The Arizona Republic’s Doug MacEachern has a column today on the Raza Studies program in Tucson, Arizona. Raza Studies is part of their Ethnic Studies program in Tucson public high schools emphasizing Latino history and pride. But the particular way in which Tucson’s program does this has raised some critical scrutiny. MacEachern writes:
The ethnic-studies directors make a great many claims that teeter over into the wrong side of truth. They claim not to “teach” communism, socialism or Marxism in their classes. But they lionize Marxist revolutionaries like “Che” Guevara; they all but worship Marxist education theorist Paolo Friere; and they have developed entire lesson plans celebrating modern Marxists like Subcomandante Marcos, the southern Mexican Zapatista who considers himself a “postmodern Che.” But they don’t “teach” the stuff.
The directors of the program “humbly and respectfully welcome the scrutiny and spotlight” their program has attracted, but then denounce “the tyrannical and fascist perspectives that are held and espoused by our adversaries.”
To defend their program, the directors have produced what one local paper called nine “cohort studies,” which the school district claims show that Raza Studies has a positive effect on the high school graduation rate and state achievement test scores of the students who elect to participate in the program. MacEachern sent the “studies” to me for my comment. They were actually just a few bar graphs making simple comparisons between the outcomes of students who did and did not choose to participate in Raza Studies at some (but not all) of Tuscon’s high schools. There is no way to know from a few bar graphs whether Raza Studies helped, hurt, or had no effect on student achievement since the self-selected group of students who chose to take Raza Studies may have already been higher achieving at the beginning. A few bar graphs does not an evaluation — or nine cohort studies — make.
Posted by Jay P. Greene 
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