Ethnic Studies: Advocacy Resources

In this legislative session, Texas state Representative Christina Morales introduced a bill that would allow Ethnic Studies courses to count as graduation requirements. California, was on its way to making Ethnic Studies a graduation requirement until Governor Newsom vetoed it. As Wayne Au has extensively documented, Ethnic Studies – in particular in K-12 education – is expanding at exponential rates with 9 states having a law or policy on the books and another 12 having considered such legislation.

I was recently in a series of conversations through The Compadres group on Clubhouse, and I was struck by how much Ethnic Studies advocates are yearning for scholarly resources to support their work. With that in mind, I have a two-pronged approach. For those who have the time and resources to do a deep dive on the subject, there are two monster books out on the subject of Ethnic Studies. They are written by people who have been in the struggle for years, the texts represent some of the most cutting-edge scholarship and thinking on the subject.

I am, however, aware that deep dives like the ones above are time consuming. Also, there is a lot of information to distill and a lot of policy makers do not have the attention span for more than a page or two of bullet pointed text. With that in mind, I created the below handout (“Ethnic-Studies-Efficacy_Handout”) that summarizes the results of Ethnic Studies research on Tucson Unified, San Francisco Unified, and Christine Sleeter’s review of the scholarship.

The short of it is that Ethnic Studies, when implemented appropriately, shows a number of promising results along the lines of graduation, passing standardized test, attendance, grades, and many other outcomes! This is particularly important for minoritized students and addressing decades-old opportunity gaps.

To those of your continuing the struggle, I greatly appreciate your work more than I can say and I hope that these resources assist you in your efforts!

Peace,

NC c/s