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.
The opinions expressed in this commentary represent those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, hosts a panel discussion with California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian, California State University Chancellor Mildred Garcia, and University of California President Michael Drake.
Credit: Ashley A. Smith / EdSource
With some of the most racially and ethnically diverse student bodies in the country, California’s public community colleges and universities fail to mirror its students in teaching and leadership positions.
White men dominate the leadership positions within the University of California, California State University and California Community College systems, even as two-thirds of undergraduates across the state identify as Latino, Black, Asian or Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Campaign for College Opportunity.
Notably, the three systems are each led by a person of color: a Black man at UC, an Afro-Latina at Cal State and an Indian-American woman at the community colleges, but the report highlights that those leading academic senates, tenured positions, departments and senior administrative positions are disproportionately white and male.
Seeing instructors, staff members, administrators and presidents from diverse backgrounds on college campuses has been shown to help all students perform better academically, the campaign’s research shows.
“I have often found a disheartening lack of representation while going to school, particularly as a STEM major,” said Casey Chang, an environmental science major at Mission College in Santa Clara. “I’ve had a few professors who are Asian American men, but navigating higher education as a woman of color has been difficult. I have yet to take a class with a female Asian American professor, and it feels like my identity has been left out.”
Chang spoke at an event Tuesday evening hosted by the campaign about the report.
Autumn Alaniz-Wiggins, a student at Chico State University, said she was excited to study nutrition, access and food justice at the school. But when she started her classes, she found that instead of learning about the intersection of systemic racism and food swamps, her instructors focused on the benefits of kale and quinoa.
“It became clear to me that the absence of diverse identities in faculty and leadership positions hindered us from equitable student access,” she said. And for a year, Alaniz-Wiggins dropped out of college. That is, until she met her first Black faculty member at Chico State.
“He taught culturally relevant courses and even hired me as a research assistant where I became published through a study on nutritional knowledge and (low-income) students,” she said. “For the first time, I was getting the support that I needed from the start.”
For the Campaign for College Opportunity, improvement is too slow.
“California’s public colleges and universities as well as our governor and Legislature have prioritized and invested in efforts to increase the representation of faculty and college leaders, but the work is, at best, happening at a pace that is far too slow or at worst, only paying lip service to the values of diversity, equity and inclusion,” said Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity. Despite small increases in the racial and ethnic diversity of faculty and college leadership, “troubling gaps” remain, she added.
The report found that while there have been improvements in gender and racial representations since the campaign’s first report in 2018, the state’s public universities still need to improve diversifying their leadership positions. For example, Latino, Black, Asian, Native Hawaiian and American Indian professors are underrepresented among the tenured and tenure-track faculty groups across the community colleges, UC and CSU systems.
The UC system
There are few Latino faculty members in the UC system, and only 8% of them are tenured or on the tenure track. Among Black faculty, only 3% are tenured or on the tenure track.
Only eight of 117 campus leaders in the UC system are Latino, compared with 25% of UC students who identify as Latino, 39% of all Californians and 49% of Californians aged 18 to 24.
When it comes to women in leadership, only two of the nine undergraduate campuses are led by women, despite 54% of undergraduate UC students identifying as women.
The Cal State system
Only 10% of Latino faculty across the 23 CSU campuses are tenured or on the tenure track.
The report also found that the CSU’s academic senate is also overwhelmingly white. Seventy percent of the Academic Senate and 64% of the campus-wide academic senate members are white, despite white students comprising 21% of the undergraduate student body.
California’s community colleges
Only 18% of Latino faculty across the state’s 116 community colleges are tenured or on the tenure track. Among Black faculty, only 4% are tenured or on the tenure track.
Asian and Native Hawaiian-Pacific Islander students comprise 14% of the state’s community college students, but only 8% of campus or district leaders are Asian or Native Hawaiian.
California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian said she’s optimistic that in five years students will see an increase in diverse leadership across the 116 campuses.
“Tenure happens at the discipline level, not only at the college level,” she said. “As system leaders, we need to set the expectations and shift the mindset.”
Unfortunately, too often during the hiring process, people give arguments about not diminishing standards in the pursuit of diversity and equity, but “those are all false arguments,” Christian said. “We need to focus on what the data shows like the (report).”
UC President Drake said one way to improve the diversity of leadership positions is to encourage the diverse students within the three higher education systems to pursue careers in academia “through graduate school, to the junior faculty, to tenured faculty and to our leaders,” he said. “Those things are evolutionary and they take time. But all the energy’s moving in the right direction.”
Cal State Chancellor Mildred Garcia, hired at the end of last year, said she’s already starting to hold the 23 campus presidents accountable when it comes to making diversity, equity and inclusion a priority.
“We have to remember belonging because students do not understand our campuses,” she said. “What are you doing about your staff? And your senior team?”
But Garcia said campuses should also address the unconscious bias that happens on search committees. The UC system, for example, uses equity advisers in its hiring searches to guarantee a diverse and equitable pool of candidates, Drake said.
There have been some pockets of improvement in closing racial and gender disparities across the three systems. For example, Black Californians are represented in both tenured and non-tenured faculty positions in the community colleges at 6% for both groups, according to the report, which reflects the state’s Black population.
The share of tenured and tenure-track professors who are women has increased from 33% to 40% in the UC system and from 47% to 49% in the CSU. About half of CSU presidents are women and more than half of the CSU board of trustees identify as women. CSU presidents are also racially diverse, with 12 of 23 campuses led by Latino, Black, Asian and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander leaders.
Women also lead 52 of the 116 community college campuses, and 49% of presidents in the two-year system come from diverse backgrounds.
The campaign also recommended requiring all three public college systems to submit a bi-annual analysis of their leadership, faculty and academic senate diversity, and encouraged the Legislature to build a statewide fund that would help the colleges in recruitment, hiring and retention. The campaign also recommended that college presidents be willing to restart searches if their applicant pools don’t have an adequate number of competitive candidates from diverse backgrounds.
Berkeley Unified School District Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel and Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley at the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on May 8, 2024.
Credit: YouTube
A first-term California congressman sparred with the superintendent of Berkeley Unified and denounced the district’s choice of a consultant to create an ethnic studies curriculum during a House subcommittee hearing on antisemitism in K-12 schools Wednesday at the Capitol.
During his five minutes allowed for questioning, U.S. Rep. Kevin Kiley, a Republican representing a huge expanse of eastern California, pressed Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel about the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium.
The group pitches to school districts in California an alternative to the state’s ethnic studies model curriculum framework with a focus on dismantling capitalism, systems of racism, and Zionism, which it equates to colonialism. The group’s leaders include ethnic studies professors from California State University and the University of California.
Berkeley Unified School District Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel and Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley at the House Education and Workforce Committee hearing on Wednesday.
The district hired the group on a one-year contract in June 2023 for $111,120 to serve as what Ford Morthel called “a thought partner.” Berkeley’s memorandum of understanding said that the district’s Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee recommended the group as a “content expert group” that would “provide instructional materials, teacher training, and consultation for implementing ethnic studies.”
The consortium’s contract is up for renewal next month. Jewish parents in Berkeley have written the school board opposing continuing it. In their letter, the parents criticized the consortium as pushing “a non-inclusive, biased, divisive, and one-sided ideological world view.”
Ford Morthel testified Wednesday that the district has not purchased a Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum. Rather, she said, the district takes pride that teachers and community partners have written the curriculum. Teachers created lessons on Israel and Palestine because of “a lot of curiosity, a lot of questions, and quite frankly, a lot of confusion from many of our students wanting to know what was going on.”
The district did not respond Thursday to EdSource’s question on what the consortium is providing the district.
The district has not released the lesson plans, and a parent, Yossi Fendel, has sued the district for them. Fendel said that what he had been allowed to view of the ninth-grade lessons was biased against Israel and violated the district’s policy on teaching controversial issues, the publication Berkleyside reported.
