We need to remember and reinvent Latino and Indigenous education in Georgia
Hispanic students make up approximately 20% of the enrollment in Georgia’s public schools, nearly a 5-percentage-point increase in the past decade. AJC Get Schooled is publishing a series of guest essays this week exploring the educational landscape for Hispanic students in Georgia as part of our Hispanic Heritage Month coverage. Here is the fourth and final essay.
In DeKalb County, namely along the Buford Highway corridor that serves a long-standing immigrant community, our enrollment has decreased in recent years, and family separations are still on the rise.
In September, DeKalb County Schools joined Gwinnett County Schools, City Schools of Decatur and Atlanta Public Schools in passing policies that will codify existing federal protections for students in the face of law enforcement abuses, namely Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Teachers, parents, students and community organizations, including the Atlanta Association of Raza Educators, formed coalitions to defy the terror inflicted on immigrant families by racist and anti-immigrant persecution at the school level.
How are we to understand the roots of these events and the ongoing segregation, racism and exclusion that afflict Latine and Indigenous (namely Guatemalan Mayan) youth in modern society if we don’t teach about it? A curriculum that doesn’t speak to these issues honestly is omission and deception. The classroom is the space to make meaning of the madness, whether it be in school walls or in community spaces that generate independent curriculum.
Teachers should organize with the communities we serve, but ultimately, we are most powerful in our exact title. We must teach and contribute our expertise in curriculum and pedagogy in the struggle for education that actually works. If the majority of Georgia residents and students are increasingly nonwhite, our curriculum and pedagogies must reflect the needs of those students.
We need courses in Latino/x studies, Indigenous studies, African American/Black studies and Asian American studies offered in K-12 education. Studies show that students who take ethnic studies generally experience higher academic performance, attendance, engagement, civic leadership and self-esteem. Ethnic studies education is an approach to education that can support every single student in seeing themselves and the world they live in with a new perspective. Bilingual education similarly empowers and supports multilingual learners in their linguistic identities and English language acquisition.
In the wake of the attempt to ban and defund AP African American studies as a course offering in Georgia, followed by organizing to defy this racist erasure, the importance of this work continues. Asian American students and community members are advocating to expand the scope of course offerings to include Asian American studies in their schools. Latino and Maya Indigenous education from community groups helps those communities connect to their heritage to improve literacy and academic skills as facilitated by culture. Dual language immersion already exists in Georgia schools, though not in enough schools with large multilingual learner students who benefit most from bilingual education settings.
Georgia and the South already have foundational roots in culturally relevant and sustaining programs that center learning about minoritized communities. The Georgia Project in Dalton built bilingual education foundations in the 1990s with the arrival of Spanish-speaking immigrant populations. In the segregated Black schools of Jim Crow, Black teachers nurtured self-love and academic empowerment in Black children despite the odds of racist violence and inequity. Similarly, the Escuelitas and Mexican American-led schools in Jim Crow Texas also built infrastructure for the success of their Mexican American children as their language rights, cultural identities and physical safety were targeted. Schools were places of possibility for these children in a society that persecuted them.
To right the wrongs of history, our school systems must dedicate time to training teachers in the content and the pedagogy of ethnic studies and bilingual education–making sure that educators are competent at transmitting key content knowledge through culturally, linguistically and community-responsive teaching strategies. Our school systems must partner with university programs and community organizations to develop curriculum and pedagogy that enrich students’ learning. Youth should be nurtured as future educators of ethnic studies and bilingual education in “Grow Your Own Educator” programs to sustain these programs at the local and district levels.
As educators charged with the well-being of all students, it is time to speak up and take action. We can choose to keep teaching manufactured, irrelevant curriculum, or we can teach our students a more truthful, critical and empowering curriculum relevant to their lives. The choice lies in whether we will provide students an evidence-based education or to perpetuate curricular and pedagogical choices that keep Georgia low in its educational ranking in both academic and child well-being measures. The test scores, attendance, positive behavior and student engagement that school leaders fixate on will follow effective school climate and instruction.
Latino, Indigenous and immigrant students are under attack. Teachers must advocate for protections on our campuses and neighborhoods, joining efforts to abolish ICE and to fight for the education denied to our students. Luckily, we have rich legacies of African American, Latine and Indigenous struggles for educational equity and community control of education to inspire our fight. La lucha sigue!
Jonathan Peraza Campos is a Buford Highway-based Central American educator and the program specialist for Teaching Central America at Teaching for Change. He organizes with Escuelitas on Buford Highway and the Atlanta Chapter of the Association of Raza Educators.
If you have any thoughts about this item, or if you’re interested in writing an op-ed for the AJC’s education page, drop us a note at education@ajc.com.