Isidro Ortiz, PHD | Draft NOtices | COMD - The Covid-19 pandemic has exacted a heavy toll on education and posed many unprecedented challenges to educators at all levels. As reported by Emma Dorn and her colleagues in “COVID-19 and education: The lingering effects of unfinished learning,” during the 2020-21 academic year, “the impact of the pandemic on k-12 student learning was significant.” Moreover, “the pandemic widened preexisting opportunity and achievement gaps, hitting historically disadvantaged students hardest.” Students in high schools became more likely to drop out of school, and “high school seniors, especially those from lowincome families, are less likely to go on to post-secondary education.” At the same time, the Defense Department has announced a new STEM strategic plan that would further militarize the nation’s schools. The plan would focus on student populations regarded as “underserved and underrepresented in STEM,” including military children, racial minorities and female students.

While these developments do not bode well for anti-militarism struggles, all hope is not lost. They have been accompanied by the rise of a counterhegemonic movement that has catalyzed the development of a new curriculum, the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (LESMC), that has significant potential to develop two essentials for future action against militarism: critical agency and self-efficacy.

Critical agency among students has been defined as the recognition of one’s ability to act, together with purposeful action or activity. Critical agency involves questioning the taken-for-granted in the knowledge and discourses that students already possess, as well as in the secondary discourses that they are acquiring. Self-efficacy, according to the psychologist Albert Bandura, is an individuals’ belief in his or her capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments.

 LESMC is a generative and transformational curriculum with the potential to promote critical agency and self-efficacy in students. Having noted the academic benefits of ethnic studies in the previous issue of Draft NOtices, here I provide a primer on this curriculum, drawing extensively on the work of its developers and advocates. In illuminating LESMC, I hope to mobilize support for it in California and help pave the way for its replication and implementation across the country.

Who developed the LESMC?

The LESMC is the product of the work of experts in ethnic studies and community activists who have been part of an ethnic studies movement in California. Some were founding members of the California Department of Education Ethnic Studies Curriculum Advisory Committee (ESMAC) and Curriculum Writers Committee, the committee tasked with the development of a model ethnic studies curriculum for the state of California. As they have noted in 2019, they “were hopeful that California would approve an ethnic studies curriculum.” The framework was a prerequisite to the adoption of ethnic studies as a graduation requirement in the state*. However, in the summer of 2019, the proposed curriculum came under attack from ideological forces on the Right. According to the founders of the LESMC,

“These forces decontextualized the curriculum, attacked individual ESMAC members and intimidated supporters in an all-out attempt to stop progress. The California Department of Education (CDE) bowed to the pressure and, from that point forward the ESMAC members were shut out of the process.”

Feb. 18, 2022  | Ruxandra Guidi | True Jersey - It’s my third year at Nutley High, the only high school in this northern New Jersey town of fewer than 30,000 people. It’s also my third year living in the United States. Everything still feels new.

One day, my guidance counselor, a soft-spoken Irish-American man whose name I cannot remember, sends a letter to the apartment where my mom and I live. He is tall, like one of the oaks in the park towering over me. It’s time to talk about my future, he tells us.

A week later, we are sitting in his office, facing the school’s courtyard. It’s winter and the weathered greenery outside looks sad and scraggly.

“Your grades are pretty good,” he tells me, pointing out how my favorite subjects must be creative writing and French.

Indeed, I’d been thinking I’d like to become a writer who travels. Or maybe a traveler who writes. I don’t know. The possibilities are so new. But the school counselor isn’t listening. He talks over and past me.

“Have you considered the Army?” he asks, looking at my mom. “It’s a great option for many Hispanics. You’ll get your college paid for and they’ll help you get your citizenship.”

We try to hide our frustration and thank him, shaking his hand goodbye.

I grew up in Venezuela. A nation that welcomed so many exiles fleeing the U.S.-backed Southern Cone dictatorships in the ‘70s. A nation that was a model of democracy in the region for decades. So the idea of joining the U.S. army feels repugnant.

For two decades, the U.S. Army used a video game to reach new recruits. It’s finally shutting it down.

Matthew Gault | Vice - America’s Army: Proving Grounds, a game used as a recruitment tool by the United States government, is shutting down its servers on May 5 after existing in various iterations for 20 years. After that date, the game will be delisted on Steam and removed from the PSN store. Offline matches and private servers will work, but the game will no longer track stats or provide online matches.

For 20 years, players have been able to download and play the Counter-Strike-esque game for free on PCs and consoles. It was a recruitment tool when no one else was using video games for recruitment, a free-to-play game well before that became common, and an attempt by the U.S. Army to reach a new generation of Americans.

“The free-to-play America’s Army PC Game represented the first large-scale use of game technology by the U.S. government as a platform for strategic communication and recruitment, and the first use of game technology in support of U.S. Army recruiting,” a forum post announcing the game’s shutdown said. “Three mainline titles and more than 20 million AA players later, the series’ original purpose continued. There have been over 30 million objectives completed, 180 million successful missions accomplished, 250 million teammates assisted, and many more in-game achievements attained in AA:PG alone.”