Public Tax Dollars Fund Racist School

Taxpayers along with radical groups that aim to reconquer the Southwestern U.S. are funding a Hispanic K-8 school led by a principal who believes in racial segregation and sees the institution as part of a larger cultural “struggle.”

The Academia Semillas del Pueblo Charter School was chartered by the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2001, local KABC radio host Doug McIntyre—who has been investigating the school for the past three weeks—told WND.

Among the school’s supporters are the National Council of La Raza Charter School Development Initiative; Raza Development Fund, Inc.; and the Pasadena City College chapter of MeCHA, or Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan.

“La Raza,” or “the Race,” is a designation by many Mexicans who see themselves as part of a transnational ethnic group they hope will one day reclaim Aztlan, the mythical birthplace of the Aztecs. In Chicano folklore, Aztlan includes California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and parts of Colorado and Texas.

The school teaches the ancient Nahutal language of the Aztecs and its base-20 math system. Another language of emphasis is Mandarin, even though no Chinese attend.

MEChA, founded at U.C. Santa Barbara in 1969, has the stated goal of returning the American Southwest to Mexico.

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Marcos Aguilar, the school’s founder and principal, said in an interview with an online educational journal, Teaching to Change L.A., he doesn’t think much of the Brown v. Board of Education decision that desegregated American schools.

Aguilar simply doesn’t want to integrate with white institutions.

“We don’t want to drink from a white water fountain, we have our own wells and our natural reservoirs and our way of collecting rain in our aqueducts,” he said.

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KABC’s McIntyre, noting the school’s emphasis on Aztec language and culture combined with test scores that fall below the L.A. school system’s meager results, told WND he believes the school is bordering on “educational malpractice.”

“What high schools are they preparing kids to go to?” he asked.

“The whole multi-culture-diversity argument is blowing up in our faces,” McIntyre said. “What’s lost is, we have a culture, too. But when you defend American culture—which I believe is the most diverse in the world—you are branded a xenophobe.”

The school has no whites, blacks or Asians, McIntyre pointed out. According to statistics he found, 91.3 percent are Hispanic and the rest Native American or Eskimo.

McIntyre said he was teaching a writing class at UCLA in 1993 when Aguilar, as a student, participated in a 50-day student takeover after Chicano activist and labor leader Caesar Chavez died. School officials eventually gave in to demands to create a Chicano-studies major and agreed to pay some $50,000 in damages caused by the protesters.

Aguilar repeatedly has refused to come on McIntyre’s program, the host said.