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Legislation authored by members of the Jewish Legislation Caucus to prevent antisemitism and prejudice from seeping into ethnic studies courses passed its first legislative hurdle on Wednesday.
However, Assembly Bill 2918 faces a hot summer of intense negotiations to persuade legislators who agree with its intent but question whether the bill’s restrictions and lack of clarity could lead to avoidable conflicts.
Assembly Members Rick Zbur, D-Los Angeles, and Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, the bill’s chief authors, told the Senate Education Committee they and key education groups are willing to put in the time to fix it.
“While we actually have issues now that are affecting the climate in schools for Jewish students, this affects all communities that are subject to bias and discrimination,” said Zbur. “We have to get this right for everyone, no matter what your background is.”
But what supporters see as transparency, opponents see as interference.
The bill’s requirements “will expose districts to increased harassment and litigation. The lack of clarity in defining what curriculum and instruction materials are will leave our teachers vulnerable to unwarranted scrutiny,” said Teresa Montaño, a former Los Angeles Unified teacher who now teaches Chicano studies at CSU Northridge.
The bill would strengthen disclosure requirements for approving ethnic studies courses and materials. The 2021 law establishing an ethnic studies mandate — that all high schools offer a course in 2025-26 and make it a graduation requirement in 2030-31 — requires districts to hold two hearings before adopting an ethnic studies course. The law also includes a broad warning that the instruction must be free of “any bias, bigotry, or discrimination.”
But those provisions have proven ineffective, Zbur and others said. Parents have complained they had no idea what their children were being taught; school board members said they were unaware of what was in a course they approved, sometimes on a consent calendar with no discussion.
The bill, which has the support of State Superintendent of Instruction Tony Thurmond, would require:
At the suggestion of staff, Zbur and Addis agreed not to apply the bill to already approved courses and not to require school board members to certify with the State Department of Education that the course is factually and historically accurate.
Tensions over the content of ethnic studies courses have simmered since a protracted process by the State Board from 2018 to 2021 to adopt a voluntary ethnic studies course framework. Gov. Gavin Newsom, State Board President Linda Darling-Hammond, and Thurmond criticized the first draft of the framework, written primarily by ethnic studies experts and faculty members, as ideological and biased.
After the state board adopted a substantially changed framework in 2021, the first draft’s authors disavowed the final version and formed the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies. Its member organizations have contracted with districts to buy their versions of ethnic studies, which stress the challenges of white supremacy and an oppressive capitalist system, and solidarity with Palestine’s battle for liberation.
As Montaño said during a webinar on ethnic studies last year, “I have no choice but to challenge settler colonialism everywhere and to acknowledge that from the very beginning, our disciplines of ethnic studies were aligned to the global struggles in Africa, Palestine and Latin America.”
In the past year, without mentioning the Liberated Ethnic Studies coalition by name, both Attorney General Rob Bonta and the Newsom administration have reminded school districts to adhere to the law’s prohibition of discrimination.
“Vendors have begun promoting curriculum for (districts) to use for ethnic studies courses. We have been advised, however, that some vendors are offering materials that may not meet the requirements of AB 101, particularly the requirement (against bias and bigotry), an important guardrail highlighted when the bill was signed,” Brooks Allen, a Newsom adviser and executive director of the state board, wrote in August 2023.
Conflicts have flared up in the past year. Jewish parents in Palo Alto have complained they’ve been left in the dark about the development of an ethnic studies curriculum that will be piloted this fall. Opponents are protesting the board of Pajaro Valley Unified’s second thoughts about renewing a contract with a liberated ethnic studies contractor.
Tension has further escalated in reaction to the massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas in October and the subsequent invasion and occupation of Gaza by Israel, causing tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths. The Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education is investigating charges that Berkeley Unified failed to respond properly to rising incidents of antisemitism in its schools.
Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, said his concerns about bias when the ethnic studies law was adopted have come true. “Now we see in practice, particularly for those of us in the Jewish community, how, in my view, bad actors have hijacked the process to promote a curriculum that does the opposite of what the goals that we had established,” he said during the discussion on the bill.
However, more than a dozen ethnic studies teachers and parents, including several Jewish parents opposed to the Israeli military’s invasion of Gaza, disagreed, saying at that hearing that they opposed the bill.
Sen. Dave Cortese, D-San Jose, said he was troubled by ambiguities in the bill and the possibility that the strength of ethnic studies could be weakened. “Everything in my core being is telling me that as it’s currently put together, (the bill) is actually going to have the unintended consequence of exacerbating the intensity of disputes at the local level,” he said.
Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton, the committee chair, said he shared Cortese’s concern that ethnic studies could “get unproductively caught up in controversies over whose version of history should be taught in our schools.”
“It’s fair to worry about the consequences, absent clarity in the bill, of organizations and individuals without teaching experience involved in developing high school courses,” he said.
“I think it’s important that the bill move forward. It’s an important discussion,” he added. Encouraging Zbur and Addis to work through unresolved issues with the Latino Caucus and others, he joined the majority in passing the bill, with Cortese dissenting.
California’s community colleges are barred by state law from offering bachelor’s degrees in fields like education and nursing, even in remote areas without a four-year university. That’s not the case in Washington.
Why open a new district-run police department? “We need to take our safety to another level.”