The Liberated consortium is one of several consulting groups whose curriculum proposals have generated controversy in Sacramento and Berkeley.
The 16 members of the leadership team are listed on the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium’s website and include leaders from across the state in ethnic studies.
Critics included State Board of Education President Linda Darling-Hammond and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. The Jewish Legislative Caucus cited the curriculum’s one-sided view of the Israel-Palestine conflict and a favorable definition of the “boycott, divestment, sanctions movement,” which calls for sanctions and boycotts of Israel. Gov. Gavin Newsom called the document “insufficiently balanced and inclusive.”
Please answer yes or no
Early in the two-hour hearing, the chair of the subcommittee, Rep. Aaron Bean, R-Fla., forced Ford Morthel and the other two superintendents on the panel, New York City schools Chancellor David Banks and Montgomery County school board President Karla Silvestre, to give one-word answers to a series of complicated questions. One was whether the phrase “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” is antisemitic.
Yes or no, Bean asked?
“If it is calling for the elimination of the Jewish people in Israel,” Ford Morthel responded. “And I will also say that I recognize that it does have different meanings to different members of our community.”
“I’m going to go ‘yes.’ I’ll put you down, yes,” Bean said.
Kiley used that answer against her during his questioning. He referred to a slide in the teacher-prepared curriculum that cited the “From the river to the sea” phrase as a call for freedom and peace and paired it with a “supportive quote” by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Michigan, soon after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas in Israel. Congress censured Tlaib on a 224-188 Republican-led vote, with members claiming it implied support for armed resistance to abolish the state of Israel.
Many people, including most Jews, also view it that way. Others, Tlaib included, say it evokes future coexistence where everyone can live in freedom in Palestine.
“Do you think that’s an appropriate thing to have on a slide for students?” Kiley asked Ford Morthel.
“So,” she replied, “we definitely believe that it’s important to expose our students to a diversity of ideas and perspectives. And if it was presented as a perspective, I do think it’s appropriate.”
“You said earlier you thought this was antisemitic, and you put this on a slide in the classroom, and then students go around the hall saying it. I don’t think there’s anything surprising about that,” Kiley said.
Noting that the district passed a policy against hate speech last year, Ford Morthel said, “Public schools reflect the values and aspirations of their local communities. Berkeley is no different.
“Our history of activism, social justice, diversity, and inclusion is alive and well today. And we recognize the need to teach students to express themselves with respect and compassion.”
Assemblymember Rick Zbur responds to senators’ questions during a July 3 hearing on Assembly Bill 2918.
Credit: Senate Education Committee
Legislation authored by members of the Jewish Legislation Caucus to prevent antisemitism and prejudice from seeping into ethnic studies courses passed its first legislative hurdle on Wednesday.
However, Assembly Bill 2918 faces a hot summer of intense negotiations to persuade legislators who agree with its intent but question whether the bill’s restrictions and lack of clarity could lead to avoidable conflicts.
Assembly Members Rick Zbur, D-Los Angeles, and Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, the bill’s chief authors, told the Senate Education Committee they and key education groups are willing to put in the time to fix it.
“While we actually have issues now that are affecting the climate in schools for Jewish students, this affects all communities that are subject to bias and discrimination,” said Zbur. “We have to get this right for everyone, no matter what your background is.”
But what supporters see as transparency, opponents see as interference.
The bill’s requirements “will expose districts to increased harassment and litigation. The lack of clarity in defining what curriculum and instruction materials are will leave our teachers vulnerable to unwarranted scrutiny,” said Teresa Montaño, a former Los Angeles Unified teacher who now teaches Chicano studies at CSU Northridge.
The bill would strengthen disclosure requirements for approving ethnic studies courses and materials. The 2021 law establishing an ethnic studies mandate — that all high schools offer a course in 2025-26 and make it a graduation requirement in 2030-31 — requires districts to hold two hearings before adopting an ethnic studies course. The law also includes a broad warning that the instruction must be free of “any bias, bigotry, or discrimination.”
But those provisions have proven ineffective, Zbur and others said. Parents have complained they had no idea what their children were being taught; school board members said they were unaware of what was in a course they approved, sometimes on a consent calendar with no discussion.
The bill, which has the support of State Superintendent of Instruction Tony Thurmond, would require:
A committee, including classroom teachers, as a majority, and parents, would formally review instructional materials and a locally developed ethnic studies course.
The governing board of a district or charter school would determine that the course doesn’t promote any bias, bigotry, or discrimination and explain why they declined to adopt a course based on the ethnic studies model curriculum that the State Board of Educationadopted in 2018;
Parents would be sent a written notice before a course is presented for approval.
At the suggestion of staff, Zbur and Addis agreed not to apply the bill to already approved courses and not to require school board members to certify with the State Department of Education that the course is factually and historically accurate.
Tensions over the content of ethnic studies courses have simmered since a protracted process by the State Board from 2018 to 2021 to adopt a voluntary ethnic studies course framework. Gov. Gavin Newsom, State Board President Linda Darling-Hammond, and Thurmond criticized the first draft of the framework, written primarily by ethnic studies experts and faculty members, as ideological and biased.
After the state board adopted a substantially changed framework in 2021, the first draft’s authors disavowed the final version and formed the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies. Its member organizations have contracted with districts to buy their versions of ethnic studies, which stress the challenges of white supremacy and an oppressive capitalist system, and solidarity with Palestine’s battle for liberation.
As Montaño said during a webinar on ethnic studies last year, “I have no choice but to challenge settler colonialism everywhere and to acknowledge that from the very beginning, our disciplines of ethnic studies were aligned to the global struggles in Africa, Palestine and Latin America.”
In the past year, without mentioning the Liberated Ethnic Studies coalition by name, both Attorney General Rob Bonta and the Newsom administration have reminded school districts to adhere to the law’s prohibition of discrimination.
“Vendors have begun promoting curriculum for (districts) to use for ethnic studies courses. We have been advised, however, that some vendors are offering materials that may not meet the requirements of AB 101, particularly the requirement (against bias and bigotry), an important guardrail highlighted when the bill was signed,” Brooks Allen, a Newsom adviser and executive director of the state board, wrote in August 2023.
Conflicts have flared up in the past year. Jewish parents in Palo Alto have complained they’ve been left in the dark about the development of an ethnic studies curriculum that will be piloted this fall. Opponents are protesting the board of Pajaro Valley Unified’s second thoughts about renewing a contract with a liberated ethnic studies contractor.
Tension has further escalated in reaction to the massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas in October and the subsequent invasion and occupation of Gaza by Israel, causing tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths. The Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education is investigating charges that Berkeley Unified failed to respond properly to rising incidents of antisemitism in its schools.
Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, said his concerns about bias when the ethnic studies law was adopted have come true. “Now we see in practice, particularly for those of us in the Jewish community, how, in my view, bad actors have hijacked the process to promote a curriculum that does the opposite of what the goals that we had established,” he said during the discussion on the bill.
However, more than a dozen ethnic studies teachers and parents, including several Jewish parents opposed to the Israeli military’s invasion of Gaza, disagreed, saying at that hearing that they opposed the bill.
Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, said he was troubled by ambiguities in the bill and the possibility that the strength of ethnic studies could be weakened. “Everything in my core being is telling me that as it’s currently put together, (the bill) is actually going to have the unintended consequence of exacerbating the intensity of disputes at the local level,” he said.
Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, the committee chair, said he shared Cortese’s concern that ethnic studies could “get unproductively caught up in controversies over whose version of history should be taught in our schools.”
“It’s fair to worry about the consequences, absent clarity in the bill, of organizations and individuals without teaching experience involved in developing high school courses,” he said.
“I think it’s important that the bill move forward. It’s an important discussion,” he added. Encouraging Zbur and Addis to work through unresolved issues with the Latino Caucus and others, he joined the majority in passing the bill, with Cortese dissenting.
