Of all the authors to ban... Shakespeare?
Jackie Mahendra, Change.org
Arizona lawmakers banned schools in the state from teaching "ethnic studies" classes. Unless public schools canceled classes that included racial and ethnic themes, the state could block schools from receiving millions of dollars in critical classroom funding.
But Arizona state officials pushed one school district too far: Tucson Unified School District not only cancelled its vibrant ethnic studies classes, but also banished any book that dealt with "race or oppression."
As a result, students and teachers say dozens of books -- including Shakespeare's The Tempest -- can no longer be taught in class, and some have even been removed from classrooms and locked up in school storage.
Now students and teachers are fighting back in order to draw attention to the ban and keep those valuable books available in schools. Norma Gonzalez is a teacher in the Tucson school district whose class about Mexican American culture was canceled after the state's ban. She started a petition on Change.org asking the Tucson school district to take the banished books out of storage and put them back in school libraries. Click here to sign her petition.
Arizona has been a hotbed of controversy for the nation's immigration debate. But a secondary casualty of what many see as the state's intense anti-immigrant focus has been Arizona's students. For many of these students, ethnic studies courses were proven to close the achievement gap like nothing else had.
Norma sees the ban unfairly hurting her students' education. "Before the ban, I taught my students that, regardless of where you come from, you deserve respect and should love who you are," Norma said. "Now, I can't teach that. My students are angry and confused because they see the ban for what it is: discriminatory."
The literary purgatory of Tucson's school storage facilities now contains dozens of books that have race as a central theme. In addition to the boxed-up books about Chicano and Mexican American history and literature, classics by authors like Thoreau, Shakespeare, and Atwood are seen as too controversial by school officials.
Many are fighting to repeal the ban completely, but the school board fears the state may pull $15 million in funding in response. While several students are fighting a lawsuit to challenge this ban, many books are still stored away. Norma and her fellow teachers want to make sure the banished books are made available in each school's library, so students can read the books that teachers are barred from teaching.
Thanks for being a change-maker,
- Jackie and the Change.org team