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Oakland Unified remains committed to the idea that disbanding its own police force can work. Staff are trained to call the cops as a last resort.
Comments (9)
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Paul Muench 2 weeks ago2 weeks ago
East Side Union High School District seems to be very quiet about its plans for ethnic studies. I wonder if this is common across all districts. Perhaps districts are wanting to avoid being transparent about what they are doing to avoid the difficult topics referenced here. Perhaps they are waiting for the state to take action. I’d love to know more about what is going on at the district level and why.
Dan Plonsey 2 weeks ago2 weeks ago
In general, it's not possible to eliminate one's bias in any dispute in which one has an interest. That's why judges recuse themselves from judging cases in which they have an interest. So when a person talks of "eliminating bias," what that means in effect is "eliminating views which are contrary to mine." CA, despite its liberalism, is an extremely unequal state w/r/t race, and unfortunately, most of those with greater privilege and power want … Read More
In general, it’s not possible to eliminate one’s bias in any dispute in which one has an interest. That’s why judges recuse themselves from judging cases in which they have an interest. So when a person talks of “eliminating bias,” what that means in effect is “eliminating views which are contrary to mine.” CA, despite its liberalism, is an extremely unequal state w/r/t race, and unfortunately, most of those with greater privilege and power want to pass along that privilege and power to their children rather than work for an egalitarian state. They will say (and perhaps believe) anything to maintain their supremacy, but the fact is that children observe the enormous inequality, they observe the correlation to race, and they ought to develop an understanding of why it persists.
Richard O'Neill 3 weeks ago3 weeks ago
The conundrum we face seems to be contained in this simple truism; Everyone, without exception, is Ethnic. My high school used to have a Lit course called ' Ethnic Literature" and grocery stores used to have "Ethnic Food", but now we understand that all literature and all food is Ethnic. Everyone has a family story of coming to the United States and to California. We need to know everyone's story, and it might … Read More
The conundrum we face seems to be contained in this simple truism; Everyone, without exception, is Ethnic. My high school used to have a Lit course called ‘ Ethnic Literature” and grocery stores used to have “Ethnic Food”, but now we understand that all literature and all food is Ethnic.
Everyone has a family story of coming to the United States and to California. We need to know everyone’s story, and it might take as much four high school semesters to unfold them. Also this; colonialism and ‘settler’ cultural narratives are fairly ubiquitous in the annals of humanity; it’s what we do. Just take an honest look. And as Paulo Freire asserted, “The oppressed want at any cost to resemble the oppressors.”. There is something in our DNA coding that seems to compel us. No ethnicity is exempt and history bears this out.
None of this grants absolution to California or the United States for our collective sins, to be sure, and the exclusion of so many ethnic narratives from our high school learning experience needs to be corrected. The silver-buckled Pilgrims story needs to be downsized so that we have the resource to tell everyone’s story.
If we allocate four semesters of high school social studies to imparting to kids the struggles all people share, then we would be on better road to full inclusion.
kelle green 3 weeks ago3 weeks ago
I would ask readers to please look carefully at the crafting of this sentence. "Tension has further escalated in reaction to the massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas in October and the subsequent invasion and occupation of Gaza by Israelis, causing tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths." This type of language is deliberately chosen. A "massacre of 1200" vs. "invasion and occupation causing tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths". It's almost as if those deaths were … Read More
I would ask readers to please look carefully at the crafting of this sentence.
“Tension has further escalated in reaction to the massacre of 1,200 Israelis by Hamas in October and the subsequent invasion and occupation of Gaza by Israelis, causing tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths.”
This type of language is deliberately chosen. A “massacre of 1200” vs. “invasion and occupation causing tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths”.
It’s almost as if those deaths were accidental!
Let’s be clear. The Israelis have bombed, bulldozed, shot and killed innocent children and families, deliberately targeting journalists, aid workers, hospitals, schools, and homes. 35,000+ Palestinians have been murdered with many more buried under the rubble.
Replies
Beto 3 weeks ago3 weeks ago
And you believe numbers supplied by Hamas? Numbers that don’t tell us how many of those deaths are made of terrorists?
M McL 3 weeks ago3 weeks ago
The White-on-White cruelty found in world history is often skipped in ethnic studies.
Brenda L - Interfaith Advocate 3 weeks ago3 weeks ago
Question: If Thurmond, our legislators, the CDE, and state board of education care so much about equity for all races, then why did they exclude non-English speaking California residents from the Ethnic Studies Framework Community Input Process? The California Department of Education only provided the document in English, even after immigrant parents requested it in Spanish. This newspaper article explains what happened. https://interfaith4kids.com/index.php/our-media/padres-hispanos-discriminados-de-participar-en-la-educacion-de-sus-hijos
B Lebsack - Founder of Interfaith Statewide Coalition 3 weeks ago3 weeks ago
This 1 minute video from the Interfaith Statewide Coalition explains how California’s Ethnic Studies equates ethnicity and skin color with many gender options. A large portion of Muslims, Jews, Catholics and Protestants of many races and language groups in California, do not see these radical Trojan Horse gender teachings in Ethnic Studies as inclusive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy3afeODvKI
Dr. Bill Conrad 3 weeks ago3 weeks ago
Milquetoast will of the wisp legislators are now conforming to our ever burgeoning fascist zeitgeist!
Welcome to our Brave New World!