Assemblymember Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, explains AB 2918 during an Aug. 5 Senate committee hearing.
Credit: Senate Education Committee
A solution to curb antisemitic content they say is infecting some districts’ ethnic studies courses is eluding Jewish legislators. The legislation they authored has failed to gain traction so far, despite the support of State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Assemblymembers Rick Zbur, D-Los Angeles, and Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, are pledging to return next year with a new version of their bill and a bigger coalition behind it. Last week, they pulled Assembly Bill 2918 from consideration amid sharp opposition from the California Teachers Association and college ethnic studies faculty. And they have yet to make the case to the largely progressive Legislature that some ethnic studies courses are problematic, and that it’s not just a Jewish problem.
The bill would have added levels of public review, additional disclosure and additional anti-bias provisions to 2021 law (Assembly Bill 101) that set a mandate for students to take high school ethnic studies as a graduation requirement, starting in 2030-31. Zbur said that he, Addis and the backers are ready to “really start from scratch, put everything on the table, and try to share something that addresses the problem that we are facing.”
The “problem,” they charge, is anti-Israel content that is bleeding over to antisemitism in the classroom. The primary intent of California’s high school ethnic studies is to focus on the historic struggles and achievements of minority groups within the United States. But a collection of groups, called the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies, led primarily by college ethnic studies faculty, have made the Palestinian conflict with Israel a theme of a high school ethnic studies course. They have characterized Israel as an oppressive settler colonialist nation that compels the liberation of Palestine. Jewish families complain that teaching a biased and one-sided view of the conflict has provoked antisemitic remarks, bullying and antagonism toward Jewish students. The courses also stress the continuing harms of white supremacy and corporate capitalism.
More than two dozen unified school districts, including Santa Ana, San Diego, Hayward, San Diego, Oakland, Castro Valley and Berkeley unified school districts, have signed contracts with consultants affiliated with the “liberated” approach to ethnic studies. The groups include the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, Community Responsive Education, the Association of Raza Educators, and the Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing.
“Unfortunately, we are witnessing harmful situations where, intentionally or not, some ethnic studies curriculum and instruction is creating classrooms that Jewish students are not experiencing as safe, inclusive, or affirming,” Addis said at an Aug. 5 hearing of a Senate committee.
The clash between the Legislative Jewish Caucus and the authors of liberated ethnic studies instruction predates the adoption of the state’s ethnic studies model curriculum framework in 2021. But the ongoing conflict in Gaza, in which 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered and 40,000-plus Palestinians have perished, has heightened tensions. Since Jan. 1, the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education has opened investigations of Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco unified districts on charges they have failed to respond properly to incidents of antisemitism.
Several UC and CSU ethnic studies faculty advised or participated in creating the first draft of the state’s ethnic studies model curriculum, which the State Board of Education ordered rewritten in 2019 to present a more balanced perspective on race. The final draft excised the initial draft’s endorsement of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Israeli government and universities.
Addition of guardrails
At the encouragement of the Legislative Jewish Caucus and Gov. Newsom, Assembly Bill 101 establishing the high school graduation mandate explicitly stated that the Legislature intended for school districts to not use unadopted portions of earlier drafts of the model curriculum.
The law also states that ethnic studies materials and instruction should be appropriate for use with pupils of all races, religions, nationalities and other legally protected student groups and that it “not reflect or promote, directly or indirectly, any bias, bigotry, or discrimination against any person or group of persons.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the Newsom administration have reminded school districts to follow the law’s requirements for “inclusivity, sensitivity, and accuracy.”
“Vendors have begun promoting curriculum to use for ethnic studies courses. We have been advised, however, that some vendors are offering materials that may not meet the requirements of AB 101, particularly the second requirement (not reflecting or promoting any bias, bigotry, or discrimination), an important guardrail highlighted when the bill was signed,” Brooks Allen, executive director of the State Board of Education and an education adviser to Newsom, wrote in a memo to districts a year ago. “Accordingly, before any curriculum or instructional materials for ethnic studies courses are selected, we strongly encourage you to closely scrutinize them to ensure that they meet the above requirements.”
Allen’s guidance does not single out any vendor or group, but the UC Ethnic Studies Faculty Council assumed it was aimed at them. In response, the council denounced the guardrails as censorship. “We vehemently oppose the preemptive restriction of what can be taught, examined, and researched as part of ethnic studies. … In a very real sense, the guardrails are themselves a form of bias, bigotry, and discrimination. California teachers should be able to deliver lessons on important concepts such as settler colonialism, apartheid, and resistance without having to fear censorship or legal action by the state.”
The Legislative Jewish Caucus, however, argues that the “guardrails” and transparency requirements under the law must be more explicit to be effective.
The last version of AB 2918, posted July 3, included compromise language suggested by staff of the Senate Education Committee. Among its key provisions, it called for districts to create a committee to review ethnic studies curriculum and materials prior to adoption. Although the majority would be teachers, it would include parents and guardians and representatives from community organizations “with experience assisting children build cultural awareness and understanding.” The district would notify parents how they could participate in the process or comment on the courses and materials once they are produced.
And, once materials or a curriculum is approved, the school board or superintendent would certify to the California Department of Education that it followed the review process — requirements that do not apply to other academic programs.
Under current law, districts must hold a hearing on a proposed ethnic studies curriculum before adopting it at a second board meeting. But some parents have complained that they were unaware that an ethnic studies course had been adopted, and some boards had placed the curriculum on a “consent” calendar for automatic approval without discussion.
In August 2023, the Washington, D.C.-based Louis Brandeis Center and other legal groups sued Santa Ana Unified school board for violating the Brown Act, the state’s open meeting law, in passing a liberated ethnic studies curriculum without proper notice, and for allowing members in the audience to insult Jewish speakers.
“By failing to intervene in the heckling and harassment of Jewish speakers at its board meeting, the board contributed to creating a hostile environment that prevented Jewish members of the public from fully exercising their right to participate in SAUSD Board meetings as the Brown Act requires,” the lawsuit read.
The bill also would have added another protection to the existing “guardrails” in the current law, that the curriculum “foster respect and acceptance and focus on the experiences of communities of the United States” — as opposed to tensions abroad. The implication is that a lesson on the war in Gaza should incorporate the perspective of Israel and American Jews. And the principle would apply to other minority groups portrayed negatively, he said.
“A lot of people think we are ‘trying to water down the curriculum’ “and steer away from the four primary groups that are the focus of ethnic studies (Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans), Zbur said at the Aug. 5 Senate hearing. “We’re not. But to the extent there is content that is about or affects other communities, you need to look at how it will be viewed by the community itself.”
A threat to ethnic studies?
Opposition to the bill was strong. In an urgent call to action to ethnic studies supporters at UC Santa Cruz, Christine Hong, professor of critical race and ethnic studies and literature at the university, wrote that AB 2918 would require an extra round of approval and another round of state certification.
“No other K-12 discipline has these requirements — ethnic studies, a field forged by students of color, is specifically being targeted by special political interests,” she wrote. And she charged that undefined community “stakeholders” would be able “to shut down an ethnic studies program if they don’t like what is being taught.”
Seth Bramble, a lobbyist for the California Teachers Association, agreed, saying the bill singled out ethnic studies courses and educators “as the only discipline where we need extra scrutiny and where we need extra red tape to ensure the class is appropriate for all learners.”
“These unnecessary hurdles replicate the very inequality that ethnic studies seek to address, limiting the potential reach and impact of ethnic studies,” he said at the hearing.
Although most of the speakers who identified themselves as Jewish expressed support, Maya Steinhardt, who said she was a Jewish teacher and former Sacramento State student who had spent time at a pro-Palestinian encampment, dissented. “I’m concerned that this bill will result in the same kind of biased education that the authors say they are combating. As the authors stated, marginalized communities should have a voice in how their stories are told. But what happens when different marginalized communities have differing views on the same history? Do you privilege one group’s perception over another?”
