The California Department of Education‘s latest Model Curriculum for Ethnic Studies, announced Jan. 31, has sparked controversy. Pictured is a second-grade teacher teaching a lesson to students at St. Joseph Catholic School in La Puente, Calif. on Nov. 6, 2020.
On Jan. 31, California Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond announced that the latest draft of the third edition of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) will gather final revisions by March 18, with final review to be completed on March 31. AB 101, which is still in the House, would require school districts to make the curriculum a graduation requirement for high school students, and the draft has been strongly opposed by multiple parties, with an opportunity for the public to propose changes before the deadline.
In the fall of 2016, then-Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a mandate to create an ethnic studies program of study for high school students, as California public school students are the most ethnically diverse in the nation, speaking more than 90 native languages. According to Thurmond, “Our schools are failing to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the contributions of people of color and the ways in which they have been exploited, marginalized and oppressed throughout the nation’s history, including the present.” This Model Curriculum for Ethnic Studies recommends four foundational ethnic studies, including African American, Asian American, Chicano Latino, and Native American and Indigenous Studies.
Is it ethnic studies or a political movement?
Elina Kaplan, formerly senior vice president of California’s largest affordable housing nonprofit, strongly endorsed the program in 2016 because of its goal of “building bridges between people, providing opportunities for minorities, and addressing inequality and eliminating prejudice among people. ” Three years later, Kaplan was shocked and couldn’t believe what she saw when she saw the first draft of the curriculum, which included a series of American social movements, including Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and criminal justice reform. One of the examples in the course also covered the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which references the South African anti-racism movement, and Kaplan questioned why a movement in another country was classified as an American social movement.
BDS was billed as a global freedom-building movement, but the first version of the curriculum failed to mention that BDS had the destruction of Israel as its primary goal, called the 1948 Israeli War of Independence a “catastrophe,” was full of insults and provocations against Jews, and failed to mention that Jewish-Americans were a minority. The California Jewish Legislative Caucus called ESMC “an effective erasure of the American Jewish historical experience. In a recent announcement, Thurmond said the CDE has recommended that the sentences, which are considered anti-Semitic, be removed.
Course origins
The ethnic studies curriculum has its roots in California, where in 1968 San Francisco State College (SSC) fired a popular black teacher, George Murray, who also served as secretary of education for the Black Panther Party, and in a speech the week before his dismissal declared that the U.S. Constitution was “lies” and that the American flag was “toilet paper” and should be flushed.
On campus, the Black Student Union and The Third World Liberation Front led violent rallies and strikes that lasted five months, with the student body not agreeing to resume classes. Afterwards, the university accepted the strikers’ main demands, agreeing to establish a School of Ethnic Studies and the possibility of awarding degrees, with students proposing what they would study; the school also agreed to accept almost all non-white applicants for admission in the fall of 1969. In addition, UC Berkeley established a Department of Ethnic Studies.
There is a straight line from the 1968 strike to today’s Model Curriculum in Ethnic Studies, and many of the 18 people selected by the California Department of Education to create the program came from the Ethnic Studies Institute at San Francisco State College, most of them adherents of the radical critical ethnic studies movement and self-described scholar-activists. In the Kaplan report, it is stated that Thurmond admitted at a meeting of Jewish groups in 2020 that there was a politicization of the creation of this group.
Neo-Marxism
Kaplan emigrated to California from the former Soviet Union at the age of 11 and calls herself a lifelong Democrat. She was surprised to find that the course’s list of 154 influential people of color did not include Martin Luther King, John Lewis or Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, but included many violent revolutionaries, and even Pol Pot, general secretary of the Communist Party of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge complimentary description of the Cambodian Communist Party, which massacred about a quarter of the Cambodian people in the 1970s.
