In 2021, California became the first state in the nation to mandate high school students take a one semester ethnic studies class to graduate. The class was set to begin this fall, i.e. the 2025-2026 academic school year. However, there are problems now because under the law, the class can’t become mandatory unless there is funding provided to schools to make it happen. And with California facing a big shortfall in next year’s budget (thanks in part to the decision to expand Medi-Cal to illegal immigrants) Gov. Newsom seems to be leaning toward not putting up the money.
Beginning this fall, students entering 9th grade would have been the first class required to pass a one-semester class at some point during their high school years.
But under the 2021 law, the mandate to reach 5.8 million students does not take effect unless the state provides more money to pay for the course. The funding would cover the cost of materials and the teacher staffing and training that go along with adding a new field of study.
Newsom’s office, which issued its May revision of next year’s proposed state budget amid a tightening financial outlook, did not respond to questions about why he has not included funding for the ethnic studies requirement that he approved, praising it as an avenue to “teach students about the diverse communities that comprise California.”
Some schools could still move forward with the ethnic studies class and it seems many have offered it as an elective for some time already. But without the money, the state can’t make it a graduation requirement.
There are really two likely reasons this is happening. One, as mentioned, is that California is broke and coming up with another $275 million to fund this is a significant amount of money. But the other factor that is almost certainly at play here is politics.
Gavin Newsom has been making a concerted effort lately to present himself as a more moderate Democrat. He’s clearly thinking about running for president in 2028 and while far-left Newsom might be able to win a Democratic primary, he’d probably have a tougher time winning a general election. And so, you have him coming out with statements some consider shocking, such as the admission that having boys compete against girls in sports was “deeply unfair” or admitting that California seems to struggle to get things built (like high-speed rail).
There are a couple other obvious political factors as well. One is the re-election of President Trump who has made opposition to DEI a focus of his early 2nd term. And another is the fact that the public at large seems less enthusiastic about Black Lives Matter-style indoctrination than they were in 2020 and 2021 when this was passed. The curriculum for this mandatory class seems like one destined to create another showdown with the federal government.
Some religious and political conservatives view the state’s guidelines for ethnic studies as the kind of “woke” ideologies in education that President Trump has vowed to eliminate as he seeks to do away with diversity, equity and inclusion programming in schools.
California’s ethnic studies curriculum guide embraces pro-LGBTQ+ content and speaks of connecting students to “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-racism society.”
The way the ethnic studies requirement is set up, California provides a sample curriculum but school districts aren’t required to use it. Instead they can modify it or choose a different curriculum provided by some outside group. That means, in some cases, districts may opt for a less extreme curriculum that isn’t focused on the war in Gaza. But it also means that in some cases, districts will opt for a more extreme version.
Take San Francisco for instance. SF has has had ethnic studies classes in the curriculum since 2015 but in 2021, when Gov. Newsome signed the state law, San Francisco upped the ante and required students to take an entire year of ethnic studies to graduate. And as you can imagine, the classes being offered there are not toned down at all. On the contrary, some of the material reads like a satire of left-wing extremism.
Last July, parent Viviane Safrin wrote a memo, obtained by The Standard, to school officials articulating concerns about ethnic studies material that had been posted to the district’s Online Resource Library. The flagged material included presentations equating capitalism with racism and exercises in which students rank various racial, socioeconomic, and gender identities based on the amount of power they have in the world today. One assignment had students role-playing as Israeli soldiers herding Palestinians into refugee camps.
Safrin said in the memo that the curriculum teaches “a contentious ideological framework” that lacks “open inquiry” and “factual integrity.” She noted that only “four lessons out of 55 highlight contributions by ethnic groups,” and the word “hegemony” appeared 81 times…
“They are taught how to organize — what it means to resist,” Safrin told The Standard. “They’re taught about dominant and counter narratives. It’s an upper-level college course for one way to examine history, but it is not teaching any actual history.”
One exercise still in use places the Red Guards, a student-led paramilitary organization from Mao’s Chinese Cultural Revolution, alongside the U.S. civil rights and feminist movements as emphasizing “the resistance that oppressed groups have shown in history.”
“I would not place them in the same category,” Stanford sociology professor Andrew G. Walder, author of a book on the Red Guards, said. “They would belong in a different unit on authoritarianism and violent political extremism.”
Another current exercise has students read a 2012 article called “Straight white male: The lowest difficulty setting there is” and asks, “What would white males need to give up (or relinquish) in order to make a more equitable society?”
The district has refused to accept criticism, in part because of a study that found students with a GPA of 2.0 or lower were more likely to graduate high school after taking the class. Despite this, the SF Standard spoke to parents who were not happy about it.
“SFUSD is a religious institution,” said one parent who noticed that her kid was being taught that Genghis Khan was actually peaceful. “They’re teaching unfalsifiable ideas.”
Pity the poor students of San Francisco, but the rest of the state may be spared, at least for this coming year, thanks to the state being broke (and the Gov. wanting to run for president).
