WARNING: Teaching Los Angeles high school minority students to hone critical thinking skills can be a job hazard; so perilous, it appears that the practice can put a teacher’s very career under the human resources guillotine.
The Los Angeles Unified School District, notably David Starr Jordan High School in Watts, still seems to be struggling with the concept of providing equitable minority education. To be brutally honest, it doesn’t look like the system’s leadership will ever see the big picture.
The LAUSD has once again ignored prudence by firing a popular ethnic teacher, prompting students and fellow teachers to stage an after school protest on Wednesday, June 11.
Karen Salazar, a second-year English teacher at Jordan, was given her walking papers for inspiring and encouraging student political activism. Her major offense, according to the Los Angeles Times, was that she was “too Afro-centric.”
The teacher drew the wrath of a administrator for using “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” the poetry of Langston Hughes and Tupac Shakur lyrics as teaching tools, even though the literary materials are LAUSD approved.
Videos of last week’s demonstration have been lighting up YouTube, as supportive students spoke out against the school’s treatment.
In one segment, Salazar told the youthful crowd, “You embody what it means to be a warrior-scholar, a freedom-fighting intellectual.”
Anybody in their right mind should know that society doesn’t want teenagers thinking for themselves, relating to their immediate environment, or learning their place in the world.
Salazar’s termination, or should I say non-renewed contract (she was told in April she was a goner), is an aberration.
One twisted irony is that Salazar is Salvadoran and the principal who canned her is black.
Imagine a Latina educator spreading black literature at a school that had an enrollment of little more than 21 percent black students and just over 78 percent Latinos in 2006-07.
Most offensive is that both her black and Latino students enjoy her classes enough to “show up religiously,” according to an article by the Association of Raza Educators on latinola.com.
LAUSD has long resisted incorporating ethnic studies as a teaching tool. This causes major frustration to students of color, especially at the impressionable middle and high school levels.
It’s a shame a young teacher would take a concerned risk when complacency and apathy is safer. Had Salazar stuck her head in the sand for another year she would have achieved tenure.
No right-thinking person in our society wishes to see an outbreak of independent teenage thinking. Certainly, LAUSD administrators see danger in teaching minority students that they are more than a footnote in somebody else’s literary history.
