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The California State Senate has passed a bill expanding financial aid to undocumented students in the state’s public colleges and universities. The California Dream Act now goes to the Democratic-controlled State Assembly, which is expected to pass it next week. Governor Jerry Brown has not said whether he will sign the bill, but he approved similar legislation this summer and is considered likely to do so again.
Undocumented students make up about one percent of enrollment at California’s public colleges and universities, a rate of attendance far below undocumented immigrants’ representation in the state’s population (in the range of two or three million out of a total of thirty-seven million).
Nine high school students burst into a room in which the Tucson, Arizona school board was scheduled to meet last night, chaining themselves into the very seats that the board members were scheduled to occupy. Their action forced the cancellation of the meeting, which has yet to be rescheduled.
The students were protesting a planned resolution that would remove ethnic studies from the core curriculum in Tucson schools. That resolution was drafted in response to HB 2281, a new state law intended to remove ethnic studies from the Tucson school district entirely. The board is divided on the resolution, which opponents call a capitulation to HB 2281.
Maryland’s legislature this week passed a bill that would grant in-state tuition to undocumented — but longtime Maryland resident — students at the state’s public colleges and universities. The state’s governor, a Democrat, is expected to sign the bill.
It should be noted, though, that this bill forces undocumented students to jump through hoops that citizens and documented immigrants don’t. In addition to showing that they’ve paid Maryland state taxes before and during their college attendance, students have to show that they did their final three years of high school in the state, and they are required to begin their studies at a community college — only after graduating with an associate’s degree are they eligible to transfer to a four-year school.
Seven students were arrested yesterday at a demonstration against a ban on the admission of undocumented students to some state universities in Georgia. All of those arrested are reportedly undocumented themselves, and they may face deportation as a result of their protest.
The arrests came at the end of a rally and march that drew more than a hundred people in support of the DREAM Act and in opposition to a ban on admission of undocumented students to University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Georgia State, Georgia College & State University and the Medical College of Georgia. The students called upon GSU president Mark Becker to refuse to comply with the ban, which was implemented by the state board of regents last fall.
Only five of the nearly forty state colleges and universities in Georgia are covered by the ban, but new regulations require all public colleges and universities in the state to determine students’ residency status. Undocumented students in the state are charged out-of-state tuition, however long they have lived in Georgia.
Arizona’s new ethnic studies law, House Bill 2281, takes effect this week, and the internets are full of chatter.
The law, the brainchild of outgoing AZ Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, has gotten a huge amount of attention, but its actual effect is still very much in doubt. We’re going to be hearing a lot more about this law in the coming months, so here’s a quick primer.
Let’s start with what the law doesn’t do. First, it doesn’t have any effect on college or university teaching — it’s aimed solely at K-12 education.
Second, despite the claims of folks ranging from Jezebel to Mother Jones, it’s not an “ethnic studies ban.” Instead, it’s a ban on four kinds of teaching — programs that “promote the overthrow of the United States government,” those that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” those that “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” and those that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”
If that list seems weird to you — if it seems like a right-winger’s fantasy of what ethnic studies are, rather than a description of any course or program you’ve ever been involved with — you’re not alone. Tom Horne crafted this law as a weapon to use against the ethnic studies program in the Tucson Unified School District, but the TUSD says — most recently in a resolution passed just last week — that they’re in full compliance with the law.
Indeed, the law itself bends over backwards to make clear that it’s not aimed at ethnic studies as a whole. It explicitly provides for the continued teaching of “courses or classes that include the history of any ethnic group,” including those which “include the discussion of controversial aspects of history.”
So what’s going on?
What’s going on is that Tom Horne has been on a public crusade against TUSD’s ethnic studies programs for years, and this bill is the fruit of that campaign.
Horne leaves office as schools superintendent today. (He was elected state Attorney General in November.) This morning he formally declared the TUSD Mexican-American Studies program in violation of HB2281.
The District now has sixty days to show the new superintendent that it’s in compliance with the law, though Horne contends that mere changes to the program won’t have that effect. “The violations are deeply rooted in the program itself,” he wrote this morning, “and partial adjustments will not constitute compliance” — they must jettison the program completely.
It’s not clear whether the incoming superintendent, John Huppenthal, shares that view. For their part, the TUSD intends to contest this ruling with Huppenthal, and possibly in the courts. If they’re found in violation the penalty would be a ten percent reduction in state support — a cut that Tucson’s superintendent says “would cripple the district, quite frankly.”
I’ll have more on Horne’s specific findings, and the district’s response, in a follow-up post.
studentactivism.net 
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