Ethnic Studies Debate Follows Students Into San Francisco Classrooms

When Samantha Aguirre’s ninth graders shuffled into ethnic studies on the first day of school this fall, many had no idea of the drama and strife surrounding the course all summer — still looming in the background of Aguirre’s and many teachers’ minds.

She delivered her opening spiel, refined over a decade teaching the class in the San Francisco Unified School District, introducing herself to new students, establishing a welcoming environment and posing one of the year’s guiding questions: “What are race and ethnicities and how have they changed over time?”

Discussing that question has always been where Aguirre starts, she said. Despite months of parent pushback against ethnic studies, prompting a late-summer curriculum change and new oversight regulations, she hasn’t had to alter much.

Since school let out in the spring, SFUSD’s ethnic studies course has come under major scrutiny after a cohort of parents, backed by local political groups and a national education organization, raised alarms that the curriculum in their children’s classrooms comes from a biased, “activist-driven” perspective.

Petitions cropped up to pause the class, parents created a toolkit to opt kids out and media scrutiny intensified. In July, the district announced it would replace its pioneering homegrown curriculum with a third-party textbook for this year.

Despite the online chatter, fewer than 50 ninth graders chose not to take ethnic studies this fall, and the classrooms the other 3,800 freshmen entered looked much the same as in previous years.

When teachers began flipping through the new course materials in early August, Aguirre said she and other veterans reached an almost ironic understanding: “This textbook that’s been quote-unquote ‘vetted and approved’ is not radically different from what most of us have been teaching already,” she said.

The first unit of the new textbook, Voices: An Ethnic Studies Survey by Gibbs Smith Education, focuses on race and ethnicity, sharing many of the themes that SFUSD’s opening “Self and Stories” unit covered.

“[Voices] talks a little bit about colonialism and constructs and eugenics and hierarchy and race. It defines what race is and how that varies from ethnicity, “ Aguirre said. “It talks a little bit about scientific racism and pseudoscientists of the past. These are all things that were in the SFUSD curriculum.”

SFUSD first piloted ethnic studies as an elective at some high schools in 2010, and expanded to all campuses in 2015. San Francisco’s Board of Education voted to make a yearlong ethnic studies course a graduation requirement beginning with students who entered ninth grade last year.

Since its inception, the course has been lauded as one of the district’s great successes. When announcing a new state-wide ethnic studies requirement in 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom pointed to San Francisco’s class, citing Stanford University research that showed it bolstered students’ attendance and graduation rates. Researchers from UC Irvine found that taking ethnic studies in ninth grade boosted the GPAs of SFUSD students throughout high school, especially among Black and Latino students.

But since the district’s course became a graduation requirement in 2024, it has faced intense criticism. Parents Defending Education, a national education group, published multiple reports last year accusing the class of bias and posted course documents it obtained through public records requests.

News articles cited one in-class activity asking students to role-play as Israeli soldiers putting Palestinians into refugee camps, and a slide deck comparing civil rights and other social movements to the Red Guards, an often-violent youth movement supporting Mao Zedong during China’s cultural revolution in the 1960s.

Multiple ethnic studies teachers previously told KQED they had never seen those materials, much less used them in their classrooms. But the documents sparked a movement to pause the course, led by parents and aided by moderate political action groups like Blueprint for a Better San Francisco.

They say ethnic studies should focus less on oppression, resistance and activism, and more on the histories of different ethnic groups. The new curriculum, however, changes little, according to Nikhil Laud, who heads the department.

“Things are taught in a bit of a different sequence than we’re used to teaching, but we’re not planets apart or continents apart, it’s like the next town over,” he said.

The course’s two guiding questions — “How have race and ethnicity shaped or been shaped by history, policy and beliefs?” and “How, if at all, are race and ethnicity significant today?” — remain the same.

That makes sense, he said, since SFUSD’s curriculum is one of the longest-standing in the state and served as a model for the state implementing a graduation requirement.

“Our course actually influenced a lot of the values and principles of the state model curriculum,” he told KQED.

Sarita Lavin, another ethnic studies educator, said she feels the Voices book has gaps, lacking sections on the LGBTQ+ movement, disability rights and women’s history.

“It has no mention of trans people or queer people or their struggles, which is pretty appalling considering the student populations we serve and the fact that we are in San Francisco, which has been a historic hub for queer resistance and rights,” she said.

The biggest change teachers face, though, is not the new curriculum itself.

“A lot of us are kind of afraid of a witch hunt,” Aguirre said. “It’s very disheartening that … [teachers] feel like they have to look over their shoulder. To question ‘Is this going to be objectionable? Am I going to get doxxed online?’”

She worries ethnic studies classes will be under a microscope this year, especially after the district implemented a new regulation last month governing when supplemental materials that aren’t from the approved curriculum can be used.

In August, Superintendent Maria Su announced that any outside documents teachers use in any class must go through the district’s review process. That protocol said teachers can use their judgment to decide when something is appropriate. If they are unsure, they must get approval from the superintendent or another designated top official.

Aguirre said when she and teachers asked for more concrete details about the vetting and complaint process, they were told little.

The district referred KQED to a page on its website that said if a teacher requests a consult, the superintendent’s designee will assess the new material’s “educational value, relevance, appropriateness, and alignment with District criteria.”

SFUSD also said parents can request feedback forms from school principals.

She said she was told to continue sharing curriculum with her department head and campus administrators — which teachers already do — but it did little to ease the anxiety of new and non-tenured teachers.

Lavin said she fears that using unapproved supplements could lead to discipline or removal.

“What we’re seeing realistically is that people who are not educational professionals are having a voice over the people who are educational professionals,” Lavin said. “People who are not education professionals are determining what is allowed for your students to learn in a classroom space.

“This is a very dangerous precedent to set.”