The authors and the caucus say that ethnic studies require a different response because it is different. For other subjects — math, English language arts, history, and science — the state has adopted academic standards with a state-led textbook and materials adoption process. For ethnic studies, there is only a voluntary model curriculum framework, leaving it to districts to choose what to teach.
The lack of academic standards, along with a materials review, “makes school districts susceptible to adopting variations of curricula that go beyond the law’s guardrails,” Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, and a caucus member, wrote in an email. He said the ethnic studies course at a high school his son attended was “a clear and dramatic violation of the law” on ethnic studies “with obvious factual inaccuracies.”
More time to build support
Zbur and Addis introduced AB 2918 late in the legislative session, leaving too little time to assemble a coalition outside the Legislative Jewish Caucus, Zbur acknowledged. He said he would spend the coming weeks negotiating with education unions, including the CTA, and increasing the support by showing that “these guardrails protect all communities,” not just Jewish Californians.
He said he expects support from Thurmond, who has not participated in negotiations thus far, and Newsom, who committed in his April 2024 Golden State Plan to Counter Antisemitism that he “will work with the Jewish Caucus and Legislature to pursue legislation strengthening the guardrails established by AB 101.”
Along with setting a high school graduation mandate, AB 101 requires that all high schools begin offering an ethnic studies course in 2025-26. In preparation, many school districts will approve courses and materials this year.
AB 2918’s delay could mean the window for affecting that process will close too soon to affect that process in many districts.
Santa Ana Unified board President Carolyn Torres, right, and board member Rigo Rodriguez speak at the board meeting on August 27, 2024. Both sit on the district’s Select Committee on Ethnic Studies.
Credit: YouTube / Santa Ana Unified
The hearing on the case has been rescheduled to Friday, Oct. 25 at 10 a.m. in Orange County Superior Court. The court gave no reason for the change. Updated Sept. 16.
Santa Ana Unified staff memberson a steering committee led by two school board members expressed antisemitic views while designing new ethnic studies courses, newly released legal documents reveal.
The comments have tainted the new courses, which were written out of public view, in violation of state law, according to the motion asking a state court to invalidate the courses.
“The students of Santa Ana will be taught damaging, biased views about Jews and Israelis — views that the State has expressly warned school districts against teaching,” the 31-page document reads. “Once these biases are imparted onto impressionable youth, they cannot so easily be undone.”
Attorneys for two nationally known Jewish legal groups — the American Jewish Committee and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law — are asking the court to throw out four ethnic studies courses that they say are biased against Jews and that the school board passed in violation of the Brown Act, which requires open meetings with advance notice to the public. They want a court to order compliance with the Brown Act as a condition for working further on ethnic studies curricula.
The attorneys uncovered prejudiced remarks through depositions, affidavits, documents,text messages and emails that the district turned over in response to subpoenas.
One ethnic studies steering committee member, identified in the memorandum as “Employee 1,” referred to the Jewish Federation of Orange County as “racist [Z]ionists” to whom the District should not “cave” in a text to another district employee. In a deposition, Employee 1 called the Jewish Federation “racist Zionists.”
Employee 1 referred to the lone Jewish member of the steering committee in a chat as a “colonized Jewish mind,” as well as a “pretender,” a “f—— baby,” and as “stupid” because of the person’s reservations about some of the committee’s work.
In an online chat, the Jewish member wrote this summary of what he heard when he and the other members were preparing to meet with the Jewish Federation: “Jews greatly benefit from White privilege and so have it better,” and “We don’t need to give both sides. We only support the oppressed, and the Jews are the oppressors.”
The Jewish member continued, “When I very respectfully said that those comments were personally offensive and racist, (name redacted) told me to ‘check my tone’ so as not to “ruin the spirit and mood of the room.”
The lawsuit focuses on the work of the ethnic studies steering committee. Since its inception in March 2020, school board members Carolyn Torres and Rigo Rodriguezhave served on the committee; one veteran administrator said they ran it “like a dictator.” They enlisted only staff members to the project who agreed with their views. They “consisted of a narrow and insular group of individuals who were close to the board members and were ‘handpicked’ to promote a ‘very pro-ethnic studies’ vision, without any “naysayers,” the complaint said.
Torres, the current board president, is a seventh-grade teacher and longtime ethnic studies advocate. Rodriguez is an associate professor in the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at CSU Long Beach. Both were deposed in this lawsuit.
Torres is not cited in the complaint with making antisemitic remarks. The complaint said Rodriguez “freely shared in his deposition his reductive belief that Jewish Americans are ‘racialized as under the White category,’ whichis why they do not belong in the ethnic studies curriculum.
The committee has adopted a “liberated” ethnic studies orthodoxy, the complaint said, that “classifies Jewish people as white — regardless of their actual skin color or historical perceptions of Jews as nonwhite — and the Jewish people as oppressors.”
The “liberated” perspective frames ethnic studies as a struggle against white supremacy, capitalism and the legacy of European imperialism, in which Israel is a modern outpost. The liberated approach was woven into the first draft of the state’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Framework, but the State Board of Education criticized it and ordered it rewritten in 2019.
When it passed Assembly Bill 101 in September 2021, mandating that all high school graduates take an ethnic studies course for a diploma, the Legislature stated that districts should not include unadopted content from earlier drafts of the framework. The Newsom administration and state Attorney General Rob Bonta have reiterated that warning in guidance to districts.
Despite this rebuke, Santa Ana’s steering committee “created a curriculum animated by the rejected draft of the Model Curriculum, including portions that were removed due to bias,” the complaint said.
Behind closed doors
For years, the steering committee worked, as one member put it, “under the radar” to avoid scrutiny from the public, especially Jews.
When it came time to present two ethnic studies courses to the full school board, two senior district officials in text messages suggested scheduling the approval on a Jewish holiday so that Jews would not attend. “We may need to use Passover to get all new courses approved,” one suggested. The other official responded, “That’s actually a good strategy.”
The select committee has no community members, and the district has not published the names of the staff members on the committee. However, one active member is Roselinn Lee, a curriculum specialist for the district who was among State Board of Education’s appointees to an advisory committee for the ill-fated first draft of the state model curriculum framework. After the state board ordered it rewritten because of bias, Lee and the other advisers, primarily CSU and UC ethnic studies faculty members, disavowed the framework and denounced “the pressures and influences of white supremacist, right-wing, conservatives” in a letter to the state board. They created the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium as an alternative.
Santa Ana’s school board subsequently hired the Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing (XITO), a consultancy group, to train teachers in the district’s ethnic study courses. Its leader, Sean Arce, is a team member of the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium. The complaint characterizes his social media postings as “an extended anti-Israel and extremist screed,” including an April 11, 2022, Facebook post that denounces “Zionist control of the CA Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.”
At a meeting earlier this week, the Santa Ana board renewed a contract with XITO for $80,633 for 11 days of professional development training in ethnic studies.
Redacted names
Attorneys for the complainants have redacted the names of select committee members who made antisemitic remarks from exhibits that have been made public. Marci Miller, an attorney for the Brandeis Center, said, “We sued the district itself, and we want the focus to be on the district, not on these individuals. We don’t want individuals attacked by the public, because obviously what they did was outrageous and heinous. However, that is not what we’re suing for.”
In a statement this week, the district denied allegations that it violated the Brown Act and that it approved materials for teachers that negatively portrayed the state of Israel and the Jewish community. It will defend its actions approving ethnic studies courses at the September hearing, it said. “The District denies these claims and will present counterarguments and facts to the Court for consideration and is optimistic that the Court will ultimately find in favor of the District.”
The complaint said that three Jewish community groups reached out over two years to express interest in the select committee’s work and support for the state’s model ethnic studies curriculum. Board members and the select committee ignored all the inquiries, it said.
