Green also mentioned that Seattle has one of the greatest disparities in academic achievement between students of color and white students-particularly between African American and white students. If students aren’t learning it in schools, they won’t learn it at all.” “We need to add the contributions of all cultures. “I talked to a lot of these students and one of the things they tell me is that they don’t see themselves in the curriculum,” says Rita Green, Seattle/King County NAACP education chair. And although more than 40 percent of its students identify as races or ethnicities other than white, the curriculum taught is through a Eurocentric prism. Seattle Public Schools is the largest K-12 school system in Washington, with about 52,000 students in 97 schools. And nearly 12 years ago, Philadelphia implemented an African American history course as a graduation requirement, making it the longest-running ethnic studies program in public schools. In 2014, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and El Rancho, California, voted to make ethnic studies courses a graduation requirement last year, a state law was signed requiring the state board of education to create an ethnic studies program for all high schools by 2019. In Portland, Oregon, the school board voted in May to offer high school ethnic studies classes that will focus on the history, culture, and social movements of people of color, immigrants, and LGBTQ communities, starting in 2018. Meanwhile, other cities are already adopting ethnic studies curricula in their public schools. A similar proposal in Santa Fe, New Mexico, would ensure that students have the option to take ethnic studies as a social studies elective. ![]() In Texas, Senate Hispanic Caucus Chair Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, is leading a bill that would require the state’s board of education to develop ethnic studies as elective courses for middle and high school students. The support for ethnic studies programs in public schools is spreading throughout the nation. Because Seattle Public Schools faces a debt of $74 million, the proposal doesn’t ask for the creation of new ethnic studies courses, but instead the incorporation of ethnic studies into existing courses-such as history, math, and language and comprehension-by relating course materials to diverse backgrounds. The NAACP’s Seattle chapter is working to change that with a resolution that would insert ethnic studies into the city’s public schools. “America is a melting pot, so we shouldn’t have to ignore the other ingredients.” Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks-that’s the extent of my cultural education,” she says. ![]() Now a senior at The Center School in Seattle, Martinez says she feels robbed of her education by not being taught the contributions and history of different groups of people. Months later, while reviewing the curriculum of a Los Angeles ethnic studies course, Martinez learned that Hispanics had, in fact, been involved in the civil rights movement. She was told Hispanic people had no role in the movement because they were not in the U.S at the time. history teacher about the roles Asian and Hispanic Americans played in the civil rights movement. ![]() Last year Mackenzie Martinez, who’s Mexican American, asked her U.S.
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