(The Center Square) – California State Superintendent Tony Thurmond hosted an online seminar featuring a series of speakers, including California Secretary of State Dr. Shirley Weber, to discuss the importance of establishing an ethnic studies curriculum.
“Ethnic studies is truly a transformational experience where people get balanced truth, and it gives students a sense of who they are and who their peers are,” said Weber, who also founded the Africana Studies Department at San Diego State University. “I am a strong advocate for ethnic studies curriculum — and there’s a reason people don’t want to discuss it—but we must insist that we not only discuss it, but that they teach it to our children, and they teach the correct information.”
AB 101, which was passed in 2021 and sponsored by Thurmond, requires that California public high schools offer ethnic studies courses by the 2025-2026 school year, and that a one-semester long ethnic studies course must be taken to graduate by the 2029-2030 school year. A California Senate report from 2021 estimated AB 101 will cost an inflation-adjusted $374 million per year, or at least $3.8 billion in its first 10 years.
California’s ethnic studies program remains a highly contentious topic, with the first draft of the state model curriculum generating over 100,000 negative comments from parents and other stakeholders in the education system, according to the Hoover Institute. In this first draft, the opening paragraph drew significant attention, and said, “Ethnic Studies courses operate from the consideration that race and racism have been, and continue to be, profoundly powerful social and cultural forces in American society. These courses focus on the experiences of African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanas/os and Latinas/os, Native Americans, and other racialized peoples in the US.”
In the second, updated draft called “Liberated Ethnic Studies,” the introduction included the statement that “protesters direct their anger at buildings that represent a political system that continues to dehumanize Black bodies by placing more interest in buildings and corporations than in equity and social justice. … It is time for educators to focus institutional reform efforts on the interests of Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) youth disenfranchised by racist policies and suffering from unresponsive educational systems.”
When Salinas Union High School district adopted the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum, roughly half the district’s majority-Hispanic students were failing the course, which included a “privilege quiz” that required students to rank themselves based on their level of marginalization.
