Genghis Khan was a nice guy. Israel is evil. SF parents push back on 'ethnic studies' mandate

San Francisco parents aren't happy about the district's year-long "ethnic studies" class, which is now a graduation requirement, report Ezra Wallach and Anya Kaiser on The Standard. All ninth graders -- and 10th-graders who opted out last year -- will have to take the course, which focuses on the evils of structural racism, colonialism, capitalism and heteronormative thinking.

Looking at the curriculum on the district website, parent Viviane Safrin found only "four lessons out of 55 highlight contributions by ethnic groups, she wrote in a memo last year. The word "hegemony" appeared 81 times.

“They are taught how to organize — what it means to resist,” Safrin told The Standard. “They’re taught about dominant and counter narratives. It’s an upper-level college course for one way to examine history, but it is not teaching any actual history.”

Some lessons were removed in response to her comments, write Wallach and Kaiser, but "one exercise still in use places the Red Guards, a student-led paramilitary organization from Mao’s Chinese Cultural Revolution, alongside the U.S. civil rights and feminist movements as emphasizing 'the resistance that oppressed groups have shown in history'.”

Another calls for students to read a 2012 article called “Straight white male: The lowest difficulty setting there is” and asks, “What would white males need to give up (or relinquish) in order to make a more equitable society?”

The ethnic studies course aims to "critique empire building in history and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, and other forms of power and oppression (such as, but not limited to, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, exploitative economic systems, ableism, ageism, anthropocentrism, xenophobia, misogyny, antisemitism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, Islamophobia, and transphobia)."

Most parents who talked to The Standard requested anonymity, the reporters write. "They described fear of being labeled as racists or right-wing and of having their children singled out at school."

Jewish parents say their children are told Jews are oppressors. "In October, students at one high school were shown a presentation claiming that Israel’s founding was an 'invasion' that 'decimated Indigenous populations,' akin to European settler-colonial projects in Australia and the Americas," write Wallach and Kaiser. "Following pushback from parents and students, that slide was removed from the presentation."

"Other parents of freshmen, many of them self-proclaimed liberals, took issue with what they characterized as lectures and assignments that demonize the United States and Western civilization," they write. One parent said her child was taught that Genghis Khan was peaceful.

Students, who also requested anonymity, complained "the class is boring and uses academic jargon they don’t understand," Wallach and Kaiser write. One class refused to do the homework, so the teacher stopped assigning it.

Students also complained the mandate will make it hard to find room in their schedules for art, music and other electives.

The school board members who pushed for a ethnic studies mandate in 2021 were recalled by voters, The Standard points out. The current school board has not approved this curriculum. Superintendent Maria Su said she is "committed to addressing concerns" about the ethnic studies course.

Statewide, support for an ethnic studies mandate is fading, they note. Gov. Gavin Newsom decided not fund a one-semester ethnic studies mandate, "other districts in the state are settling lawsuits over their own curricula, and the University of California system has not moved forward with ethnic studies as an admissions requirement."

Last week, San Francisco Unified "paused its rollout of a controversial 'grading for equity' program amid public outcry," the reporters write. (The outcry started with a Standard story.) "Last month, popular field trips were cut due to budget concerns. As the district faces a $113 million deficit, around half of the students don’t meet state benchmarks for math and reading."

Power, privilege, oppression and resistance are featured in the curriculum, reports Defending Education, which has a lot of detail. To the extent that teachers discuss history, it is often "queered." In one lesson, students are asked: “How does drag queen story hour disrupt the cycle of heterosexism for young minds?”