Berkeley High's Dana Moran Was Teaching Ethnic Studies Decades Before California Required It

Amid raging national debates over how history is taught in schools, California last month became one of the first states to eventually require all high school students to complete a semester of ethnic studies to graduate.

The new law — Assembly Bill 101 — mandates all public and charter high schools in the state, starting in the 2025-26 school year, to offer at least one ethnic studies class. Taking the course will be a prerequisite for graduation beginning with the class of 2030.

But under the new law, not much will change at Berkeley High School, an early adopter of ethnic studies classes. Nearly 30 years ago, the school became one of the first in the country to require its ninth graders to take a semester-long class exploring the dynamics of race, discrimination, privilege and gender.

Abby Sanchez, now a sophomore at Barnard College in New York, reflected on her experience taking the ethnic studies class when she was in ninth grade at Berkeley High.

“This class really attacks this fundamental ideology that a ton of Americans have, that America has done no wrong and does nothing but spread this idea of freedom and whatnot, and attacking that bias,” she told KQED. “I remember in ethnic studies, we talked a lot about identity formation. And that hit super-personally and changed the way I totally perceived myself — the beauty of having both one foot in Latin culture and one foot in U.S. culture, and how that experience is so unique, but so common.”

In 1993, Dana Moran, a Berkeley High alum, began teaching ethnic studies at the school, and went on to develop a more comprehensive curriculum.

KQED reporter Alexander Gonzalez recently spoke with Moran about how ethnic studies curricula have changed over the years and the impact the new state mandate could have on millions of high school students across California.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Alexander Gonzalez: How did you get involved in this work?

So, I’ve been teaching for a really long time. I started my teaching career in Los Angeles, actually in LA Unified. And when I was teaching there (and also working as a “diversity trainer”), Berkeley High started its ethnic studies requirement and I got recruited by the principal at the time to come … specifically to teach the course. I’m a graduate of Berkeley High, so it was intriguing, and I came back and started teaching ethnic studies in 1993 — and I’ve been doing it ever since.

Another sort of funny thing about that is [Berkeley High at the time] was having some difficulties and they hired me as — you’re not going to believe this — my actual job title was “racial harmony coordinator.” I wanted to make a plaque and put it on the door — it was just so funny.

I was given one period a day to create racial harmony at Berkeley High, which I didn’t do. So they eliminated the position [but let me continue teaching ethnic studies].

How has the course evolved over the many years you’ve been teaching it?

When we first started teaching ethnic studies, it was a one-semester course and we were supposed to cover African American, Asian American, Chicano/Latino, Native American and Jewish American experiences. And that meant about three weeks per group.

The longer we did it, the more unworkable it seemed, and sort of disingenuous and maybe even disrespectful. It just felt like checking boxes in a way that didn’t feel very authentic. And so now I think we try to frame our ethnic studies classes. We’re very different from some of the other ways that people talk about ethnic studies. I know, for example, in Tucson [in Arizona] and in San Francisco Unified, it’s very based in and grounded in certain groups’ experiences.

Ours is a lot more, I would say, like an intro ethnic studies class at the college level, where we’re introducing a lot more conceptual stuff. We just finished our culture unit and we were talking about cultural appropriation versus cultural appreciation and cultural assimilation. And then we sort of talk to kids about race as a social construct, and power and privilege and how people get that and how people are denied that. [We talk about] resistance movements, ways that people have in the past resisted systemic racism or attempted to dismantle it.

We use current events or historical events as case studies, but we don’t try to say, ‘Oh, we’re going to teach you everything you need to know about African Americans in this one-semester class.’

Has your class recently focused more on the issue of systemic racism, especially since the national uprisings and racial reckoning sparked by George Floyd’s murder last year?

I sort of feel like we’ve been doing it forever at Berkeley High anyway. I’ve been teaching “The New Jim Crow” forever. We’ll talk about voter suppression, we’ll talk about mass incarceration, and because here in California there’s been so much anti-Asian and anti-Latino history, we’ll talk about that, too.

So they understand that racism is not just a Black and white thing, that there are all these other people who have dealt with very, very similar things. And that [with] the systems that are in place, racism isn’t just like name-calling and people being mean to each other, and if you’re just nicer to each other, then everything will be fine.

I think it’s easier for us to connect, certainly to current events. But I feel like it’s a framing that we’ve had for a really long time.

It sounds like you’re an educational specialist in uncomfortable conversations. Would that be a fair way to put it?

Yes, very much so. We try to make it so that it is safe for kids to have these conversations. We’re not trying to make all the white kids feel bad for slavery or other things that just are so unproductive and don’t get anybody anywhere. And we’re also not trying to stir up rage among other communities of color.

So what we really want to do is get them all involved in these conversations about how none of us made these systems, but all of us are inheriting these systems. So what is it that we think any of us can do about it? And I think that’s our goal: to get everybody realizing that none of us like it. And all of us want to do something about it. So how and why were these systems set up and what can we do about them moving forward?

It’s cool to hear that this is already being taught in high school as early as ninth grade.

[The students] are so lucky, they have no idea. We give them a framework and some language for understanding some pretty complex things. I feel like when our students go out into the world and go to college, they understand a lot more about the world, I think, than a lot of other students. And they certainly report back to us that this is true. Like, they take classes and they’re like, ‘People have never heard of white privilege or people don’t understand systemic racism.’ Their peers in college have never heard of these things, have never talked about these things, have never thought about these things and their role in all of this or their place in a multiethnic world. And Berkeley High students have been thinking and talking about that for four years already.

So I feel like they’re really prepared for a lot of things that are introduced to them in college. Where other students are kind of going, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve never heard of this before,’ our students are like, ‘Yeah, we talked about this in ninth grade.’