The San Francisco Unified School District is considering canceling its ethnic studies program in the fall while the district reviews teaching materials, the superintendent told principals Thursday afternoon, prompting criticism from educators who said doing so on such late notice would be unprecedented and create a logistical nightmare.
Superintendent Maria Su is weighing a pause to the ethnic studies program to look over materials that have come under scrutiny in recent months. Her choice comes after months of organized opposition from a group of parents who insist that the class pushes liberal politics and was hastily organized.
She was expected to announce her decision to administrators on Thursday, but instead told them during a Zoom meeting that she would hold off until school principals had a chance to attend a forthcoming meeting with Phil Kim and Jamie Huling, the president and vice president of the school board.
“The Superintendent is currently in active discussions with principals and various stakeholders regarding high school curriculum and course sequencing for social studies, including Ethnic Studies, in fall 2025,” a district spokesperson wrote in a text to Mission Local. “We are committed to keeping our community informed as soon as we have an official update.”
District veterans said that they could not remember any other instance of a course being paused while the district undertook a review.
“Stopping the course while auditing is, to me, a disproportionate response and one that doesn’t make a lot of sense, given the chaos it would cause, and the cost,” said school board member Matt Alexander, a former district principal.
“If we had curriculum issues in a math course, would we stop teaching math for a year? And create massive destruction over the summer? I don’t think so,” he said.
Sarah Ballard-Hanson, a principal at Thurgood Marshall High School, pushed back against the proposed cancelation during public comment at Tuesday’s school board meeting.
“The push to pause ethnic studies is about a national wave against DEI and truth-telling in schools,” she said. “SFUSD must resist,” she said.
San Francisco public schools made a year of ethnic studies mandatory at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, though the district has included ethnic studies as an elective course offering for 15 years. Ethnic studies courses cover a wide range of topics, including white supremacy, transphobia, activism and social movements.
Though graduation requirements are set by the school board, which has not said it would change the ethnic studies mandate, the superintendent can choose what classes are actually taught.
Some parents have complained that the SFUSD ethnic studies program contains content that misrepresents history or discriminates against white and Jewish students.
They complained about a since-removed listing of the Red Guards, a militant student movement during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, among historical social movements, and a reading about white male privilege from 2012.
The district removed several examples that parents complained about, and published the ethnic studies materials on its website. It also included a concern form.
‘Behemoth of a logistical nightmare’
Teachers and school administrators said that the superintendent’s proposal would be disastrous for scheduling. At Tuesday’s school board meeting, educators questioned why the superintendent’s decision was happening in June, during summer break.
“It should take a good teacher weeks to carefully construct a curriculum for their students; weeks and months. But they don’t have weeks and months,” an ethnic studies employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, told Mission Local.
Teachers go back to work on Aug. 12, which would leave them just six days to change their curriculum before school starts.
“Every school will be on their own to figure out this behemoth of a logistical nightmare,” added a high school principal.
Students enrolled in ethnic studies for the fall would be moved to world history, though some have already taken that class and would have a gap in their schedules. Some schools are anticipating textbook shortages because the number of students enrolled in world history would double.
Studies from Stanford University and the University of California, Irvine, show that ethnic studies courses at SFUSD improve attendance and overall grade point averages for students. The academic improvements, school workers said, could be a result of a greater sense of belonging.
The courses “[help] create a sense of community and a sense of empathy among students,” while teaching “a different lens and a different way to think about world history and U.S. history,” said Anna Klafter, the president of the SFUSD administrators union and a principal at Independence High School.
“It helps create deep critical thinking, and it helps students understand their place in the world,” she said.
Surveys from the end of this school year of about 300 ethnic studies students, shared with Mission Local, showed that more than half said the course helped them understand themselves and their backgrounds better. Sixty percent said they “felt a sense of belonging” in class.
Teachers and administrators emphasized that the course is particularly impactful for students of color.
As the result of a 2021 law, California requires students to have one semester of ethnic studies coursework to graduate high school, though Gov. Gavin Newsom has since withheld funding from the requirement.
