By Marsha Sutton
Times of San Diego
CARLSBAD, California — There’s no mincing words: the California ethnic studies mandate is a train wreck.
Since the passage of Assembly Bill 101 in 2021 that requires California public school students in the class of 2029-2030 to take a course in ethnic studies to graduate high school, districts have been floundering around for four years trying to figure out what to do.
AB 101 was ill-conceived from the start: no enforceable guidelines, no state standards, no penalties for ignoring guardrails that prohibit discrimination, not even a real definition of what ethnic studies actually means.
What were legislators thinking? That everyone would suddenly gather together in unity, form a happy circle, hold hands and sing Kumbaya?
The ethnic studies mandate has sown confusion and division, hardly the original objective of bringing students and communities together in harmony.
I’ve witnessed so much waste in time, money and public resources watching local school districts try to create coursework from scratch while attempting to balance varied and heated perspectives and navigating the pitfalls without a clear roadmap for guidance.
Meanwhile, with attention focused on non-academic matters, test scores and basic skills continue to decline.
For background, the state produced an abominable first draft of an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum for schools to use. It was a poor substitute for actual state standards and was riddled with bias and leftist ideology that often included blatant antisemitism and anti-capitalist content.
Although that first draft was rejected by the state after receiving thousands of complaints, a newer version was developed that was supposed to provide a more neutral curriculum. However, those responsible for developing that first version disavowed the revised version and began to advance their own set of materials.
Now known as the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, those authors and supporters have been providing their instructional materials to school districts, despite the state issuing notices to districts to avoid using the “liberated” version.
By all accounts, this “liberated” version approaches the subject based on an oppressed/oppressor dichotomy, and students are often asked to self-identify with one group or the other.
As a result, the takeaway has been a not-so-subtle message: If you are descended from a white European background, your inherited, entitled status makes you guilty of being part of a despicable class of people. Challenging, actually overthrowing, that system of oppression is a worthy objective.
Besides white European descendants, Jews and Asians have also been categorized as oppressors because, in general, many members of both groups have found some degree of success in America.
Because Israel has been positioned as a colonial settler entity with no ancestral right to the land, ignoring the obvious historical fact that Jews have been living on that land for centuries, anti-Zionism, which has often crossed over into outright antisemitism, has become a key component of the liberated ethnic studies model.
A Los Angeles Times story published May 14, states that the “liberated” curriculum is a guide to teach students about “contemporary social movements that struggle for social justice and an equitable and democratic society, and conceptualize, imagine, and build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic-racist society.”
How are educators to teach high-level principles such as these, designed initially for college-level coursework, to teenage students, many of whom are only 13 and have yet to take a class in U.S. history or social studies?
It’s astounding that state legislators would support such a mandate and would leave it up to individual school districts for follow-through, with little to no guidance on how to proceed and a model curriculum ripe for abuse.
The state’s official curriculum only offers a menu of options and leaves the actual development of ethnic studies up to each school district, so it’s easily hijacked and leaves open plenty of room for lessons that go well beyond the purported effort to focus on the four traditionally identified ethnic groups that have been historically overlooked in high school classes: Black-, Native-, Latine- and Asian-Americans.
An important point is that a model curriculum, even this one at 700 pages, is no substitute for the creation of rigorous state standards that specify what should be taught (and maybe even more relevant in this case, what should not be taught).
All other classes the state requires to earn a high school diploma have written state standards; ethnic studies is the sole exception.
Districts proceeded under the assumption that the mandate was indeed a mandate, even though a clause in AB 101 clearly states that the provisions of the bill are operative only upon state funding, which was estimated at the time to be $276 million.
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget presented earlier this year did not provide funding for ethnic studies, and state officials have indicated that no funding will be forthcoming for the 2025-2026 year.
This leaves districts in a quandary. They’ve been forced by the state’s passage of AB 101 to develop what they were told would be a mandate — and now it’s technically not.
In the LA Times article, Troy Flint, chief communications officer for the California School Boards Association, said the ethnic studies requirement has been problematic since its inception. And because funding might come through at some point in the future, “school districts are in a bind because there is a possibility a mandate could be implemented, but it’s uncertain.”
Do districts shelve their work over the past four years, offer ethnic studies as an optional elective, or move forward with their own decision to require ethnic studies for high school graduation?
Although supporters of the radical “liberated” curriculum want to maintain the requirement, a more reasonable option is to offer ethnic studies as a choice, letting students decide if this is a course worth their while.
An even better option is to shelve the whole thing for some time if needed in the future, instead of expending more money to hire and train teachers to deliver the class.
What’s currently in place is an ethnic studies mandate that’s unfunded — so theoretically inoperative — and districts are left with what? A dilemma, a betrayal by the legislature, and a lot of expended time and money after being forced to prepare for a course that’s now not legally required.
Elected officials, including the governor, who supported AB 101 should be doing some soul-searching at this point. They unleashed a mess and left school districts high and dry.
Compounding that headache for school boards has been having to deal with hours of often confrontational public comments over the past few years from community members and parents expressing their disparate views.
Meanwhile, the amount of taxpayer money spent on this thankless pursuit and ultimate failure by our state’s elected officials to provide sensible and workable legislation is inestimable.
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This article appeared initially in Times of San Diego, with which San Diego Jewish World trades articles. Marsha Sutton is an education writer and opinion columnist and can be reached at suttonmarsha@gmail.com.