The 9th Circuit ruled the MAS ban to be constitutional, but with a twist. They kicked it back to Judge Tashima giving more explicit direction about potential constitutional violations that state representatives may have engaged in while creating the legislation and banning the program. At this point in time, there was a huge change in the legal team as Wallstreet firm Weil, Gotshal & Magnes LLP agreed to take the case pro bono. It was the first time that MAS supporters would have more legal resources than the state.

In addition to discussing the testimony of “bit” players as well as “missing” witnesses – witnesses the state planned to call but didn’t – this chapter examines closely the testimony of two witnesses for the state, Kathryn Hrabluk and Elliott Hibbs, who were instrumental in showing that the superintendent’s finding of violation was prejudged and predetermined, revealing that the reasons offered by Horne and Huppenthal were pretextual. While there were not as many fireworks as the testimonies of Horne and Huppenthal, these were critically important in establishing the factual basis, which eventually led to the final ruling.

UNIDOS was the center of the youth movement in support of MAS, and their takeover of the TUSD school board meeting (4/26/11) made national headlines. The students engaged in civil disobedience because the state found TUSD out of compliance and the school board was going to take the first steps toward eliminating the program without substantive public input. This chapter details those events from a firsthand account, the massive militarization of subsequent school board meetings (e.g., 150 armed officers, many in riot gear, at a meeting of 500 people), and the subsequent conspiracy theories that rose to prominence (e.g., that former Ethnic Studies professor Ward Churchill orchestrated the whole thing).

The MAS court case moved to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and one of the premier First Amendment scholars in the country, Erwin Chemerinsky (Dean, Bolt Hall, UC Berkeley), agreed to do the oral arguments. Meanwhile, back in Tucson, co-founders of the MAS program Sean Arce and Auggie Romero got into a public fight that almost came to blows at the annual NAME (National Association of Multicultural Education) conference with multiple MAS teachers in attendance. Finally, John Huppenthal again found TUSD out of compliance with state law even after the elimination of MAS citing hip-hop legend KRS-One’s lyrics as evidence.

This chapter details the ways that core anti-MAS leaders in Arizona and throughout the country helped foment attacks on the program through a massive, loosely coordinated misinformation campaign involving official public statements from elected officials, legislation, television appearances, op-eds, and rightwing radio shows. The rhetoric is directly compared to that used to currently attack and sometimes ban Critical Race Theory throughout the country.

In response to the civil disobedience detailed in Chapter 4, TUSD decided to appeal the ruling that they were out of compliance with state law. However, the administrative law hearing detailed in this chapter – including a board member testifying that MAS represented “cult-like behavior” – was more of a kangaroo court because the state superintendent of public instruction was not required to abide by the ruling. Regardless, it was an important point in the movement as it became clear where the key actors stood in relation to MAS.

The epilogue brings the fight over MAS forward to today’s culture wars and the struggles over the way this country’s history will be taught.

Three Stanford-educated Chicanos took the stand in support of MAS, and these witnesses were central in Judge Tashima’s final ruling. Specifically, they detailed in a scholarly way the academic integrity of the department, the efficacy of taking the classes, and also demonstrated how state representatives used racist “code words” in cementing their opposition to the program. We detail their times testifying, how the state desperately tried to trip them up.