SFUSD Was a Pioneer in Ethnic Studies. Now the Program Could Be Put on Pause

Updated 3:45 p.m. Friday

After months of mounting pushback, San Francisco’s superintendent of schools is in talks to pause the district’s ethnic studies program, according to teachers and a member of the school board who have raised concerns over the move.

The program — which covers topics including identity, white supremacy, sexuality and social movements — has come under increasing scrutiny from some parents and a national education group that have criticized its course materials as biased and “activist-driven.”

Now, Superintendent Maria Su is considering reassigning ninth graders enrolled in the course next fall while the district conducts an audit of the curriculum, according to ethnic studies teachers and school board member Matt Alexander.

They say that the move would deviate from the district’s past protocols for handling curriculum changes and raises concerns about the future of the course, which has been heralded as a success for more than a decade.

“We have a course that’s worked for a very long time,” Alexander said. “There doesn’t seem to be any reason for a pause, and it’s something that’s very effective. In fact, it may be the only initiative that we have that actually increases college and career outcomes for students.”

More than a decade of ethnic studies

The San Francisco Unified School District became one of the first in the nation to introduce ethnic studies after its board of education called for creating a dedicated course in 2008. The field, which has roots in Bay Area student activism in the 1960s, includes and examines the experiences of minorities in the United States, typically focusing on the experiences of Indigenous people, as well as Black, Latino and Asian Americans.

In 2010, SFUSD launched a pilot program as an elective for high schoolers, which has been offered on all campuses since the 2015–16 school year.

A 2021 study by Stanford’s Graduate School of Education raised the program’s profile when it found that low-achieving students who participated in SFUSD’s course were more likely to attend and be engaged in school, had higher probabilities of graduating and were more likely to go to college. And a new draft study from UC Irvine this year shows that over the 15 years SFUSD has offered the class, taking ethnic studies in ninth grade boosted the GPAs of students throughout their high school careers, especially among those who identify as Black and Latino.

The 2021 study persuaded policymakers at the state and local levels. That year, California lawmakers enacted a mandate for public schools to require a semester of ethnic studies, which is set to take effect in 2025. That same year, the San Francisco school board passed legislation making the two-semester course a graduation requirement, beginning with ninth graders entering high school in the fall of 2024.

But one year after lawmakers passed those measures, three of the school board members who backed the SFUSD plan — and other social justice-oriented changes within the district, including renaming schools and eliminating merit-based admissions at Lowell High School — were overwhelmingly recalled. The contentious vote followed a swell of criticism from parents, particularly in the Asian American community.

Parents and advocacy groups push back

Samantha Aguirre, who has taught ethnic studies in SFUSD since 2015, said she had not heard widespread pushback specifically about the course until this year.

One parent, Vivian Safrin, began raising concerns about the curriculum to district officials last year, after she said she was shown class materials that concerned her.

“[Ethnic studies] is supposed to be an opportunity for students to learn about the histories, cultures, struggles and contributions of ethnic groups in California,” she said. “And at this time, the course in San Francisco is a lot of one-sided political dogma.

“Our kids don’t have context to be able to analyze this material, given that it is being taught before world history, before U.S. history,” she said.

Criticism of the course didn’t break into the mainstream until May, though, following media coverage and a report from a national parents’ group about the class’ content.

Parents Defending Education, which said it aims to protect school districts from “activists imposing harmful agendas,” published an “incident report” criticizing the ethnic studies curriculum’s focus on “white supremacy culture” and support for undocumented immigrants.

Weeks later, an article published in the San Francisco Standard said that one lesson plan viewed by parents asked students to role-play as Israeli soldiers putting Palestinians into refugee camps.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that a lesson about social movements included as an example the Red Guards, an often-violent militant youth movement that backed Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong during the country’s cultural revolution in the 1960s.

Aguirre, along with SFUSD ethnic studies teacher Sarita Lavin and a third who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation since they are not tenured, all told KQED they had never used, or heard of any of their colleagues using, those materials in their classrooms.

None of the district’s publicly posted ethnic studies materials currently reference such lesson plans, though at least one of the unit curriculum slide decks contains broken links to slides that it said have been deleted, and it’s unclear when or if changes have been made.

“That is not something as an ethnic studies department that we are promoting or teaching en masse,” Lavin said. “I think that that’s just been wildly overblown.”

And not all families have had negative experiences with ethnic studies.

Maria Elena Francis said that when her children took the course, they came home from school feeling like they saw themselves reflected in their curriculum for one of the first times ever.

“Both of my children are Puerto Rican, Chicano and Indigenous, so they’re multiracial, multi-ethnic, and don’t often hear their different histories in a classroom,” she said.