The Jewish community, the attorneys for the complainants wrote, “was seen simply as a roadblock to their vision rather than a stakeholder and constituency that deserved to be heard.” Orange County, with Santa Ana as its second largest city, had 87,000 Jewish residents in 2020. In 2022, the county had 3.12 million residents.
The complainants argue the select committee falls under the Brown Act, because the school board created it indefinitely as a legislative body with no end date. The complaint said that the committee has met monthly and set agendas but did not publish them or open meetings to the public, in violation of the law.
Approved with no discussion
The strategy of secrecy kept the public in the dark. State law under AB 101 requires school boards to present proposed ethnic studies curricula twice, first at an information hearing intended to encourage discussion and then for formal consideration at a second board meeting.
The select committee presented the World Geography and World Histories ethnic studies courses to the school board in spring 2023. The board treated the item perfunctorily; there was no discussion, public comment or presentation by the select committee. It consisted of “merely reading the titles of the courses. The entire ‘presentation’ was over in less than thirty seconds,” the memorandum said.
The school board then approved the courses at its April 25, 2023 meeting without discussion after one member of the Jewish community who “heard about the courses and could attend the meeting in time to make a public comment” objected. Only subsequently, after they learned about the content, did Jewish residents show up at meetings to urge the board to change its mind, to no avail.
The Jewish community “had expressed their concerns throughout the process, unaware that the process was taking place behind closed doors by this secretly run committee,” said Miller. “There was no way of knowing what was coming to the board and that it would be essentially rubber-stamped when it got there.”
“There is reason to require that meetings have to be open to the public,” said Miller. “When the Brown Act is not followed, people can be free to impose their ideology. When nobody is watching, people will be left to their own prejudices.”
To prevent scenarios like the one depicted in Santa Ana, the Legislative Jewish Caucus joined Assemblymembers Rick Zbur, D-Los Angeles, and Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, in authoring legislation that would strengthen AB 101’s public disclosure provisions. Assembly Bill 2918 would have required school districts to create a committee of teachers, parents and representatives of community organizations “with experience assisting children build cultural awareness and understanding” to review proposed ethnic studies curricula and materials. Districts would also have to notify parents how they could participate in the review or comment on the proposed courses and materials.
Faced with strong opposition from UC and CSU ethnic studies faculties and the California Teachers Association, the authors pulled the bill this month and said they would continue negotiations for a new bill next year.
Theresa Montaño, a professor in Chicano/a Studies at CSU Northridge and a member of the LAUSD-UTLA Ethnic Studies Committee, is a defendant in the lawsuit.
Credit: Luis Garcia / California State University, Northridge
A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit against the United Teachers Los Angeles and the organization that created a controversial ethnic studies curriculum adopted by at least two dozen school districts in California.
U.S. District Judge Fernando Olguin’s scathing ruling on Nov. 30 criticized what he concluded was a lack of evidence and unpersuasive arguments made on behalf of the two Jewish teachers and parents in Concerned Jewish Parents and Teachers of Los Angeles, the group that brought the litigation.
The plaintiffs’ complaint “is difficult to understand and contains a morass of largely irrelevant — and sometimes contradictory — allegations, few of which state with any degree of clarity precisely what plaintiffs believe defendants have done or, more importantly, how plaintiffs have been harmed,” wrote Olguin of the Central District of federal court in California. His 49-page pretrial ruling dismissing the lawsuit “with prejudice” precludes the plaintiffs from refiling another similar lawsuit in federal court. The lawsuit was filed in 2022.
The lawsuit alleged that the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, the teachers union, its president Cecily Myart-Cruz, and two members of the LAUSD-UTLA Ethnic Studies Committee encouraged the adoption of instructional materials used in several LAUSD classrooms, that they also “covertly” trained teachers in the “liberated” ethnic studies curriculum, which condemns capitalism, white privilege, and Zionism, and characterizes Israel’s existence as “based on ethnic cleansing and land theft, apartheid and genocide,” according to Olguin’s summary of the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also alleged that teachers who identified as Jewish or Zionist were not welcome in classrooms where ethnic studies was taught and “personally experienced the official hostility” of UTLA to Israel and to the concept of Zionism.”
Denying they are antisemitic, educators affiliated with the consortium — mainly instructors and professors in ethnic studies departments at California State University and University of California — have made anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel a focus of their curriculum. They characterize Israel as a settler, colonialist nation, similar to European nations’ oppressive occupations of Africa and Asia in the 19th and 2oth centuries.
The “liberated” approach to ethnic studies has drawn scrutiny since its leaders formed the consortium in protest after the State Board of Education rejected as ideological and one-sided a draft curriculum that some of them had authored. In passing Assembly Bill 101, creating a mandate requiring high school students to take ethnic studies to graduate, the Legislature, at the encouragement of the Legislative Jewish Caucus, specified that school districts should not use unadopted portions of earlier drafts of the model curriculum.
Advocates of liberated ethnic studies charged the clause and other “guardrails” in the law were intended to squelch their free speech. The largely unfunded graduation mandate is set to take effect in 2029-30.
In an online celebration Monday, Theresa Montaño, a defendant in the lawsuit who is also a member of the LAUSD-UTLA Ethnic Studies Committee and secretary of the consortium, said, “The end of this two-and-a-half year lawsuit means vindication, affirmation, and victory.”
“This is a win for liberatory critical ethnic studies and academic freedom. It’s a testament to the power of solidarity and liberation, whether that be in South Los Angeles or in Gaza,” said Montaño, a professor of Chicano/a Studies at CSU Northridge. “And so it’s a signal to us that we will not stop, that we will persist until authentic ethnic studies is guaranteed to every student in this state.”
The attorney representing the defendants, Mark Kleiman, told teachers on the press call, “The moral of this story for people in the other school districts is, you don’t have to be afraid of these kinds of attacks. Given half a chance in a fair courtroom, you will be vindicated.”
Meanwhile, the legal director for the Deborah Project — the law firm that filed the lawsuit — said, “We absolutely will be appealing the decision and are confident that the decision will be reversed on appeal.” The appeal must be filed by Dec. 30.
The ruling, said Lori Lowenthal Marcus, “is deeply flawed, as it ignores crucial allegations in plaintiffs’ complaint, fails to address arguments plaintiffs made in their briefs, and even ignores binding precedent from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.”
“We are in the midst of soaring antisemitism in education throughout the U.S., and this is no time for anyone — much less a federal court — to allow publicly funded public schools to be used to indoctrinate children to hate the Jewish commitment to Israel,” she said. “Contrary to the ruling, that’s not ‘education’ about a ‘controversial’ issue. It’s prejudice, pure and simple.”
Uncertain implications
It’s unclear what impact, if any, the ruling might have on other litigation in California involving ethnic studies and allegations of antisemitism and indoctrination which include a potentially stronger lawsuit that the Deborah Project filed last month against the Sequoia Union High School District in Menlo Park, its superintendent, and administrators at two high schools. The plaintiffs in this case are the parents of Jewish students who claim that the district ignored parents’ repeated complaints of antisemitic taunts and bullying by students and biased lessons on the Israeli-Gaza conflict, taught by two history teachers.
On Friday, an Orange County Superior Court judge will consider a motion to invalidate four ethnic studies courses in Santa Ana Unified. In their lawsuit, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law claims that district staff wrote the courses, with the participation of school board members, in violation of the California open meetings law. They did so in order to hide the content from Jewish community members who had repeatedly offered to participate in the process and offer their perspectives. Documents reveal that staff members referred to the Jewish Federation of Orange County as “racist Zionists” and made other bigoted remarks about Jews.
The lawsuit against UTLA and the consortium did not include LAUSD as a direct defendant, which may have weakened the case because the district has not adopted the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum, and there is no indication if and when it would. That made the plaintiffs’ concerns speculative and, therefore, their proposed remedies invalid, Olguin wrote, noting that the participation of Montaño and Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, an LAUSD teacher and a member of the consortium’s leadership team, in an advisory committee is not evidence of the district’s endorsement of the curriculum.
