The study compared the state standard requirements to a body of knowledge that reflects what civil rights historians and educators consider core information about the civil rights movement.

Researchers concluded that states are failing to set high expectations for student learning about the civil rights movement.  States’ curricula on the movement tend to be about leaders and events, but are less likely to include information about the obstacles that civil rights activists faced, like racism and white resistance.

Researchers gave a grade to each state indicating how that state performed in teaching civil rights.  35 states received a grade of “F.” 16 states have no requirements for teaching the movement.  Only three states received an A:  Alabama, Florida, and New York.  The study found that less attention is paid to the movement in states farther away from the South.

SPLC suggests that learning about the civil rights movement educates children “about the possibilities of civic engagement while warning…about the kinds of resistance that stand[s] in the way of change.”  The study also states that teaching about the movement “helps minority students to find themselves in history classes that are often alienating and confusing.”

This study is part of Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Teaching Tolerance is a program designed to reduce prejudice, improve intergroup relations and support equitable school experiences for children.

As the New York Times reports in Court overturns Affirmative-Action Ban (July 1, 2011), this Coalition decision is the “latest round” in a long-standing fight over the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policies.  Both the Times piece and the Coalition opinion review the history of the affirmative action battle, including the landmark  decisions regarding the University of Michigan’s admissions policies in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger in which the Supreme Court held that universities may consider race and ethnicity as factors, among others, in its admissions policies with regard to individual applicants, but may not use quotas for certain racial groups.

According to the Times, lead counsel for plaintiffs in the Coalition case George B. Washington hailed the decision as a critical victory that will have have significant impact on a pending similar challenge to California’s anti-affirmative action law after which Michigan’s Proposal 2 was modeled.   On the other side, Michigan attorney general Bill Schuette told the times that the state will seek an en banc review of the decision.

Based on HDI scores, the report sorts residents into “Five Californias”.  Only  1 % make it into highly privileged  “Silicon Valley Shangri-La” with a 9.35 HDI score.  By contrast, 38 % of residents occupy “Struggling California”, a group at 4.17 on the HDI whose members are found in the Central Valley, Inland Empire and swaths of Northern California and whose hard work never leads to security or sustained well-being.  Faring worst of all is “The Forsaken Five Percent” at 2.59 on the HDI.  The Forsaken, who are mostly Latino and African-American  reside in impoverished Los Angeles neighborhoods and areas of the San Joaquin Valley and face extremely limited opportunities and choices.  Interestingly, one third of the Shangri-Las and one third of the Forsaken are foreign-born.

The report’s findings point up stark economic, racial and gender disparities including:

• Just 100 of California’s nearly 2,500 high schools account for half of the state’s dropouts.
• Men earn more than women in every racial and ethnic group.
• A gap of $58,000 in annual earnings of the typical worker separates the state’s top wage earners in the Santa Clara–Cupertino, Saratoga, Los Gatos area (about $73,000) from the lowest earners in the LA–East Adams–Exposition Park area (about $15,000).
• California’s Latina women earn the least:   $18,000, which is about what  the typical American worker earned in 1960 half a century ago.
• There is a 15.3 year life expectancy range across neighborhoods with the high and low— Newport Beach/Laguna Hills area (88.1 years) and Watts (72.8 years)—in the same metropolitan area.

There are some report findings that  some readers may find counterintuitive, including the fact that California’s overall life expectancy at 80.1 years is one and a half years longer than the national figure and that foreign-born Californians live an average of four years longer than native-born residents.

“Given the current budgetary environment in California, there could be no better time for this nonpartisan, fact-based tool to break down the silos, look at who is thriving and who is merely surviving, and identify the most strategic levers for change,” says report co-author Kristen Lewis.  In a recent piece on the report, Sacramento Bee political columnist Dan Walters warns that failure to take appropriate action on the findings will relegate the Golden State to the “two-tier” haves and have-nots California that he predicted in his writings of 25 years ago.

The report’s recommendations include fixing the broken governance system, targeting high drop out high schools, reducing residential segregation, reducing the earnings gender gap and addressing the African-American health crisis.

We encourage California readers to examine the full report and see how its findings, maps and other demographic information might be used in advocacy.

Margaret Fortune who heads Fortune School of Education, the entity that will run the five charters and others  say that such racially and ethnically-focused charter schools are necessary because the current educational system has failed to correct persistent and severe underachievement among African-American, Latino and Hmong students.

However, the Bee reports, school board President Harold Fong, the lone “no” vote on the charter plan, believes that supporting heavily segregated schools “flies in the face of education policy handed down from the Supreme Court” no doubt referring to the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision which held that racially separate schools are not equal under the U.S. Constitution.  Education professor and Civil Rights Project at UCLA co-director Gary Orfield agrees that charters like Fortune’s institute “a new form of segregation” while understanding the frustration that leads to charter formations.   Orfield proposes desegregating neighborhood schools as a better alternative.   (See related REP blog post Mixed income housing boosts low-income students’ performance.)

“the Legislature finds and declares that the public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not to be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.

Prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that:

• Promote the overthrow of the United States government.
• Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.
• Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.
• Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

This week, Arizona’s state school superintendent issued a statement that the Tucson Unified School District was in violation of the law and has 60-days to shut down its ethnic studies program, or risk the loss of $15 million in state funding.  For more information about the controversy, click here.

This law is an interesting case study of the detrimental effect of a legislative body’s ignorance of cognitive science.  In a nutshell, this law gives the colorblind paradigm (the notion that the only way to achieve racial harmony is to ignore race) the force of law in Arizona’s public schools.  Through the teachings of social cognition science, we know it is impossible for our brains to ignore race; rather, the brain notices the race of others first, before it processes any other information, such as gender.  We also know from social cognition that each of us espouses implicit racial biases, typically unconsciously.  It is only when we discuss race openly (perhaps in a classroom) and the role it plays in our society and our history that we can confront those implicit biases.

If the purpose of Arizona’s ethnic studies ban is to achieve racial harmony, then current science dictates it will fail, as it simply silences discussions of race, thereby promoting stereotypes and furthering racial discrimination.