By Rodolfo F. Acuña

While history cannot repeat itself, it should inform us. The Mexican American population much like other minorities has fought for an equal education as a key to a better life. Their strategy has included ending segregation and making public schools accountable.

The community was lost in a black hole in the 1920s a decade of American cultural jingoism when many public school districts replaced the words “my flag” in the pledge of allegiance with “the flag of the United States” that according to nativists would prevent immigrants and others from swearing allegiance to a foreign flag.

School segregation increased during the decade and most Mexican children were placed in “Mexican schools.” IQ testing and myths such as that the Spanish language was a “very real educational barrier” to the Americanization of Mexican children justified segregation and Americanization programs. By the end of the decade about half of Mexican students attended segregated schools.

The districts profited from Mexican schools because they spent less on educating Mexican students. They did not care if Mexicans dropped out because they could spend more state funds on the education of white students.

In Tempe, Arizona, in 1925; a Mexican American rancher named Adolpho “Babe” Romo Sr. successfully sued the Tempe Elementary School District for denying admission to his four children in the newly opened Tenth Street School. Since it was not a class action suit, the impact was limited, and only Romo’s children were admitted to the white school.

Mexican Americans suffered disproportionately during World War II and the Korean Wars enhancing their feelings of entitlement. Education was the priority of Mexican American organizations as a way of ending inequality. As the Mexican American middle class grew so did its demands for equal education and pressure for the schools to end the dropout problem.

Real breakthroughs were made in bilingual education (Lau v. Nichols), school financing (Serrano v. Priest), segregation (Cisneros V. Corpus Christi ISD), the teaching of Chicano and ethnic studies, employment discrimination to name a few. All these gains have all but been eliminated by the courts that initially supported them. Even before Gore v. Bush (531 U.S. 98) (2000), the Supreme Court politically intervened on behalf of corporate interests.

In 1992 Miriam Flores brought a suit on behalf of English Language Learner (ELL) students alleging that the Nogales Unified School District failed to teach ELL students English. After seven years of pretrial proceedings the case went to trial in 1999.

In 2000, the District Court concluded that defendants were violating the Equal Educational Opportunity Act (EEOA) of 1974 provision to take “appropriate action” to help students overcome language barriers. The amount of funding the State allocated for the special needs of ELL students was arbitrary. The court ordered the State to “prepare a cost study to establish the proper appropriation to effectively implement” ELL programs.

In January 2005, the court told the State it had 90 days to “appropriately and constitutionally fun[d] the state’s ELL programs taking into account the [Rule’s] previous orders.” The State was held in contempt after a year of non-compliance and imposed a fine of $500,000 to $2 million per day until it complied

. In 2006, the state legislature passed HB 2064, which was designed to address problems found by the District Court. It increased ELL incremental funding, put a 2-year per-student limit on such funding and created a structured English immersion fund and a compensatory instruction fund. The investment of new state funds was to be offset by available federal moneys.

U.S. District Judge Raner Collins criticized a state plan’s use of federal poverty dollars to help foot the bill for classroom instruction. He also questioned a two-year limit on how long a student could remain in an English-language program.

Upon review the District Court found that HB 2064 did not establish “a funding system that rationally relates funding available to the actual costs of all elements of ELL instruction,” and the District Court again held the State in contempt.

The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Flores case had been strengthened by George Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 requiring the state to satisfy the requirements in the 1974 law to take “appropriate action” to help students overcome language barriers.

On June 25, 2009 the Court ruled on Horne v. Flores, changing the legal standards for the EEOA. As expected, its ruling was highly political, splitting 5-4 along political lines. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion questioning why schools and states should remain under the direction of federal courts for so many years. Justices John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined Alioto. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Stevens and David Souter.

In essence, the Supreme Court sided with Arizona officials who wanted an end of oversight in teaching non-English-speaking students. It reversed a law that required ”appropriate action” to help English language learners overcome language obstacles. It remanded the dispute to a federal judge in Arizona for another look at whether the schools in Nogales now provide equal opportunities to English language learners.

The state superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, declared victory. Critics, however, charge that the Supreme Court intentionally gutted the Civil Rights statutes. Without federal oversight Arizona could now violate the Equal Education Opportunities Act of 1974 and the No Child Left Behind law. In other words, it was a step back to the 1920s and the establishment of “Mexican schools.”

Justice Breyer wrote that given that 47 million Americans do not speak English at home, ”I fear that the court’s decision will increase the difficulty of overcoming the barriers that threaten to divide us.” Breyer cautioned judges to take care when the standard of enforcement of federal statutes revolves around whether it “will impose significant financial burdens upon states.” ”An attitude,” which he said, “is not a rule of law.”

The Ninth Circuit Hearings will now determine how much money is sufficient to meet federal law, which requires an equitable education for all students. The Court said that the “record contains no factual findings or evidence that any school district other than Nogales failed to provide equal educational opportunities to ELL students, and respondents have not explained how the EEOA can justify a statewide injunction here.” It added that “Unless the District Court concludes that Arizona is violating the EEOA statewide, it should vacate the injunction insofar as it extends beyond Nogales.” At stake is the education of 138,000 English-learners in Arizona that most experts say are warehoused in “Mexican Rooms.”

