A federal judge on Wednesday put the final nail in the coffin of Arizona’s Republican-backed law banning Mexican-American studies classes in Tucson public schools. Conservative lawmakers led by then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne and then-state Sen. John Huppenthal, who later succeeded Horne, derided Tucson’s Mexican-American studies curriculum as an anti-American politicization of public school classrooms. Tashima’s judgment also sticks the state of Arizona with the bill for the plaintiff’s legal fees. Tucson’s school board voted in 2012 to abandon its Mexican-American studies program after Arizona officials threatened to withhold 10 percent of the district’s state funding. CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this article, the last name of the federal judge was given once as Wallace rather than Tashima.

Source: Huffington Post December 28, 2017 01:30 UTC