Tucson- No Tienen Madre : Rudy Acuña

Tucson’s Sin of Scandal

Failing Students

By

Rodolfo F. Acuña

What is missing in the media’s coverage of the elimination of the Tucson Unified School District Mexican American Studies program is that students were learning and they wanted to go to school.  I take this travesty personal.  One of the reasons I have stayed in education for over fifty-five years is that I wanted to do something about the dropout problem.  I always heeded John Dewey dicta that a student failure was that of the teacher. If students drop out then there is something wrong with the educational system.

Arizona education has many problems:  taxpayers do not want to pay for schools and it is dead last in student per capita spending.  White parents don’t want their children going to school with Latinos and blacks as well as other working class people, so charter schools have multiplied to “balance” student ethnicity by making it whiter.

Arizona has blatantly avoided federal court orders to desegregate: more than fifty years after Brown v. the Board of Education (1954), the TUSD is still under a federal court mandate to “balance” the schools. The federal government, meanwhile, has poured millions of dollars into Arizona to help pay for integration purposes.

The truth be told, there has been no improvement. The dropout problem remains over fifty percent. As part of an effort to correct imbalances, the federal court in its desegregation plan, included the MAS program, which federal government paid for.