Chapter 6: Chicano!(1996)

In our state (Georgia), and we imagine in many others as well, elementary and middle grades civil rights curricula end at Brown v. Board of Education and subsequent integration efforts (e.g. Ruby Bridges, Sylvia Mendez). While it is valuable to learn about school desegregation, focusing only on the rights to walk in to a school building ignores ongoing equity issues within the walls of schools. Not enough attention has been paid to students’ rights to walk out in response to substandard educational opportunities. Furthermore, in addition to state and national standards related to history and civics, we have included economics. In modern schooling, students have been commodified and reduced to a monetary value. Today’s school voucher conversations exemplify this, but even in its advertisements for the 1964 New York City student walkouts, the NAACP recognized that “one of the quickest ways to destroy inequality and segregation is to hit it in the pocketbook. Financial aid to the school system is based upon pupil attendance” (cited in Zinn Education Project, 2023, para. 12). Therefore, school walkouts can be framed as a demand for economic justice, for equality under the market as under the law and for capitalism to deliver on its promises. We think this is particularly salient given that the East LA Walkouts featured in the lesson took place at the height of the Cold War.