After the release of the 2019 draft curriculum, immigrants from the former Soviet Union found it so traumatic that more than three hundred people wrote jointly to the governor and government officials, “We fled the Marxist socialist system and the tyranny and oppression associated with it, not expecting that decades later the same ideology and concepts, which appear almost everywhere, would appear in the California Model Curriculum for Ethnic Studies.” For example, the curriculum calls on students to fight for “a truer democracy,” which in Marxist terms means the abolition of private property; terms that seem innocuous and even enlightening to outsiders, such as “transformative resistance,” ” radical healing,” and “critical hope” have specific meanings that ESMC explicitly instructs faculty to use as pedagogical theory and guidance.
We have been working on a racial movement curriculum for decades and it remains urgent today, says Thurmond, and we have seen racial justice in countless demonstrations. But Kaplan argues that the curriculum promotes a radical doctrine that has swept the disciplines over the decades, which “critiques imperialism, white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, capitalism, etc.; and lists capitalism, homophobia, transphobia and Islamophobia as forms of oppression. in common; instead, it simply divides the world into the poles of victims and oppressors. According to this model, victims include four groups: African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, and it promotes a crude neo-Marxism and proclaims the end of capitalism.
Misinformation about the African American Movement
Clarence Jones, legal counsel for black civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King, wrote a letter to the governor last October arguing that the curriculum distorts history and would cause great harm to millions of students in California if it were approved.
Jones served as a strategic adviser and speechwriter for Martin Luther King Jr. and was in close contact with many key figures in the black freedom movement, including James Baldwin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Lorraine Hansberry, and Malcolm Malcolm X, who currently serves as director of the Institute for Nonviolence and Social Justice at the University of San Francisco, among others.
In his letter, Jones said, “The fact that the black freedom movement of the 1950s and 1960s under Dr. King’s leadership changed our nation by overthrowing segregation and white supremacy terror groups is known to all educated people, but the fact that these heroes of nonviolent resistance such as Dr. King and John Lewis were not included in the Model Curriculum for Ethnic Studies curriculum is is morally unacceptable.”
“This omission appears to be intentional; the curriculum is implying that nonviolent resistance is submissive and passive and should be condemned; instead it refers to the leadership styles and tactics of Black supremacy, the Black Panther Party, and Malcolm X who promoted violence, all of which are highly suspect. The Model Curriculum for Ethnic Studies skips over the history of the Black Freedom Movement and presents the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement of recent years without connection.”
The first draft of the curriculum denigrates the entire tradition of nonviolence in the Black Freedom Movement and glorifies those who advocate Black supremacy and even violence as role models for our students. Nothing in the second draft explicitly rejects the offensive portions of the first draft. Jones said, “I plead for morality, reason and decency in teaching students the history of transformative social movements, with respect for truth and accuracy. Too many martyrs have died in our people’s struggle for liberation, including my beloved friend Dr. King, to remain silent on this issue, and I ask that the ESMC curriculum be rejected until changes are made to correct these errors and distortions.”
Radical Sex Education
Many people are concerned about what the Model Curriculum for Ethnic Studies will teach children. One Chinese-American parent said, “The curriculum includes gender identity, LGBTQ marginalization, patriarchy, critical race theory, internal and external oppression, social justice, action and reform, including requiring students to learn to express their basic human rights and oppression. It also requires discussing and answering questions such as different genders (more than just men and women), discrimination against LBGTQ communities by heterosexuality (one man and one woman), historical female inequality and how women of color have fought for justice, and more.
Daniel Solorzano is quoted in the Model Curriculum for Ethnic Studies as saying that the curriculum’s critical race theory “challenges traditional claims of the educational system, such as objectivity, meritocracy, colorblindness, race neutrality, and equality of opportunity,” and that it seeks to change traditional educational philosophies and It seeks to change traditional educational concepts and make race theory a guide for action.
Ethnic studies courses, which first emerged and became widespread in universities, are now about to enter the high school curriculum, but have been mentioned as being universal in all grades of the K-12 curriculum, and the framework and content of the curriculum is so important and critical that it will affect more than just one generation.
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