The San Francisco Unified School District is unfortunately known as one of the most dysfunctional and ideologically captured school systems in the country. The district cares more about indoctrinating young minds and pushing far-left ideology than actually prepping students for the real world.
While district leadership attempted to push a controversial “grading for equity” initiative in recent weeks, their plan to outright indoctrinate students flew under the radar. Despite outcries from both parents and students, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) began mandating an insane ethnic studies program that is filled with what can only be described as far-left ideology during the 2024-2025 school year.
The San Francisco Standard reported that parents were alerted by email about the curriculum only three days before students returned to class for the school year. Freshmen students were automatically enrolled in two semesters of ethnic studies without parental input. SFUSD’s Board of Education oddly never officially mandated the curriculum. District leadership made that decision without board approval.
The lessons in this curriculum are alarming. Students are taught to question the significance of figures such as Christopher Columbus and Thomas Jefferson. The course has students provide a “counter narrative” to their contributions.
One lesson includes an image of the so-called “Genderbread Person.” This image is used as a diagram to teach students that gender is not binary. The district teaches them through the curriculum that “just like sexuality, gender and gender identity are fluid, and exist on a spectrum.”
In a lesson about perceived white supremacy, the district teaches students about the possibility of creating a new country called the “Republic of New Afrika” that would consist of the states Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. This country would be solely for “formerly enslaved African (new Afrikan people) on U.S. soil, in states where their ancestors were formerly enslaved.”
SFUSD reportedly received so many complaints about one lesson on Israel that it was removed from the ethnic studies curriculum in October. This lesson taught students that Israel as a country was created through an “invasion” that “decimated Indigenous populations.”
The district’s ethnic studies curriculum is appalling, but this is more than just a problem at SFUSD. California will be mandating ethnic studies in order for students to graduate high school in the next few years.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law in 2021 that made California the first state to mandate high school students to take ethnic studies courses. The law forces all public high schools in the state to offer ethnic studies courses by the 2025-2026 school year. Students graduating in the 2029-2030 school year must complete at least one ethnic studies course to graduate.
With California schools forcing students to take ethnic studies courses, all students in the state must now go through what is essentially taxpayer-funded indoctrination of far-left and anti-American ideology. Many school districts appeared more than willing to jump on the trend either through an effort to reach young impressionable minds or by necessity of the inevitable penalties they will likely face for not doing so.
School districts in California that have already adopted ethnic studies curricula promoting left-wing ideology include Santa Rosa City Schools, Fort Bragg Unified School District, Alameda Unified School District, San Ramon Valley Unified School District, Fresno Unified School District, and Los Angeles Unified School District.
A common theme among almost every ethnic studies curriculum in the state is that students are privileged or oppressed based solely on the color of their skin. This is an inherently racist idea.
Newsom and the administrators in charge of his state’s schools are too blinded by their own activism to see the folly in their policies. From Congress to the White House, last year’s elections were a referendum on these dangerous ideals. If Golden State leaders are too stubborn to change course, that is to their own detriment.
Ethnic studies curricula do not belong in SFUSD or in any K-12 school at all. Parents should have the right to send their children to school without the fear that their children are being groomed into becoming activists for a nefarious ideology that teaches them to hate their own country. Americans are fleeing California in mass droves, and it is easy to see why.
Casey Ryan is a writer and investigative reporter at Defending Education.
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