After years of debate, California high schools will teach ethnic studies. But whose stories get told?
Two years ago, California set out to draft a model ethnic studies curriculum for its high schools. The state’s department of education had no idea how heated the debate would get.
More than two years, multiple versions and nearly 100,000 public comments later, the state’s board of education is set to vote on the final draft. It’s an 894-page tome whose own history illustrates the challenges of crafting an ethnic studies curriculum at a time of racial reckoning and national division.
The original draft was criticized for taking a leftwing, biased and a politically charged view of history and drew complaints from Jews, Koreans, Sikhs, Armenians and other ethnic and religious groups who said it left out their American experiences.
The final draft was criticized by authors of the original version as watered down and substandard, with several demanding their names be stripped from the proposal.
In one ongoing conflict, Jewish and pro-Arab groups have accused each other of discrimination and trying to silence each other’s histories.
California’s ethnic studies debate highlights some of the difficult questions educators will face in an era when the US is redefining its heroes and asking whose stories should be told. More than three-quarters of California’s 6.2 million public school students are nonwhite.
“We’ve worked to bring justice to what we believe the ethnic studies movement to be about,” Tony Thurmond, the state superintendent of public instruction, told reporters.
The ethnic studies movement has its roots in California, where students protested in the late 1960s at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, to demand courses in African American, Chicano, Asian American and Native American studies.
The proposed course materials focus on those four groups so students can “learn of the histories, cultures, struggles and contributions to American society of these historically marginalized peoples which are often untold in US history courses.”
There are four chapters with more than two dozen lesson plans that schools can pick from to fit their student communities.
It suggests conversations on the Black Lives Matter movement could start with a local or national incident of police brutality. Other lessons ask students to study poetry and art by Japanese Americans put in internment camps during the second world war to better understand their trauma. Another urges students to interview Korean Americans and Black people who were in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots to examine tensions that exploded into deadly violence.
An appendix features lesson plans on Jews, Arab Americans, Sikh-Americans and Armenian Americans who are not traditionally part of an ethnic studies curriculum “but have experienced oppression and have a story to tell”, Thurmond said.
California legislators voted to draft an ethnic studies curriculum for high school students in 2016, in a bill that passed the legislature but was opposed by Republicans. The first draft of the curriculum appeared in the spring of 2019 and was written by a committee of ethnic studies teachers and professors appointed by the state’s department of education.
The original draft was almost immediately panned. It drew criticism from several groups who are not traditionally part of an ethnic studies curriculum for being overlooked.
California’s legislative Jewish Caucus complained it included content that denigrated Jews and erased the American Jewish experience, arguing that course materials referred to the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement as a global social movement but left out “any meaningful discussion of antisemitism”.
Pro-Arab groups and several of the original authors, on the other hand, have asked for their names to be removed from the final draft and are drafting a competing curriculum.
Lara Kiswani, the executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center in San Francisco, says education officials bowed to political and rightwing pressure. “They have not only relegated a whitewashed Arab American lesson plan to an appendix, alongside a pro-Israeli Jewish lesson plan, but they have also gutted the entire curriculum,” Kiswani said during a recent webinar. Others criticized the removal of Palestinian narratives.
Nadine Naber, an Arab studies expert and professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, called it an effort “to silence our histories and our stories”, which she called “colonialist tactics of elimination”.
The Democratic Assemblyman Jose Medina, a member of both the Latino and Jewish legislative caucuses, was among those who supported expanding the curriculum beyond people of color. Still, he says the latest draft is a vast improvement on the original and “strikes the balance that is needed”.
Amid the controversy over the curriculum, his bill last year to make ethnic studies a high school graduation requirement was vetoed by the California governor, Gavin Newsom.
The original law did not define what the course materials should include, which gave the initial drafters no clear direction, said the California secretary of state, Shirley Weber, a Democrat and academic who created an ethnic studies program at San Diego State University in the 1970s.
In the absence of clarity “it got very, very complicated and contentious,” said Weber, a former lawmaker who has authored separate legislation to make ethnic studies a graduation requirement throughout the California State University system.
That first-in-the-nation proposal sailed through the Democratically controlled legislature last August without controversy, partly she says, because it focuses on the four core ethnic groups and didn’t try to please everyone.
“There was plenty of pressure for me to add a whole bunch of other people. I chose not to. I stuck to what was defined 50 years ago as ethnic studies,” Weber said. She sees the model curriculum an adequate starting point that will “begin a process of opening the eyes of kids”.