Olguin further ruled that the plaintiffs could not substantiate that teachers and other plaintiffs had yet faced any actual harm, nor did they demonstrate that the eventual adoption of the curriculum would violate civil rights. The judge continued that although plaintiffs claimed the curriculum was “infected from top to bottom with racism,” they didn’t show any evidence to support their assertion.
“It is far from clear that learning about Israel and Palestine or encountering teaching materials with which one disagrees constitutes an injury,” Olguin wrote.
The plaintiffs had asked Olguin to issue injunctions prohibiting LAUSD from including language critical of Israel or Zionism in teaching materials; preventing the district from paying teachers who used the liberated curriculum; and prohibiting the district from using materials from liberated curriculum in classrooms and teacher training paid for by public funds.
Olguin ruled that the plaintiffs had not substantiated claims that their First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom and their right to equal protection under the U.S. and California constitutions were impeded. However, their request for an injunction would have raised an unconstitutional prior restraint on the defendants’ First Amendment speech rights, he concluded.
While a district can “reasonably” curtail teachers’ speech rights in a classroom, “those limitations are fundamentally different from speech restrictions imposed by a court at the behest of a group of private citizens,” he wrote.
In language certain to alarm Jewish organizations worried that antisemitic and anti-Israel bias is gaining a foothold in California schools, Olguin wrote, “It would be of great concern for the educational project and for academic freedom if every offended party could sue every time they did not like a curriculum or the way it was taught.”
Ariane Tuomy, a social studies teacher at Palo Alto Unified’s Gunn High School, responds to school board members’ questions at a special board meeting on Jan. 23.
Credit: Palo Alto Unified / YouTube
In hour two of a meeting that stretched to nearly five, Josh Salcman, barely two months on the Palo Alto Unified School Board, said aloud what other school board members no doubt realize at some point in their first term: “I’m acutely aware that no matter how I vote, I’m going to deeply disappoint a large part of our community, including people whose friendship is important to me and whose opinions I hold in the highest regard.”
He was undoubtedly right. Whether to require ninth graders to take an ethnic studies course starting next fall was and likely will remain contentious this year, not only in Palo Alto but throughout California.
Palo Alto had become the latest skirmish in California’s ethnic studies war. Salcman, who founded two education-related tech startups, was in the middle, ultimately facing the awkward decision of choosing between the views of enthusiastic students and teachers and apprehensive parents.
Two decisions in 2021 all but guaranteed that. First, a battle-weary State Board of Education, after multiple rewrites, approved an ambiguously worded curriculum framework that challenged districts to determine what should be included in an ethnic studies course. Then, the Legislature mandated that schools offer an ethnic studies course in high school starting in 2025-26.
Or maybe not. This month, Gov. Gavin Newsom decided not to fund the implementation of ethnic studies in next year’s state budget without explaining why. This not only calls the mandate into question, at least for next year, but also gives an out to districts that are dreading arguing over the course.
But not Palo Alto. Last week, board President Shana Segal, a Palo Alto native and former high school teacher, called for a special board meeting to approve the course that Palo Alto high school teachers had developed. The district would offer it in the fall and mandate it for graduation, starting in 2028-29. Regardless of state funding, that would be one year ahead of the state mandate. She set the hearing for later in the week, Jan. 23.
To pause or not to pause?
For two years, at the board’s direction, a half-dozen veteran Palo Alto teachers persevered to create a first-year ethnic studies course. Last fall, they offered a pilot version to 20 students in each of the district’s two high schools in Palo Alto. The students’ survey results, all positive, were in.
At the center of the conflict is Liberated Ethnic Studies, a strain of ethnic studies that made the liberation of Palestine a prominent element of instruction. Critics characterize it as a left-wing ideology focused on the ongoing domination and oppression of white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism.
Ethnic studies faculty at California State University and University of California and activists created Liberated Ethnic Studies after the state board rejected the first draft of the curriculum that they had primarily authored in 2019. They have made spreading Liberated Ethnic Studies a lucrative side hustle and have contracted with at least several dozen districts to train teachers and guide instruction.
In a May 2024 FAQ it published, the Palo Alto parent group cited language tying Liberated Ethnic Studies to the proposed course.
Superintendent Don Austin has reiterated that Palo Alto’s course is not Liberated Ethnic Studies and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict won’t be part of a course on California racial and ethnic groups.
But in October, Linor Levav, an attorney and co-founder of the parent group, filed a Public Records Act request for curriculum materials that the district had largely ignored. Eventually, the district provided a PDF that contained links that couldn’t be opened.
The rejection has fueled suspicions. “And so the question is, why are they teaching materials that they’re not willing to even tell us about?” she told EdSource.
The parent group called for a “pause” from proceeding with a mandated course.
While running campaigns for their first term on the five-member board, Salcman, Rowena Chiu and Alison Kamhi supported a delay. Now, the new majority’s campaign position would be put to a test.
The audience in the boardroom was not particularly friendly to the three dissenters. The room seated about 80, with some standing room. By board rules, students get to speak first, and they filled most of the room. The adults lined up outside to address the board for one minute via Zoom or enter to do so individually. Forty-five were set aside for one-minute comments. Students, all supporting ethnic studies now, clapped enthusiastically at comments they liked.
During the hearing, the three board skeptics said they shared some of the public’s concerns about the course’s content. They questioned its timing and sharply criticized the district for not being forthright about what would be taught in the course.
“I believe we have to be very transparent about what we are teaching, provide an opportunity for meaningful feedback, and not push through classes that make people and communities, including communities of color, feel unsafe, targeted, or disrespected,” said Kamhi, who is the legal program director for the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.
Watch Palo Alto Unified board member Josh Salcman discuss his concerns regarding ethnic studies.
Two hours into the hearing, when he was still advocating a delay, Salcman explained his dilemma, mixing high praise for the teachers’ work with well articulated reservations about some of the content.
He congratulated the teachers who developed the pilot course and the initial students who took it. Their presentation “underscored what I’ve heard from many community members who have emphatically urged me to vote yes.”
“I find myself agreeing with most of what they say,” he said. “About how one-sided our current history classes are, about how little our students are currently learning about the experiences of historically underrepresented communities. How our students from those communities can feel so marginalized as they question why their family histories are nowhere to be found in our classrooms.”
And “how they wish we could have more challenging conversations about topics like power and privilege and structural inequity.”
Then he switched and laid out his concerns and those he had heard in the community:
“insufficient communication, which I share”
“ideologies that could increase a sense of division among students, which could lead to fixed mindsets or scapegoating”
“a lack of guardrails”
“widespread confusion about why, if there’s nothing to worry about, almost no details were shared about the course until yesterday.”
One thing he knows for certain, he said, is: “We do not have a shared understanding of what the phrase ‘ethnic studies course’ means.”
“Is an ethnic studies course primarily about the histories, cultures, and contributions” of the main ethnic and racial groups in California?” he asked, or “Is it primarily about concepts like ethnicity, identity, intersectionality, power, privilege, oppression and resistance? Is it a mix of both?”
Striking a balance
At least on paper and in student testimonies, Palo Alto’s course would appear to strike a balance. The teachers’ eight-page course description — the form that board members have used to approve all previous courses — states that the course “examines social systems, social movements, and civic participation and responsibility through a local lens. … By fostering empathy and belonging, the course prepares students to engage meaningfully in our communities.”
The four units in the course would be Identity; Power, Privilege and Systems of Oppression; Resilience and Resistance; and Action and Civic Engagement, in which students would create their own projects aligned to the course.
Each of the four units in the course would contain sample essential questions, learning objectives, and examples of assignments and assessments. Students would keep a journal of reflection throughout. Each unit calls for reading, analyzing and evaluating multiple and diverse sources.
