California’s Approach to Ethnic Studies is a Warning for the Country

By Mitch Siegler, Founder

This month has seen a slew of stories about disturbingly flawed ethnic studies curricula in my home state of California. That is only too fitting, considering that California is the birthplace of “liberated” ethnic studies, but we shouldn’t labor under the delusion that the problem is confined to one state. What happens in California does not stay there.

Let’s briefly review four recent stories from the San Francisco Bay Area:

1. North Monterey County Unified School District’s new ethnic studies course – a graduation requirement – teaches(opens in new tab) high school students that “9/11 made the already existing prejudices against Arab and Muslim Americans more obvious and shameless” and frames Osama bin Laden’s 2002 screed, “Letter to America,” as primarily a response to “U.S. involvement in matters that targeted Muslim communities.”
2. Campbell Union High School District’s trustees unanimously voted(opens in new tab) to adopt the problematic Voices curriculum(opens in new tab) – riddled with concepts like “Whiteness” and “wheels of privilege” – over the objections of concerned Asian and Jewish parents, among others. Last year, the California Department of Education mandated(opens in new tab) that the district provide anti-bias training after determining that two ethnic studies teachers’ materials on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were biased and discriminatory against Jewish students.
3. UC Berkeley’s History-Social Science Project, a radical initiative that trains K-12 teachers statewide, hosted(opens in new tab) a workshop featuring an ethnic studies teacher who had shared footage of an anti-Israel rally on social media in which an activist can be heard chanting “Long live the intifada,” a reference to the murderous terrorist war waged against Israeli civilians.
4. Jefferson Union High School District’s ethnic studies curriculum teaches(opens in new tab) that Israeli “settler colonialism” led to Palestinian “dispossession.”

The anti-American and anti-Israel radicalism that we’ve seen explode on college campuses since October 7, 2023 didn’t originate there. For many students, it was cultivated years earlier in K-12 classrooms that teach ideology rather than fact. These four stories, the tip of the iceberg, provide a small glimpse into that pipeline and its unifying principle: a worldview that sorts every event and every person into “oppressor” and “oppressed” categories, dividing children and our society at every step of the way.

This would be a problematically simplistic approach in any case, but “liberated” ethnic studies teaches that those categories are predetermined by ethnicity, a Marxist approach that substitutes race for class in power relations.

Groups cast as oppressors – including Israel, the United States, and Western civilization generally – are presumed to act out of a malevolent desire to retain their supposed power. Groups cast as the oppressed – including the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies – are assumed to act out of a desire for freedom, and any action they take against their supposed oppressors is justified, even celebrated. Think of the phrase appearing at so many pro-Hamas rallies, “By Any Means Necessary.” Nuance, context, and civil dialogue cannot survive contact with this framework.

This worldview has long been de rigueur in cloistered academic circles – gaining real traction with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 – but it has infected the broader culture. It’s circulated ad nauseam on TikTok. It’s amplified by bots on X. Parroted by celebrities. And, increasingly, built directly into students’ assignments in K-12 schools.

That said, we've seen direct parent involvement make a real positive change.

Exhibit A: In Pennsylvania, parents raised alarms(opens in new tab) after learning that the state Department of Education had replaced the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism in its equity and inclusion guide with the “Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism," which is disproportionately focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was written specifically to counter and weaken the IHRA definition. This parental action resulted in the Pennsylvania DOE’s removal of the guide from its website and its statement that it is “reviewing all other materials.”

Exhibit B: In Virginia, families of six students and the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP successfully challenged a school board’s decision to restore Confederate school names. A federal judge ordered(opens in new tab) the Shenandoah County School Board to change the names of Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby-Lee Elementary School, finding that reinstating them violated students’ civil rights. Although the board has voted to appeal(opens in new tab), the ruling represents a significant victory for the families who challenged its decision.

These are both powerful proof points of what can happen when parents act.

Extremism and division thrive in the absence of scrutiny and challenge. They rely on most parents assuming that someone else is paying attention and will speak up. That “someone else” just might be you!

So, request to see your child’s curricula, lesson plans, and school materials. Read them carefully and know what to look for(opens in new tab). Engage with other parents. Your voice matters, and you can make a real difference.