The Latino community doubts whether Arizona will keep its promise that EL students can reach proficiency in English in one year as promised by the new 4-hour English Language Development (ELD) block.

Under the aegis of the highly respected Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles (formerly at Harvard), 21 researchers and graduate students from four of the nation’s top research universities conducted new empirical studies assessing instructional models and assessment practices for English learners. The results are online http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/9-new-studies-document-the-educational-condition-of-arizonas-english-learners. These findings will be presented to the federal court in September.

If allowed to stand, the dictum in Horne v. Flores would return Mexican Americans to a time when there was no federal oversight of the schools. The ruling would empower Tom Horne to play Bull Connor or Joe Arpaio. Just like Gore v. Bush stole the presidential election of 2000 and caused an uproar and consternation among liberals, Horne v. Flores weakens the rule of law.

According to Scalia, his judicial philosophy of “orginalism,” means interpreting the Constitution “on what it originally meant to the people who ratified it over 200 years ago.” A time when there were no Mexicans in the United States, women could not vote and blacks were slaves.

Scalia says, “You think there ought to be a right to abortion? No problem. The Constitution says nothing about it. Create it the way most rights are created in a democratic society. Pass a law. And that law, unlike a Constitutional right to abortion created by a court can compromise. It can…I was going to say it can split the baby! I should not use… A Constitution is not meant to facilitate change. It is meant to impede change, to make it difficult to change.”

The problem is that laws were passed—the Equal Education Opportunities Act of 1974 and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, as well as countless court decisions. As in the case of Gore v. Bush, Horne v. Flores came down to the judges’ bias, not what was constitutional. If this same standard had been applied in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka there would still be de jure segregation in the United States—segregation would be the law of the land.

By MARGARET KIMBERLEY

The founding fathers made one thing perfectly clear when they ratified the constitution in 1787. Full citizenship rights were meant only for white men of property. Over a period of nearly 200 years, people’s movements guaranteed that those rights were extended to everyone regardless of race or gender, but the fact that the struggle literally took centuries should not be forgotten. It is tempting to snicker at the sight of today’s Tea Party members, grown men wearing knee breeches and three-cornered hats. Yet their costumes tell an important tale. They evoke an era still seen as the high water mark of American society, the days of the enslavement of one race and the extermination of another. This movement has captured the Republican Party outright and leaves even some Democratic politicians and pundits in a state of fear and/or awe.

The pull of that early history is ever present for many white Americans. No matter the degree of progress made, the adherence to the evils of America’s early days are never far from the surface. Simply put, there are too many brown faces for the liking of a majority of white people. Even the president has a brown face. His very presence has been a shock to the country’s system and to the mythology which says that only white people are truly American.

For decades, the presence of undocumented foreign nationals has been an accepted fact in the United States. Estimates of their presence run as high as 11 million. In the very recent past that presence was considered positive, a proof of America’s attractiveness to the rest of the world and a boon to industries dependent upon their labor.

Under the guise of concern for integrity of our borders, and stemming illegal activities, that presence is now being called a threat and a danger to the nation. Republicans like former presidential candidate John McCain have bowed to pressure from the Tea Party wing and moved from advocating a path to citizenship to producing nonsensical campaign videos to “build the dang fence” and prevent Mexicans willing to pick fruit and bus tables from entering the country.

The guarantor of citizenship since 1868 has been the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which grants automatic citizenship to anyone born in the United States. That amendment and its guarantees are now under direct threat. On a daily basis pundits and politicians rear their ugly heads to say that the children born of undocumented persons should no longer be given American citizenship.

Arizona legislators, the go-to group for turning white supremacy into law, have proposed denying birth certificates to anyone who can’t prove legal residence. Flush with the nationwide popularity of SB1070, which turns Arizona into the “show me your papers” police state, they are now drunk with the possibility of keeping the dark skinned people in check and away from what they hope to make an oasis of whiteness.

All of these proposals are masks for a simple proposition. Citizenship rights should only be extended to white people, just as in the barbaric days of the golden age of whiteness. All but the most unrepentant racists will deny this intent. Instead we hear lunatic tales of beheadings in the Arizona desert, non-existent kidnappings and birth tourism terror plots to make sleeper cell American citizen babies.

Black Americans should be the first to denounce these bizarre schemes to undo constitutional protections. The 14th Amendment was a means of protecting the rights of the newly freed population and of over turning the infamous Dred Scott decision which nullified the very concept of black citizenship.

“We want our country back” is not just an anti-Obama call to action. It is a call to revive an idea which ought to have been firmly discredited by now, that America should belong only to white people and that they alone should have a voice in how it is run. It would be a terrible mistake to see these citizenship proposals only as anti-Latino based bigotry. They are surely that but they are also a means of keeping the non-white population under control and depriving them of any rights which a white person need respect.

Margaret Kimberley is a columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgandaReport.Com.

Source: CounterPunch