Ethnic Studies is yet another disastrous misstep for our public school district.

When we all worked together to recall our School Board, it was because the members we removed were putting their own ideology ahead of what was best for SFUSD students. As you may remember, ideological School Board members were focused on renaming schools, when they should have been focused on reopening them. While we finally have a competent school board, we still have a problem: SFUSD’s incompetent administration has once again failed students, as evidenced by their botched development of a radical Ethnic Studies curriculum.

While the name may suggest otherwise, this radical Ethnic Studies class is not some altruistic, well-intended curriculum. It was developed in-house by SFUSD, which has a terrible track record of developing things by themselves (remember the failed payroll system?).

Specific features of SFUSD’s Ethnic Studies curriculum are:

• Role-playing Israeli soldiers herding Palestinians into refugee camps
• Activities where students are asked to write letters to a convicted murderer
• Portrayed the Mao’s Red Guards, a group known for torturing dissidents during China’s Cultural Revolution, in a positive light.
• Taught before students take US History or World History, giving them no context for complex social issues.

Beyond the curriculum itself, there are other reasons that the in-house SFUSD-created Ethnic Studies class has failed our students: 

• The course requires $2 million for this upcoming school year; while the district just solved for a massive deficit, it’s financially imprudent to implement a non-essential course with such a high price tag
• Students already don’t get enough instructional minutes in math and English. The mandate for one year of Ethnic Studies for all ninth-graders to be a graduation requirement deprives students of critical instruction minutes in foundational skills. 
• This mandatory requirement originates from a decision in March 2021 by former BOE commissioner Alison Collins, who you helped recall in 2022.

While there are legitimate and valid reasons for supporting Ethnic Studies classes in our school district, this SFUSD-specific Ethnic Studies curriculum is divisive, anti-semitic, largely ignores the Asian American experience, and only encourages intolerance. That’s why parents across the city were outraged when it was announced that the Ethnic Studies curriculum would become fully implemented as a requirement for this school year (after initially becoming mandatory as a requirement in fall 2024).

As of the morning of Friday, June 27, Maria Su was with SFUSD parents on this issue, agreeing that Ethnic Studies mandate shouldn’t continue being implemented. By early evening, she’d reversed her position, getting steamrolled by a loud group of radical activists. We’ve included a full detail of how and why Superintendent Maria Su caved to activist pressure groups, but the bottom line is this: Superintendent Maria Su has demonstrated that she’s more interested in catering to activists than doing what’s right for SFUSD students and families.

Our students are failing reading, writing and math; our district’s learning outcomes are bad, and even worse for students of color and those from lower-income families. United Educators of San Francisco (UESF, or the teachers union) and their affiliated activist groups have never been motivated by learning outcomes; rather, UESF is entirely motivated by a political agenda and ideology. And in this instance, Superintendent Maria Su is fully to blame for folding to ideological pressure. If Su and the radical ideologues cared about the people they claim to be protecting, they’d be focused on delivering real results and actual learning outcomes. Ethnic Studies is the objectively wrong thing for SFUSD to focus on when our students are being so severely failed by our public education system.

At a time when our district and its families needed a leader to stand up for them, Superintendent Maria Su crumpled under political pressure. Our families need a strong leader who will do what’s right for students - not what’s convenient to appease the loudest ideologues in the room. We have a moral responsibility to the students at SFUSD to ensure that our education system prepares them as well as it possibly can. Superintendent Su and her administration have failed on this front.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

Sign the petition:

Tell Superintendent Maria Su that you are against the immediate implementation of the proposed Ethnic Studies class. Tell the Board of Education to follow the state requirements and standards for Ethnic Studies in our classrooms. Share this petition with your community.

Sign Petition Here

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TIMELINE:

Here’s the play-by-play of how we got to the point of an Ethnic Studies course becoming a major flashpoint:

• 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.

• As the result of a 2021 law, California required students to have one semester of ethnic studies coursework to graduate high school
  
  • Governor Newsom has withheld funding to prevent the implementation of this requirement
  • The San Francisco Board of Education approved a change to the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD)’s graduation requirements in 2021 to include at least two semesters or 10 elective credits of Ethnic Studies, beginning with the class of 2028.
  • Lainie Motamedi, then-president of the Board of Education, criticized adding Ethnic Studies to the graduation requirements. She noted that Board of Education never approved funding for the year-long requirement and “It is the imposition of adult agendas on what students need, and, at the same time, the obstruction of kids getting to choose courses based upon their interests.”
• Because of weak leadership in SFUSD administration, activist educators and community organizers (many who have nothing to do with education) steamrolled Superintendent Su into allowing for the rollout of this course in the 2025-2026 academic year for SFUSD

• Thanks to our new school board that you helped elect, we caught this hastily implemented course.

• School Board President Phil Kim led Board negotiations with Superintendent Su to delay the implementation for one year in order to search for a high-quality, commonly-used, vetted, and state-approved Ethnic Studies curriculum.

• Activist groups launch a pressure campaign on Superintendent Su against delaying implementation, steamrolling her to immediately implement the in-house Ethnic Studies course.

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