Just the other day the State of Tennessee announced they will no longer hire students who were home schooled for jobs that would otherwise require a high school diploma. Despite the fact that home schooled students are required to take a standardized test to insure their education level, the State Government apparently was concerned about what else the students may have been learning at home.

In Arizona we have an issue on the complete opposite end of the spectrum where it is not what is learned at home that is of consequence, but what students are being taught in publicly funded schools. Michelle Malkin points us to an Op-Ed in the Tuscon Citizen from a former teacher at one of La Raza’a charter schools:

During the 2002-2003 school year, I taught a U.S. history course with a Mexican-American perspective. The course was part of the Raza/Chicano studies department.
Within one week of the course beginning, I was told that I was a “teacher of record,” meaning that I was expected only to assign grades. The Raza studies department staff would teach the class.

I was assigned to be a “teacher of record” because some members of the Raza studies staff lacked teaching certificates. It was a convenient way of circumventing the rules.
I stated that I expected to do more than assign grades. I expected to be involved in teaching the class. The department was less than enthusiastic but agreed.

Immediately it was clear that the class was not a U.S. history course, which the state of Arizona requires for graduation. The class was similar to a sociology course one expects to see at a university.

Where history was missing from the course, it was filled by controversial and biased curriculum.

The basic theme of the curriculum was that Mexican-Americans were and continue to be victims of a racist American society driven by the interests of middle and upper-class whites. In this narrative, whites are able to maintain their influence only if minorities are held down. Thus, social, political and economic events in America must be understood through this lens.

This biased and sole paradigm justified teaching that our community police officers are an extension of the white power structure and that they are the strongmen used “to keep minorities in their ghettos.”

It justified telling the class that there are fewer Mexican-Americans in Tucson Magnet High School’s advanced placement courses because their “white teachers” do not believe they are capable and do not want them to get ahead.

As an educator, I refused to be complicit in a curriculum that engendered racial hostility, irresponsibly demeaned America’s civil institutions, undermined our public servants, discounted any virtues in Western civilization and taught disdain for American sovereignty.

When I raised these concerns, I was told that I was a “racist,” despite being Hispanic. Acknowledging my heritage, the Raza studies staff also informed me that I was a vendido, the Spanish term for “sellout.” (emphasis mine)

I touched on this briefly last week when I wrote about the white professor who was denied tenure for failing too many black students. The failures were not a result of institutionalized racism, but of laziness on the part of the student body who although offered the opportunity to go to college, refused to show up to class and do the required work. Political correctness would not allow the school to have such a high failure rate among its predominantly black student body, so rather than make an attempt to recruit more motivated students, they chose to lower the bar.

La Raza is now attempting to push the victim card on Mexican Americans in the same manner that Al Sharpton pushes it on African Americans. The result will be a self fulfilling prophecy. Convince a large enough group of people that they cannot succeed, and you remove their motivation to strive for success, thereby guaranteeing they will never achieve it.

A logical person would ask, “why would a group who is supposed to represent the Latino community make every attempt to keep them down?” The answer is quite simple, money. La Raza received $8 million from the Department of Education, and that number is sure to go up in the future. If Mexican Americans ever made an attempt to assimilate into American culture, and god forbid they made successes of themselves, groups like La Raza would lose their millions of dollars in government handouts.

As long as Mexican Americans, and Latinos as a whole feel they are victimized by an oppressive white majority, La Raza will continue collecting money from both the government as well as the Latino community themselves.

Update: From the comments section of the Tuscon Citizen:

I asked Raza Studies to come to my school to mediate some tensions between Hispanic and African-American students. Instead, they segregated the groups and the person who met with the Hispanic students went into a rant about how the students’ land — Tucson — was taken from them and that they should stand up to authority and assert their rights and show their pride. It was not a mediation session. It was a racist presentation and it was a disaster. (Raza’s presenter was also very big in TEA.)

I am proudly liberal and support good, reflective cultural studies, but what I’ve seen of Raza/Cultural Studies at TUSD seems misdirected and, frankly, very stupid.

Imagine asking a civil rights group to mediate between two ethnicities in your school, and instead they segregate them telling one group they need to assert themselves?

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Education, Features, Racism