San Francisco schools have been a leader in ethnic studies programs since the 1960s, when protesters at San Francisco State University made the adoption of an ethnic studies curriculum one of their demands.
Earlier this year, state Sen. Scott Wiener coauthored a bill in the California legislature that would require ethnic studies courses in schools to “foster multicultural respect and understanding and focus on the domestic experience,” an addition that critics said was targeted at conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and bordered on censorship.
That bill was withdrawn in May. Another bill, rewritten in May and coauthored by Wiener, would prohibit using curriculum that discriminates against a student, with an emphasis on antisemitism or Islamophobia.
Wiener’s office declined to comment, citing scheduling issues.
Of course what always gets lost in the shuffle are the pragmatic concerns. Why did SFUSD decide to generally require 9th graders to take the course and put it opposite the one-semester health course? Why is Health simply not integrated into the two years of PE that’s required at most high schools? Ethnic Studies should be taught in schools, but does it make sense to make kids fresh out of middle school take it? Seems like it would be best structured as a senior seminar-type course in which one could take on an optional honors/capstone research project.
The real issue is that SFUSD keeps piling on the required courses which makes it difficult for kids with strong STEM interests/abilities to take 4 years each of math and science. And/or world languages for those inclined. It’s especially a challenge at Asawa SOTA where the students only have five academic blocks a year.
The criticized curriculum cited here has been WIDELY misconstrued btw
all the super has to do is call it “English 101 Ethnic Studies” and have them read and write essays about what they learn. Fulfills the English class that’s needed.
Yeah, you’re going to get racist assholes complaining about lots of things.
“Some parents… complained about a since-removed listing of the Red Guards”
If someone complains that students are reading an encylopedia entry, you nod and smile and say, “Thanks for your input,” and you ignore them, because that’s a ridiculous critique.
“…and a reading about white male privilege from 2012.”
Yeah, I read that piece. If some parents would like to come to class and present peer-reviewed studies arguing that “straight white male” is not the easiest setting, have at it. Again, you don’t give in to bigots and crackpots, and you don’t let Archie Bunker write your lesson plans.
That some “progressive” person (aka Marxist) thought that listing the red guard as some kind of positive social movement, and that no one at SFUSD said “he’ll know” says all I need to know.
This is just more “progressive” indoctrination, and it is not working… it actually pisses off young people. Just look at trump’s support from the post-George Floyd generation.
The Board of Education voted to have this be a graduation requirement 15 years ago, but it was phased in and treated as an elective instead. Ethnic Studies is not new and has been studied extensively in SFUSD. Pulling it for “study” that has already happened is an act of cowardice.
Won’t somebody think of the poor white people?
Americans, as a multi-racial,multi-cultural, diverse population, we need to learn and appreciate our differences. We may not agree, or even like what we discover, but we need to learn to repect each others differences. We are living under, and hopefully being protected by our existing legal system, challenged as it may be. Some of our rules are different in other cultures. Morals regarding marriage and personal sexual preferences may vary but are all must learn to accept others as we are and respect the rules and freedoms we’ve chosen to live by. Learning about people from other ethnicities, religions, is the only way to know our neighbors,
Move on? You should be grateful your kid has gotten a decent education. As an older product of the California public school system, I am still angry over the sanitized education we received. We studied local history and took field trips to the nearby Spanish mission, but were never taught about the colonization, enslavement, and genocide of the indigenous peoples. By any measure, we were fed a white supremacist version of history.
Good. We’re not going to prepare kids for adult life by indoctrinating them with racial hatred. We should concentrate on teaching science, math, English, art — basically everything else.
Like Columbus discovered America? Never taught about Tulsa OK.
There is no racial hatred being taught. But whitewashing history would contribute to it.
Agreed. The class teaches one side of a political position. My son and his friend group look like the United Nations. They all think their teacher is a crazy. Anti America. Anti White and Jewish. Criminals shouldn’t go to jail. Theyre trying to create radicals not advocates. Being taught by a woman who didnt know India was in Asia! We are a Hispanic family. This class is disgraceful!