by David Safier
Friday night's poltical roundtable (Arizona Public Media, hosted by Jim Nintzel) ended with a discussion of the Unitary (deseg) Plan, the MAS program and school closures at TUSD. Here's City Council member Steve Kozachik on MAS (about 24 minutes into the video):
"[As to] the whole MAS question. Intuitively, we are a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural community. It strikes me there ought to be room in the curriculum of our public education for an element such as that. And I would hope that through this process, we find a way to retool that program and get it back into the curriculum, and frankly, tell Horne and Huppenthal to shove it."
Pima Dem Chair Jeff Rogers struck a similar note (about 25:45 into the video):
"Part of the [Federal] order looks like it's going to get it created now. [Reads from the Unitary Plan.] That sounds an awful lot like the previous Mexican American Studies program. So it sounds like the Federal Court is going to be ordering them to go back to something quite similar. And it was a very successful program. Students who were in that program were more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to graduate from college, more likely to attend college. There was a recent study released just within the last 10 days from the University of Arizona College of Education that also backed up those ideas. I think we're going to see some changes here and go back to that."
Between the Kozachik and Rogers, Bruce Ash talked about how vile the MAS program was, how it preached racism and hate. I don't feel like transcribing it here. You can catch that on the video if you want.