Arizona ups the ante in insanity
 

After making national headlines for a new law on illegal immigrants, the Arizona Legislature passed a bill Thursday that would ban ethnic studies programs in the state that critics say currently advocate separatism and racial preferences.

The bill, which passed 32-26 in the state House, had been approved by the Senate a day earlier. It now goes to Gov. Jan Brewer for her signature.

The new bill would make it illegal for a school district to teach any courses that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."

The bill stipulates that courses can continue to be taught for Native American pupils in compliance with federal law and does not prohibit English as a second language classes. It also does not prohibit the teaching of the Holocaust or other cases of genocide.

Schools that fail to abide by the law would have state funds withheld.


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Wtf? Ok, half of that sounds good but half is BS. Oh Arizona. Really now?

Has this been a problem in Arizona? Do some schools have courses in Beginner Sedition?

I was thinking the same thing.

I wonder if "African American Studies" or similar courses are affected by this. They don't necessarily exist for specific ethnic groups, buuuut...

Good bye learning about Civil Rights Movement.

What is the rational basis for this classification?

What with this and the way those Texans are picking and choosing which historical figures and what events they will teach about, I weep for the next generation of learners. Seriously.

I can't even wrap my mind around the absurdity of this bill. It is sublime.

Wow. I thought this was going to be an Onion article when I first started reading the post. As an anthropology major and as a human being who enjoys learning about others... this is sad.

Maybe Arizona is just trying to set the stage for seceding from the US and becoming its own country. "You don't like our laws? Fine, we don't like yours. It's over- we are breaking up!"

I also saw this article today in the Wall Street Journal about interesting education policy in Arizona. I haven't seen it on GC yet, and this thread brought it to mind. There are some interesting things happening in that state right now (to say the least).

^Interesting article. Thanks for sharing. I think the law/policy/whatever means well- I know when I'm learning a language, I am very particular on the accent because I want to get it right. And I do think that a teacher using proper grammar is important. But good intentions are often taken too far. This piece in particular got to me:

So what about Bostonians who pronounce harbor as "haba", southerners that say y'all, or Minnesotans that say you betcha, doncha know, or end questions/statements with eh? I'm overgeneralizing, I know, but still. We have a lot of accents in this country and they come from a lot of different areas of the world.

It gets better, Az has the 3rd worst grade avg in THE US (and for some odd reason not surprisingly ALASKA is 2nd...Palin lovers)


Now let's sit back and wait to see what Texas comes up with to outdo this.

"Anything you can do i can do dumberer..."

do they define what an "ethnic studies program" is?

Pssst.. they are listed in alphabetical order, not order of "worst" to "best". You can sort by best to worst and the worst are Nevada, Nebraska and DC (also depicted by the color of the states)

Exactly. I'll be interested in seeing how this is enforced. I agree that students should have teachers that are understandable, but the terms need to be very clearly defined if they're going to be removing teachers from classrooms.

LOL.

and surprisingly DC has the lowest

but AZ and AK are still in the bottom 20 percent or so.