Ethnic Studies a Positive

Regarding “Fair Education vs. Just Communities Boils Over at School Board,” ethnic studies programs are proven to be a positive for all students. Multiple studies show that when an ethnic studies curriculum is added to a school campus GPA rises, college matriculation goes up, civic involvement increases, tardies and absences go down, suspensions and expulsions decrease, the dropout rate diminishes. The only “negative” is that ethnic studies and similar educational programs challenge the status quo of gender, race and class relations, which conservatives, by definition, want to maintain.

Conservative right-wing attacks — we assume Fair are right wingers because members normally show up to school board meetings wearing Trump regalia — on ethnic studies and other such programs are based in a strategy of suppressing any institutional development capable of supporting a critique of racism’s role in winning political consent for an emerging economic order that harms the interests of the vast majority of us. However, these attacks also prove the importance of ethnic studies. Or as a Tuskegee Airman once told us, “You only catch flak when you’re right on target.”