Ethnic studies debate: Whose stories get told?
March Madness set to begin, but with more COVID rules and restrictions
Race and ethnicity can be tricky topics to discuss in general, nevermind navigating them in the classroom.
Race and ethnicity can be tricky topics to discuss, especially in the classroom. But the California Department of Education had no idea how heated the debate would get when it set out to draft a model ethnic studies curriculum for high schools statewide.
The process took over two years, multiple versions, and drew nearly 100,000 public comments.
In one ongoing conflict, Jewish and pro-Arab groups have accused each other of discrimination and trying to silence each other’s histories.
Several authors of the original draft have demanded their names be stripped from the final version, saying it’s watered down and substandard. Their draft was criticized for taking a left-wing, biased and a politically charged view of history, including terms like “hxrstory” and “herstory.” Capitalism was described as a system of oppression and drew complaints from Jews, Koreans, Sikhs, Armenians and other ethnic and religious groups who said it left out their American experiences.
This week, the State Board of Education is expected to approve the final draft, an 894-page tome whose own history illustrates the challenges of crafting an ethnic studies curriculum at a time of racial reckoning and national division.
It also highlights some of the difficult questions educators will face in an era when America is redefining its heroes and asking whose stories should be told. More than three-quarters of California’s 6.2 million public school students are nonwhite.
“We’ve worked to bring justice to what we believe the ethnic studies movement
to be about,” state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond told reporters.
The ethnic studies movement has its roots in California, where students protested in the late 1960s at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley to demand courses in African American, Chicano, Asian American and Native American studies.
The proposed course materials focus on those four groups so students can “learn of the histories, cultures, struggles, and contributions to American society of these historically marginalized peoples which are often untold in U.S. history courses.”
There are four chapters with more than two dozen lesson plans that schools can pick from to fit their student communities.
It suggests conversations could start with a local or national incident of police brutality. Other lessons ask students to study poetry and art by Japanese Americans put in internment camps during World War II to better understand their trauma. Another urges students to interview Korean Americans and Blacks who
were in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots to examine tensions that exploded into deadly violence.
An appendix features lesson plans on Jews, Arab Americans, Sikh-Americans and Armenian Americans who are not traditionally part of an ethnic studies curriculum “but have experienced oppression and have a story to tell,” Thurmond said.
Those groups also objected loudest to being left out or misrepresented in the original draft, completed in spring 2019 and immediately panned. It was written by a committee of ethnic studies teachers and professors appointed by the Department of Education after a 2016 state law that passed the Legislature with opposition from Republicans.
California’s legislative Jewish Caucus complained it included content that denigrates Jews and erased the American Jewish experience. It cited course materials that referred to the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which is antiIsrael, as a global social movement but left out “any meaningful discussion of anti-Semitism.”
The 68 teams whose names popped up in the March Madness bracket only thought it was time to celebrate: The next four or five days figure to be the most nervewracking part of their seasons.
Welcome to Bubble Ball — the NCAA Tournament is being played in a pandemic, where no player can show up for the games in Indianapolis without seven negative COVID tests, and no team is really “in” the tournament until the ball is tipped off.
“Which potential season-ending test was more stressful than the other?” Drexel coach Zach Spiker said, meaning the challenges that still await. “Testing, practice, getting on the bus in Philadelphia, waiting for that reply, that response time to say, ‘We’re all negative here. OK, let’s get out of here.
Let’s get to Indianapolis.’”
Because of COVID—19 issues, Drexel played a grand total of 19 games — about 11 fewer than usual — en route to the Colonial Athletic Conference title. That earned the Dragons an automatic bid into the tournament. The reward? in addition to a battery of nasal swabs, they get a No. 16 seed and an opening-round meeting with topseeded Illinois.
The other top seeds were Michigan, Baylor and Gonzaga, which is the overall No. 1, and a 2-1 favorite to win it all and complete the first undefeated season since the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers.
In the biggest adjustment to a normal March Madness, all the games will be played in and around Indianapolis over 19 days. No more worrying about who got shipped to Spokane or mired in Memphis. The NCAA did, however, keep the re
gion names — West, East, South and Midwest — to at least make the bracket look normal.
More about that bracket: A few bubble teams are coming from unexpected places, namely UCLA and Michigan State. Both were widely projected to make the field with ease, but they ended up as 11 seeds, paired in a First Four matchup on Thursday. The other 11-11 game pits Wichita State against Drake.
Teams like Louisville, Saint Louis, Colorado State and Mississippi would gladly trade places with them. And still might. In one of many first-of-its-kind moves made to accommodate a one-of-akind tournament, the NCAA put team Nos. 69-72 on standby in case a program in the 68-team draw has to withdraw because of a COVID-19 outbreak.
They have until Tuesday night to notify the NCAA they can’t make it. After that, a team that withdraws will simply go home, and its opponent will get a walkover into the next round.
“If the teams continue to do the great work that they’ve done just to get to the tournament, we will have a very safe, very healthy 67game tournament and we’ll crown a champion,” selection committee chairman Mitch Barnhart said.
But to underscore what a different, and difficult, season this has been, the committee spent a lot of time stressing over two shoo-ins, Kansas and Virginia, each of which pulled out of their conference tournaments last week because of outbreaks.
Barnhart said both are following proper protocols to make it to Indianapolis for their games on Saturday.
Kansas is the No. 3 seed in the West and Virginia, the defending champion (from 2019), is the fourth seed in the same region.
“The one thing I’ve found out through this, probably as much as anybody, is expect the unexpected,” Kansas coach Bill Self said.
That is, after all, what March Madness is about — three weeks filled with busted brackets, out-of-nowhere surprises, teams that take care of unfinished business and an occasional visit from an old friend.
Remember Sister Jean? She’s 101 now, and her team, Loyola Chicago, is back in the dance, hoping for a reboot of the, shall we say, “miracle” run to the Final Four in 2018.
Remember Patrick Ewing? He lifted Georgetown to national prominence back in the 1980s, and now he’s back as the coach, guiding the underdog — yes, underdog — Hoyas to a Big East Tournament title and a surprise trip to the tourney.
And Rick Pitino? His career was left for dead after his ouster from Louisville following that school’s unseemly recruiting scandal a few years back. He’s back, too, as coach of Iona, which played only 13 regular-season games, but won its conference tourney and made it to Indy. The Gaels are a 15th seed — not what Pitino is used to this time of year.
And play they will. From the First Four on Thursday through the Final Four, which ends with nets the coming down on April 5.
So much could go wrong between now and then. So much has to go right.
But a year after the tournament was scrubbed in the early days of the pandemic, it feels good to have a bracket to fill out.
Even if it feels a little different.