California’s ethnic studies boom has to be the greatest living nightmare imaginable for opponents of ethnic studies, especially if they reside in Arizona. A couple of weeks ago, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the landmark AB-2016 bill that will create a model ethnic studies curriculum by 2019. It also encourages every high school in the nation’s most populous state to offer an ethnic studies course to all 9-12 grade students.
This comes on the heels of California’s largest urban school districts opting to offer or require ethnic studies to their students. This includes the Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Diego Unified School districts and more.
Jose Lara, head of the Ethnic Studies Now Coalition and who has been instrumental in getting California’s largest school districts to adopt ethnic studies, calls the signing of the bill as a “momentous and great next step in the Ethnic Studies Movement.”
While the bill is not mandatory, that the curriculum will be sanctioned by the state means that those districts, medium-sized and small, that have not committed to offer ethnic studies courses now will have academic and institutional support to be able to do so, he says.
On its face, these developments sound like great news, but as Elias Serna, Chicano Studies instructor at California State University, Long Beach and one of the co-founders of Raza Studies Now notes, “The state is catching up with the Ethnic Studies Movement.”
Both organizations, Raza Studies Now and the ES coalition, have been active in promoting Xicana/Xicano studies and Ethnic studies respectfully, even before Arizona’s ethnic studies was killed in 2012.
The reality of the bill is that it is a double-edged sword. It is historic, yet it is nowhere near what Raza Studies Now or the ES Coalition have been calling for.
