Amid Existential Challenges, San Francisco USD Continues to Embrace Ideology
By Mitch Siegler, Founder

A recent workshop held at a San Francisco public high school highlighted “adultism,” the idea that adults exercise systemic power over young people in ways that amount to oppression. According to reports, participants were taught that the relationship between students and educators is inherently oppressive because of this power imbalance.

Taken to its logical conclusion, your boss is your oppressor, your kids’ soccer coach is exploiting a power imbalance, and not giving your child the candy they demand is an act of domination. It’s no surprise that the idea has found fertile soil in San Francisco.

A decade ago, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) launched a district-wide, 9th-grade ethnic studies curriculum that included materials many parents and community members found unacceptably ideological. Their concerns eventually led district leaders to abandon the homegrown curriculum and, in late April, SFUSD adopted a replacement: “Voices: An Ethnic Studies Survey,” which takes the “liberated” – that is to say, the partisan – approach to the subject.

That process drew sharp criticism. Parents who reviewed the replacement curriculum described the process as rushed and predetermined, arguing that meaningful dissenting viewpoints were largely ignored.

The larger issue extends beyond any single curriculum or workshop. Each of us is infinitely divisible by identity – gender, ethnicity, religion, political views, wealth, etc. – so if educational frameworks are built around those divisions, new forms of “oppressive” power imbalances will constantly be discovered. When forms of identity are understood primarily as proxies for relative power, age would inevitably become another such category.

Meanwhile, SFUSD faces far more pressing challenges. About 24% of its students are chronically absent, and according to Board of Education Commissioner Supryia Ray, the district is “nowhere near” reaching its targets of 70% reading proficiency in 3^rd grade and 65% proficiency in math in 8^th grade by 2027. In the 2024-25 school year, most SFUSD students, and 59% of eighth graders, were not proficient in math. Reading proficiency among third graders actually dropped from 53.1% to 51.8% in 2025.

Recent reporting in the California Post exposed that SFUSD spent nearly $400,000 on liberated ethnic studies consultants, amid declining enrollment and looming school closures as well as serious financial challenges – SFUSD has a significant budget deficit and remains under state fiscal oversight. It’s also enlightening that SFUSD, in the midst of these woes, would contract to spend $7 million for “Voices,” an ethnic studies curriculum which has been characterized as “activist-driven” and “biased”. Commissioner Ray, who said she had not been able to access the full curriculum before April’s vote, called its content “politicized”: “I wonder how many kids will dare to disagree with the Voices framing that they’re given,” she said.

We wonder: Should school systems struggling to meet basic academic and fiscal goals be devoting time and energy to ever more absurd theories of oppression?

In her June testimony before the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, SFUSD Superintendent Dr. Maria Su said, “SFUSD does not seek to direct any student’s identity, beliefs, or family values. Our role is educational.”

Ahem. The record indicates otherwise.

At THINC, we believe in a strong grounding in the basics: reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as civics education and civil dialogue. We support an approach to ethnic studies that helps students understand the diverse experiences and contributions of different communities while emphasizing mutual respect and an appreciation for American history. We are developing a curriculum founded on these principles called The American Story: Out of Many, One.

Education should be rooted in the pursuit of academic excellence, intellectual openness, historical accuracy, and critical thinking rather than dividing students based on their differences and encouraging them to see every human relationship through a primitive ideological lens – you’re either an oppressor or you’re oppressed. Human beings and society are too complex and multivalent to be boiled down to such a simplistic binary.

Students deserve a pedagogy that broadens their understanding of their fellow students, fellow Americans, and the world. They do not need lessons that boil humanity down to guilt and grievance.