I’m sorry for the brevity of this post.
I want to post something in detail about Arizona, but instead I’ll quote Salon as a quick introduction: “As part of the state-mandated termination of its ethnic studies program, the Tucson Unified School District released an initial list of books to be banned from its schools today. According to district spokeperson Cara Rene, the books “will be cleared from all classrooms, boxed up and sent to the Textbook Depository for storage.”” (Links as they were in the Salon article, Who’s Afraid of The Tempest.)
Lucky for me, Debbie Reese of American Indians in Children’s Literature has been reporting up a storm on this, both on her blog and twitter.
Here are the links, so far, at AICN:
Teaching critical thinking in Arizona: NOT ALLOWED, Jan 15. “The Mexican American Studies program was built on critical thinking. Students learned how to think critically, to question texts, to look at moments in history and portrayals of Latino Americans and American Indians from more than one perspective.”
Mexican American Studies Department Reading List, Jan 15. Very detailed, and Reese has updated this multiple times. This also contains a link to the May 2011 curriculum audit.
Authors banned in Tucson Unified School District respond, Jan 16
From Karen Healey: Save Ethnic Studies in Tucson
If you have a post to add, please leave it in the comments.
Archive Tea Cozy 
Wow. I hadn’t heard about this. This is terrible.
LikeLike
Because book banning is always the best thing for our school children. UGH. Things like this make me so angry. Schools should be supporting free thought and exposure to diverse cultures/peoples. Not stifling it and keeping kids ignorant. Anyone who supported this should be ashamed of themselves and charged with child abuse.
Lori
LikeLike
This is truly appalling. Has anyone gotten word of this to the national media? Maybe someone like Ed Schulz of The Ed Show on MSNBC – he does segments about education frequently. This needs to get out to the masses not just those of us reading SLJ and other professional resources. Horrifying…
LikeLike
Sigh. Once again my state manages to shoot itself in the foot. I wrote a long, ranty post about this already, so I’m not going to repeat any of that except: UGH.
LikeLike