Her son is a rising 11th grader, and her daughter, who took the honors course when she was in high school, graduated from UC Berkeley last month with an ethnic studies degree.

“It was important to me, it was important to my husband that we saw them coming back and saying, ‘We learned about this and I made this connection with this person,’” she said. “This program did for my children what I did not have as a student in SFUSD. I had never felt that way … and I’m so glad that my children had a different experience.”

‘We were in the middle of the process’

The teachers who spoke with KQED acknowledged that one of many parents’ resounding concerns with the class was valid: a standardized curriculum for it isn’t complete.

According to Aguirre, in the summer of 2021, amid the wider push to expand ethnic studies requirements in the district and across the state, she and other teachers were asked to participate in a working group to develop and vet a more standardized curriculum.

They split into small cohorts focused on each of the course’s four units, swapped and refined lesson plans, and came up with a draft for each of the class’s sections throughout the summers of 2021 and 2022.

She said the working group had planned to gather to assess their first drafts, give each other feedback and make further changes before delivering a final product.

But that never happened.

“After the summer of 2022, there was no more money or funding to keep doing the process of making the pilot curriculum,” she said.

The work was cut short amid the return to classrooms and mass exodus of district employees after the COVID-19 pandemic and a growing budget deficit, she told KQED.

“What’s available right now on the website when you look at SFUSD curriculum is a lot of our draft work,” Aguirre said. “We were in the middle of the process. Project specialists went in and kind of just made it presentable and put it out there.”

Those drafts — in the form of Google slide presentations for each of the class’s four units — include writing prompts, in-class group projects, links to articles and external resources that align with the class’s broader focus areas. The specific materials, Aguirre said, are suggestions, not requirements.

There is no standardized curriculum for the course, nor is there one for any of the district’s history classes, Aguirre said. Instead, teachers are required to teach based on a bullet-point list of content standards handed down by the state.

“It’s not a curriculum … that doesn’t exist,” she said, adding that the textbook she’s been using in her world history courses was developed 20 years ago.

Pausing the course

Despite the pushback that’s plagued the end of the school year, the educators said they went into the summer working on updates to their lesson plans and preparing to teach ethnic studies again in the fall.

“Then, about last week, I started hearing murmurs through the different ethnic study teachers that I was already working with over the summer that something might happen and that there was some sort of plan that things might not be the same in the fall,” said the teacher who requested anonymity.

In a statement, a district spokesperson said, “The superintendent is currently in active discussions with principals and various stakeholders regarding high school curriculum and course sequencing for social studies, including Ethnic Studies, in fall 2025.”

The district said there was no anticipated change to the ethnic studies graduation requirement, which is mandated by school board policy.

“We are committed to keeping our community informed as soon as we have an official update,” the statement said.

Ethnic studies teachers told KQED they’re worried that a potential pause could turn into a repeal of the class altogether.

“There’s no more teachers on special assignment, nobody’s actually teaching ethnic studies, I’ve heard no talk of work groups, there’s no funding to get teachers together to keep on working on the curriculum … then you run into the same issue about access to resources,” Aguirre said.

Alexander said that an audit of the curriculum is a good idea — especially given valid concerns about certain class materials — but he believes the class should continue in the interim.

He said that a few years ago, when a group of parents approached the district with concerns about racism in the U.S. history curriculum, prompting an audit, “we didn’t stop teaching U.S. history.”

“We analyzed the curriculum and looked at ways that we could improve [it] and make them anti-racist in line with our values,” Alexander told KQED. “That to me seems like the appropriate response when this kind of thing comes up. I’ve never heard of stopping a course because of curriculum concerns.”

A larger movement

The decision comes as the state also seems to be backing away from its push to broaden ethnic studies education.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation in 2021 mandating a semester in the course for all public school students beginning with the class of 2030, who will enter ninth grade in the fall. The same year, the state board of education adopted a model curriculum for the course.

However, California’s current 2025–26 budget plan, which needs to be adopted by the end of this month, doesn’t include funding to implement ethnic studies statewide.

Under the 2021 law that created the ethnic studies requirement, the state had to provide money to pay for course materials, teachers and training for the mandate to take effect.

At the same time, districts around the Bay Area and the state have also been backing off plans to expand the course in the face of legal challenges, many of which have stemmed from Israel’s war in Gaza and concerns over allegations of antisemitism in schools.

A bill making its way through California’s Legislature that aims to strengthen protections against discrimination and antisemitism has also been criticized by some teachers and advocacy groups who worry it could prohibit students from learning about Palestine and human rights more broadly.

“The reason why ethnic studies was created in the 1960s in San Francisco was because of the lack of education for students of color about their own identities,” Lavin said. Without ethnic studies, she asked, “Where exactly are those students supposed to get their representation?”