Arizona’s schools superintendent Tom Horneis pushing legislation to ban ethnic-studies courses from high schools,specifically the 22 courses offered at four Tucson high schools inhistory, government, and literature.**
If Senate Bill 1069 becomes law, a district or charter school thatallows such courses would lose 10 percent of its state funds eachmonth. The money would be returned when the district shut down theprogram.
“The job of the public schools is to develop the student’s identityas Americans and as strong individuals,” Horne said. “It’s not the jobof the public schools to promote ethnic chauvinism.” At the last minute, Horne added two exceptions to his bill. NativeAmerican studies would be exempt because these courses are protected byfederal law. Also exempt is any grouping of students based on academicperformance, even if most of the students are predominantly from oneethnic background. This would prevent the new mandatoryfour-hours-a-day language classes for English learners from runningafoul of the law. Sen. Jonathan Paton, a Tucson Republican, issponsoring the legislation.
** Rather than simply ban all ethnic studies a better approach would be to promote (and invariably defend) Western Civilization studies for children of European extraction ONLY. –Ed