  It is my observation that whenever you add on courses, those are the first to go when money/time get scarce.  This is too important to allow that possibility.  Embed it into the history curriculum and it's there to stay.  It absolutely should happen but in a way that sustains it.

2) I've gotten pushback on my stance because there isn't good embedded history curriculum with ethnic studies.  I also observe that teachers have been creating curriculum since teaching started.  There are good books out there and I believe it can be done. 

The KUOW story reports on teacher Jon Greenberg's social justice and civic engagement class.

Again, I see this growing pattern in the district of equating issues like ethnic studies and racial equity as being the same thing as teaching about social justice.  Surely the former are part of the latter but they are not the same things.  

Other good reading on this topic comes from The Atlantic, The Ongoing Battle Over Ethnic Studies.

The article starts from what I knew had happened in my home state of Arizona, where there are very large numbers of Mexican-Americans and a long and deep history with Mexico. 

In Tucson, Arizona, Che Guevara posters and Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed are the spark that set off a heated conflict over ethnic studies that has made national headlines for years. For critics, including two former state schools superintendents, the Mexican American studies program in the Tucson Unified School District is little more than divisive propaganda: “ethnic chauvinism” with a “very toxic effect … in an educational setting.” For supporters, reading literature on Chicano history in America and critical race theory is intended to close cultural gaps in the curriculum—and to close academic gaps for the district’s Hispanic students.

I would be highly suspicious of anyone who did not want students to know the full history of our country/state. 

But, I can see how pushback could come from those who would want ethnic studies presented in a dispassionate manner i.e. not blaming.    I'm not sure the history of any country can be given dispassionately but I think it can be taught in a manner that informs and not accuses.  There is blame aplenty to go around for what our country has done to minorities but the goal must be clear about what the class is to achieve.  The why and how should be made clear.

 No matter how you do it, it is likely some students will be uncomfortable and/or challenged.  (That is learning in a nutshell, although this may be more personal than the discomfort of challenges of alegebra.)

Ethnic-studies courses dispel myths, Brooks said, and build connections among students as opposed to divisions. “Similar to students of color, white students have been miseducated about the roles of both whites and people of color throughout history,” she said, and culturally relevant lessons allow white children to “not only learn about people of color, but also white people’s roles as oppressors and activists fighting for racial change. This is very important because often whites feel there is nothing [they] can do to change racism.”

From the article on history around ethnic studies and recent studies:

In 1994, Berkeley High in California became one of the first high schools in the country to offer ethnic studies, the program facing opposition even in a town known to be a bastion of progressive thinking. More recently, Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest school district, added an ethnic-studies course to its high-school graduation requirements.

Yet even as enthusiasts have called for more ethnic-studies programs—and the debate rages on over making the identities of black, Asian, Native American, and Latino students the centerpiece of class instruction—notably absent was data linking culturally relevant pedagogy specifically to measurable student gains. This changed this year with new research that shows ethnic-studies classes boost student attendance, GPAs, and high-school credits for a key student group—a pivotal finding that brings hard evidence to the dispute over adding these courses in public schools.

The improvements were significant: Attendance jumped by 21 percentage points, grade-point average by 1.4 points, and students in ethnic-studies courses covering discrimination, stereotypes, and social-justice movements earned 23 more credits toward graduation. Overall, the largest gains were found among boys and Hispanic students, and in the subjects of math and science.

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