ETHNIC STUDIES STUPIDITY UPDATE

I noted this below and on Sunday, June 14th I sent the head of the ethnic studies program, Dr. Augustine Romero, an e-mail asking him to explain what he meant by an "ethnic lens" on algebra and calculus. I didn't get a reply on Monday or Tuesday, so on Wednesday I sent an e-mail to Romero's immediate manager, Dr. Jim Fish, an assistant superintendent, and copied to Romero. Fish responded on the following Monday, June 22nd, and wrote that he would speak to Romero. I still didn't get a reply after another week, so I wrote again on June 29th to Fish to ask him if had in fact spoken with Romero. Fish replied on the 30th and told me that I should expect a reply by Thursday, July 2nd.

By July 8th, I still had not gotten a reply so I sent Superintendent Dr. Elizabeth Calenia-Fagen an e-mail and she replied the same day and let me know that Dr. Romero is planning to respond.

The ethnic studies issue seems to have raised the hackles of the editors at the Arizona Republic, who in this unsigned June 16th editorial seem to believe that the program is radical:

Tucson's school administrators and board members seem to have no problem with a "raza studies" program that is openly, defiantly political - "progressive," in the preferred language of its advocates.

This is what "progressive" means at TUSD: It means advancing the most radical, neo-Marxist notions of anti-free-market revolution to be found in any education-theory textbooks. It means hiring raza-studies "educators" whose primary qualification is that they hold extreme leftist political views.

I have no idea if this assertion is true and it is orthogonal to my concern about how mathematics can have an "ethnic lens."