Lesson plans for California K-12 schools are riddled with anti-racism language, and even compare the January 6, 2021 protest at the Capitol to Ku Klux Klan demonstrations.
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) created “The History & Civics Project” to offer “high quality history and civics education” resources and lesson plans to teachers at K-12 schools across the state. However, a recent investigation by Defending Education (DE) shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation reveals the lessons focus heavily on race and racial identity, “anti-Blackness,” and anti-racism frameworks.
The materials also repeatedly reference the January 6 Capitol attack across multiple lessons and grade levels, using the event as a point of comparison in many different historical contexts.
The lesson plans and resources outline a curriculum designed to “engage students” in “interrogating” historical representations and “re-imagining” them, a framework rooted in critical theory. It includes sections such as “Historicizing Race & Whiteness” on teaching about “structural and institutional racism” in order to build “anti-racist classrooms and schools.” A document on “Racial Injustice” in that section covers the project’s activism, including participation in Black Lives Matter protests, and directs teachers to external reading that includes the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations,” and essays such as “Beyond ‘White Fragility.’”
Another section is titled “Teaching the January 6, 2021 Insurrection on Capitol Hill.” This section includes document created by teachers offers a list words a class can choose from to “make sense” of Jan. 6: mob, sedition, terrorism, insurrection, or coup. It also links to headlines from various news outlets that suggest additional terms such as “assault on democracy,” “siege,” “invaded” and “unprecedented assault.”
It also includes social media posts from the time, solely selected from those on the left such as Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, saying that democracy was under attack and threatening impeachment of President Donald Trump.
UCSC History & Civics Project section titled “Teaching the January 6, 2021 Insurrection on Capitol Hill.” (UCSC History & Civics Project / DCNF)
The document suggests a kindergarten-level discussion prompt to be paired with a lesson on “Heroes in American History,” which compares Capitol police on Jan. 6 to a World War II naval hero. Another lesson created by a Berkeley High School teacher asked students to “compare and contrast” how Jan. 6 “reveal[ed] continuities and contradictions about the United States,” showing two tweets comparing the day to the Reconstruction era and describing it as “extremely predictable white backlash” to black people “showing the promise of a fully realized democracy.”
One exercise directs students to consider January 6 “through the lens of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898,” a massacre in which white Democrats in North Carolina effectively overthrew local government.
Another exercise titled “Contextualizing the Insurrection” includes a photo of Klan members near the U.S. Capitol, and says that “comparing a KKK demonstration in Washington D.C. that occurred almost 100 years ago to the January 6th Insurrection should provide your students with some context for this event while also prompting them to ask some clarifying questions about both.”
“UC Santa Cruz’s History & Civics Project isn’t teaching students how to think, it’s teaching them what to think,” said Paul Runko, Defending Education’s senior director of strategic initiatives of K-12 programs, in comments to DCNF.
“High schoolers deserve real debate, not ideological hand-holding. And with national math and reading scores at historic lows, there are far better uses of elementary school classroom time,” Runko said. “Parents need to know what their children are being exposed to during the school day and speak up when the curriculum is overtly partisan or historically revisionist.”
At least one California school district has partnered with the UCSC program to create an “ethnic studies” curriculum, which is a graduation requirement in the state. North Monterey County Unified School District paid UCSC $23,200 between 2024 and 2025 for this program.
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