Palo Alto High history teacher Ben Bolanos acknowledged that privilege and systems of oppression “are triggering for certain people” but said it “is important to look at the shadow side of the human experience in order to understand what needs to be changed and how to look at and change the world for a better place.”
The word “oppression” appeared more than 100 times in the state framework, observed Ander Lucia, a Teacher on Special Assignment.
Watch student testimonies regarding ethnic studies at Palo Alto Unified.
All the student evaluations of the course — 27 of the 40 who completed one — were positive. A half-dozen ninth graders elaborated at the hearing.
“I’ll admit I had some reservations going into this course,” said Gunn High student Quinn Boughton. “I wasn’t sure how much it would apply to me as a white student or whether the topics might make people feel divided or uncomfortable, but those fears turned out to be completely unfounded. This course didn’t just teach history; it built empathy.”
Gunn student Gabriel Lopez’s takeaway from the course was: “When one group of people takes power from another, I think it is the responsibility of school to teach us about the injustices people face. So, in the future and in our lives, we can strive for more equality.”
For his final project, Palo Alto High student Amaan Ali organized Palo Alto students to volunteer at tutoring programs for less well-off students in East Palo Alto. “These projects go beyond academic exercises. They empower us to turn knowledge into action,” he said.
Boughton examined homelessness in the Bay Area “in a new light” to dissect the problem and “discuss the causes and impacts of the unhoused with my peers.”
The presentation impressed board President Segal, a Palo Alto native who taught high school for more than a decade. “So teachers, I just, I want to say these words,” she said. “You did it right. I just want to make sure you know it. You did it right.”
Transparency questioned
Chiu and Kamhi repeatedly stressed that they strongly support ethnic studies.
“Ethnic studies is critical to me personally, but it is also something that I very much believe we need as a society,” said new board member Chiu, a consultant to the World Bank and an ethnic studies instructor who, she said, is scheduled to lecture on “Asian American Women and Difficult Conversations” at UC Berkeley.
But they remained unpersuaded, not because of what the teachers presented, but because of what the district had not provided. The district waited until two days before the meeting to send out an agenda with information, and it didn’t contain detailed information about the curriculum and the materials that teachers had used in the pilot.
“I also have very specific questions about the curriculum that was sent to us,” said Chiu. “I’m sorry to say, while I’m sure you have an excellent course and the students all say so, I did find your materials difficult to navigate around. I couldn’t open some of the links.”
As it turned out, Austin had included an outdated, detailed curriculum outline called a “scope and sequence” that included the broken links and sites requiring permission to open. Austin blamed the Public Records Act request that required providing outdated material. But Chiu found that explanation wanting. She had spent 48 hours poring over a document under the assumption it would be taught in the pilot. That, she said, “causes more confusion and more calls for lack of transparency.”
Neither Austen nor other district officials explained why the document did not include more information than the presentation.
“I will say it’s quite possible that your course is not going to incite any of these incidents that we’ve seen in other school districts,” Chiu said. “However, it’s connected to the issue of transparency. So if the community has not had, in their view, sufficiently transparent instructional materials, that fear is only going to grow.”
Kamhi put it differently. “What I feel really uncomfortable doing is saying every single student should take a course that we know is controversial, that based on the materials we’ve seen, some of which are problematic. Maybe they’re being taught in the classroom; maybe they’re not — without more information about what the course actually is.”
Dissenters’ dilemma
The three board members found themselves in a Catch-22. Pressed to say what in the course needed to be changed, they couldn’t provide answers without more information.
After hours debating unsuccessful amendments to Segal’s motion, and amendments to those amendments, the original motion was back on the table.
To the teachers, Segal and the fifth member, Shounap Dharap, the issue came down to trust. The founding teachers had held listening sessions for the public when the course was being developed, and had made changes in response.
“I want to reiterate my thanks, gratitude and trust in our teachers. These teachers are choosing to do extra work in addition to their daily teaching, lesson planning and grading. I know from firsthand experience the amount of time and dedication it takes to create curriculum,” Segal said.
“When we are sitting here hearing that there are concerns about the course and the way the course is being presented to students, I, we can’t help but take that personally, right?” said Jeff Patrick, social science instructional leader at Gunn, “because that, that is our job and that’s the job we thought we had the trust of the board to do, right? We think we’ve done our job, and we don’t know what a pause is going to do.”
Dharap, a personal injury attorney and law professor, encouraged board members to base their decision on what they heard from teachers and students, not the unsubstantiated fears of the public. “We really need to sit down and consider whether a decision that we’re going to make now is valuing adult inputs over student outcomes.”
The final vote
Salcman sought a solution in the minutes before the vote. He pointed to San Dieguito Union High School District as a model for involving the public. It posted each ethnic studies unit on a website as it was developed with a form inviting comments.
“I’m not saying now that we need to go back and do that. We are where we are” but is there a way to move the course forward and involve people in the process? he asked.
Dharap said the board already has liaisons with schools to convey concerns and frustrations and serve as a “conduit” for community feedback. He said the board can set course goals, measurements and expectations for public input.
“How do I know that I have a commitment from folks in this room to try to address the concerns that I raised?” were Salcman’s last words before the vote.
Segal and Dharap said yes quickly. Chiu and Kamhi hesitated before voting no.
The silence surrounding Salcman was unsettling. Twice during that time, Segal said, “There’s time; we can all take a breath. We have time.”
Three and a half minutes seemed like hours passed before Salcman said his next word, “Yes.”
Segal immediately announced the motion passed 3-to-2 and ended the meeting and the webcast.
One can only speculate what went through his mind during the long pause that followed — wondering perhaps which friend or close adviser he would please or disappoint or whether he made the right vote? Salcman didn’t respond to EdSource’s repeated invitations to share his thinking.
The UC course criteria would promote the Liberated Ethnic Studies perspective.
It would likely become the default ethnic studies course in K-12 districts.
It would contradict the state’s own voluntary, open-ended model curriculum.
School districts are looking to the May revision of the state budget to learn if Gov. Gavin Newsom will press ahead with a mandate to offer a high school ethnic studies course whose implementation is contingent on state funding. That will be unlikely.
Brooks Allen, executive director of the State Board of Education and a Newsom adviser, confirmed Tuesday that, given current revenue forecasts, Newsom will not be funding the mandate. He conveyed that message to a representative of the UC Academic Senate, he said.
On Wednesday, however, representatives of the University of California faculty will decide whether to recommend that U.C. regents not wait for state funding and instead independently mandate a course. They’ll vote on a proposal (see pages 39 to 57) to require an ethnic studies course, incorporating criteria and content that Newsom and the State Board of Education have already rejected as politically extreme, for admissions to UC campuses.
Opponents said that adopting the proposal, which had been nearly five years in the making, would be unwise and probably illegal.
“Requiring such a course would entangle the university in the sorts of political and ideological disputes over ethnic studies course content that are currently roiling school districts across the state and the nation,” wrote Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA, and Matt Malkan, an astronomy professor at UCLA, in a letter to the UC Faculty Assembly of the Senate, the body that will take up the issue on Wednesday. An earlier version was signed by 440 members of the UC faculty.
Sander and Malkan also said that the proposal “would effectively force hundreds of schools to invest large sums in creating the mandated curriculum and finding or hiring teachers to teach it” – a step that “would probably ultimately be found to be illegal” if UC acted unilaterally.
If the Assembly passes the proposal, it would be forwarded to UC President Michael Drake and then to the UC Regents this summer for final approval.
Ethnic studies faculty at UC campuses pushed for including ethnic studies among the 15 courses required for admissions, known as “A-G.” It would be satisfied through an English, history or an elective course taught through an ethnic studies lens, as UC defines it. Ethnic studies would become “H”, a new area of concentration.
When adopting legislation in 2016 authorizing the creation of a voluntary, model ethnic studies curriculum, the Legislature was vague about what it intended for an ethnic studies course. It said the objective was to prepare pupils to be “global citizens with an appreciation for the contributions of multiple cultures”; school districts could “adapt courses to reflect the pupil demographics in their communities.”
