Credit: Alison Yin / EdSource
Last week, the California Legislature let its widely heralded 2021 high school ethnic studies bill, AB 101, silently lapse after it and Gov. Gavin Newsom passed a 2025-26 state budget that did not appropriate funds for it. Without that funding, school districts will not be bound by AB 101’s Fall 2025 deadline to offer students an ethnic studies course.
Ethnic studies’ popularity has been built on a false narrative: that California requires high school students to pass an ethnic studies course to earn a diploma. What’s been omitted from this narrative is that shortly before AB 101’s passage the Legislature added a barely noticed but hugely consequential sentence to AB 101 — that the ethnic studies graduation requirement will become “operative only upon an appropriation of funds” in separate legislation.
In other words, from its inception, AB 101 was, and remains, aspirational.
Upon learning this surprising news, Mountain View-Los Altos High School District Superintendent Eric Volta dubbed the state’s ruse “a hot mess” (view recording hour 3:37). “Everyone was moving in one direction until December,” he said, scrambling with limited resources to meet the state’s pressing deadline.
The Senate Appropriations Committee estimated that an ethnic studies requirement would cost taxpayers a staggering $276 million a year — for a subject rife with controversy and concern.
California’s decision not to trigger AB 101 was undoubtedly made easier given the turmoil wracking school districts that had already prepared this coursework, including Newsom’s alma mater, Tamalpais Union. Heated school board meetings extended into the night when ethnic studies landed on board agendas. Parents statewide were distraught to see their districts selecting “liberated” ethnic studies like in Tamalpais, centered on race-based resentment that seemed to encourage armed militancy.
Attorney General Bonta, in a rare Legal Alert sent to all local superintendents and school board members, obliquely signaled the state’s hesitation to move forward. This public alarm and skittishness followed state leaders’ receipt of a detailed June 2023 policy paper from the non-partisan Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, cc’d to 3,000 school board superintendents and trustees, alerting them that the California Legislature did not appear to require ethnic studies after all. The Los Angeles Times and EdSource confirmed it, EdSource reporting that state officials agreed — “no money, no requirement to develop or offer classes.”
The California Department of Education’s (CDE) years of silence on this funding caveat, pertaining to the first change in the state’s graduation requirements in decades, is not what local education leaders and taxpaying parents should expect from a state agency with a $300 million annual administrative budget and a duty to help districts operate their schools.
This silence was not just consequential for California’s 430 school districts with high schools. It became a recurring issue for the University of California’s Academic Senate and its governing bodies as they contemplated making passing an ethnic studies course a UC admissions requirement, grounded largely in the mistaken belief that the state requires high school students to enroll in it. The Academic Senate rejected that proposal in April after a letter signed by hundreds of UC faculty members pointed out its many flaws, including this faulty premise.
It appears that CDE’s silence about this funding caveat was intentional. Believing for years that ethnic studies was mandated, school districts developed courses expecting the state to cover their expenses. Neither the CDE nor the State Board of Education advised school districts differently. In fact, CDE’s website states that students must take ethnic studies to graduate. The state board’s comment that ethnic studies is not required was in 2025, and directed only to the University of California’s Academic Senate.
Over one-quarter of California school districts with high schools now offer ethnic studies, 85% employing the controversial liberated ethnic studies framework according to my recent sampling. Liberated Ethnic Studies is political education, teaching students to view the world through the narrow lenses of skin color and oppression, often so they will try to change it with anti-Western activism.
School districts just now learning about this reprieve are reversing course or pausing their ethnic studies work. In January, San Dieguito Union turned its new required 9th-grade Ethnic Studies English course into an elective, only to discover that student interest in the course was so low that it might not offer the class at all its high schools. This spring, Ramona Unified, Glendora Unified, Chino Valley Unified, and others paused their work mid-stream. Parents in San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Newsom’s Tamalpais Union are pressing their school boards to do the same.
The lesson here for local school leaders: verify narratives before acting, including those advanced by California state education officials.
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Lauren Janov is a California lawyer, education policy analyst, and political strategist. She is a legal consultant for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, advised the University of California faculty team which opposed a proposed Ethnic Studies admissions requirement, and co-founded the Palo Alto Parent Alliance. The opinions expressed are her own.
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