UC’s proposed criteria for high schools would take a more directive and controversial approach, reflecting the content of many college-level courses.
“Ethnic studies is aimed at producing critical knowledge about power, inequality, and inequity as well as the efforts of marginalized and oppressed racialized peoples to challenge systemic violence and the institutional structures that perpetuate racial injustice,” wrote the co-lead writers, UC Riverside teaching professor Wallace Cleaves and UC Santa Cruz critical race and ethnic studies and literature professor Christine Hong, in a preface explaining the intent of the criteria.
Hong and Cleaves say it is appropriate to set rigorous course criteria for students entering UC because ethnic studies faculty created the foundational theories and instructional strategies for the academic discipline, and the State Board and local district teachers lack their expertise.
But the effect of adopting their course for entry into UC would be an end-run around the state board’s open-ended guidance. It would also deviate from many legislators’ vision of ethnic studies as the study of the cultures and achievements of minority groups, as well as their past and ongoing struggles with racism and discrimination.
The UC criteria would become the standard version that high schools would offer. In turn, UC and CSU ethnic studies faculty would become the go-to private consultants for creating districts’ curricula and training teachers.
Emergence of Liberated Ethnic Studies
UC and CSU ethnic studies faculty were primary writers of the first draft of the state’s model curriculum in 2019, but President Linda Darling-Hammond and other members of the State Board rejected it as biased, and the board hired new writers. The California Legislative Jewish Caucus objected to its characterization of Israel as an oppressive white colonial state and the call for a boycott of companies doing business with Israel.
“A model curriculum should be accurate, free of bias, appropriate for all learners in our diverse state and align with Governor Newsom’s vision of a California for all,” Darling-Hammond’s statement said.
Having gone through five revisions, the final proposal before the Assembly (pages 10 to 18) is a toned-down version, but its purpose and guidelines for developing skills are clear. For example, toward the goal of “Applying critical analysis,” it reads, “Study histories of imperialism, dehumanization, and genocide to expose their continuity to present-day laws, ideologies, knowledge systems, dominant cultures, institutions, and structures that perpetuate racial violence, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression.”
Sander said, “It’s still very clearly a liberated course by which I mean it’s very ideological. It has a particular point of view on various controversial issues.”
Under Assembly Bill 1010, the 2021 state law, high schools would have to offer a one-semester ethnic studies course starting in fall 2025 and students would have to take it for a high school diploma starting in 2029-30. Legislators explicitly referenced the rejected first draft in the law. “It is the intent of the Legislature that (districts) not use the portions of the draft model curriculum that were not adopted … due to concerns related to bias, bigotry, and discrimination,” it reads.
Since then, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the Newsom administration have reminded school districts to follow the law’s requirements for “inclusivity, sensitivity, and accuracy.”
“We have been advised, however, that some vendors are offering materials that may not meet the requirements of AB 101,” Brooks Allen, executive director of the State Board of Education and an education adviser to Newsom, wrote in a memo to districts in 2023.
The “liberated” version has prompted several lawsuits (see here, here andhere) by Jewish families and supportive law firms charging that its one-sided perspective fosters discrimination.
A “target” for President Trump?
The vote Wednesday coincides with fraught relations with the Trump administration. The president has threatened to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from school districts and California universities that fail to curb antisemitism and teach undefined “woke” ideology on race, including critical race theory.
“Passing the course criteria now would be like putting a target on our back,” Sander said in an interview, and undermine the university’s best defense against Trump’s effort to dictate who to hire and what ideas can be taught.
“It is fundamentally wrong, and inconsistent with the very spirit of a university, to mandate courses that are framed by an ideology – whether that ideology comes from the left or from the right,” he said.
Decades of institutionalized racism and inadequate funding have left California with a racial achievement gap in its schools. All of our students deserve the chance to learn and succeed, but all too often, students of color have been failed by an education system that still bears the marks of a long history of racism and inequality.
To address this persistent structural problem, Gov. Gavin Newsom has allocated funding that will be directed toward the poorest schools, to be used specifically to help all student groups improve academic achievement in this year’s proposed budget.
The governor did not, however, explicitly allocate funding to support Assembly Bill 101, the mandate that all public high schools offer an ethnic studies course in the 2025-26 school year and require all students to complete a one-semester ethnic studies course for graduation, beginning with the school year 2029-30. The lack of explicit funding has emboldened opponents of ethnic studies education, who now argue that the ethnic studies requirement must be delayed or withdrawn.
Delaying or abandoning the state’s commitment to ethnic studies would not only break the promise that the governor and the Legislature made to the people of California at a time when this kind of education is more important than ever, but also threaten efforts to close the racial achievement gap. Although ethnic studies isn’t designed with the specific goal of reducing or closing racial achievement gaps, it has a track record of doing exactly that.
For example, Stanford researchers Thomas S. Dee, Emily K. Penner and Sade Bonilla found San Francisco’s ninth-grade ethnic studies course to improve students’ GPA, school attendance, and graduation rate. University of Arizona researchers Nolan L. Cabrera, Jeffrey F. Milam, Ozan Jaquette and Ronald W. Marx found that participation in Tucson’s Mexican American studies program raised students’ achievement on the state’s reading, writing and math achievement tests and virtually closed racial achievement gaps.
San Francisco State University researchers found that students who major in ethnic studies graduate within six years at a much higher rate (92%) than students in other majors and students in other majors who take at least one ethnic studies course boost their graduation rates compared with students who do not. At the University of Louisville, researcher Tomarra A. Adams found that Black students who major in Pan-African studies have a higher graduation rate than Black students who major in something else.
Ethnic studies has consistently positive impacts on the academic achievement of students from racially marginalized backgrounds. By offering a relevant curriculum that speaks to issues of concern to their lives and communities, ethnic studies taps into and engages the knowledge students bring to the classroom, allowing them to draw from and recognize their own expertise.
Ethnic studies classes offer an environment where important and relevant issues related to race and ethnicity can be addressed openly rather than be belittled or ignored. Further, as students come to see education as relevant to addressing problems and needs in their communities, and themselves as academically capable, they gain confidence to thrive in school more generally.
Ethnic studies benefits all California students while helping to close the racial achievement gap and preparing the workforce of tomorrow for the multicultural reality of our state. It was in recognition of these benefits that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 101, declaring as part of the signing statement that “these courses boost student achievement over the long run — especially among students of color.”
Recently, Assembly Bill 1468 was introduced to authorize the development of content standards for high school ethnic studies. This bill is unnecessary and potentially harmful. Ethnic studies is a highly contextual approach to curriculum and teaching because it connects with the local cultures and issues of specific communities in which it is being taught.
For that reason, there can be no standardized ethnic studies curriculum. Within the current Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, we already have a set of six guiding values and principles that are broad enough to allow for diverse contextualized approaches to ethnic studies, while they are also sufficiently direct as standards.
I worry that further specification of what should be in an ethnic studies curriculum will authorize one version of ethnic studies to the exclusion of others. This has been my experience with content standards for decades. In addition, ethnic studies is interdisciplinary, which means that the standards for that subject (such as history or English) should be used along with the seven ethnic studies guiding principles. AB 1468 unnecessarily adds layers to the standards we already have.
Ethnic studies needs to be a part of the curriculum offered to California’s students, and it is incumbent on the governor and the Legislature to make good on that promise by resolving any ambiguities about the funding of AB 101.
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Christine Sleeteris professor emerita in the College of Education at California State University Monterey Bay, known for pioneering research into multicultural education and anti-racism.
The opinions in this commentary are those of the author. EdSource welcomes commentaries representing diverse points of view. If you would like to submit a commentary, please review our guidelines and contact us.
A version of this commentary originally appeared in the Sacramento Bee.
