Behind the attacks on ethnic studies at SFUSD

The San Francisco school district has changed its ethnic studies curriculum for this year to a version used in such radical commie outposts as Des Moines, Iowa. It is training teachers on what seems to be a pretty mainstream teaching program.

And yet, the attacks on ethnic studies continue—and involve a pretty hard-core right-wing group that the Chronicle quotes as if it were a credible authority.

Jill Tucker’s story May 31 kicked off the attack, with a lead saying that that “angry parents and a national organization” are “pushing back on the San Francisco school district’s ethnic studies curriculum.” The story leans heavily on quotes from a group called Parents Defending Education.

The founder of that group, Nicole Neily, favors many of Trump’s policies, favors private school vouchers (a fundamental attack on the idea of public schools), opposes any form of affirmative action, opposes any type of diversity equity and inclusion, and has made some pretty transphobic comments:

The president has framed out a very ambitious agenda through his executive orders. And so I think, we keep hearing the phrase, promises made, promises kept. I mean, certainly on the issue of women and girls in sports, on gender issues, he has delivered big on that. I think it was a big issue that came up during the course of the election. Obviously, the ads, he’s for you, Kamala is for they/them. I think that is something that has been delivered on. School choice also is an issue that obviously was on everybody’s mind. And so there were executive orders about that.

She’s a regular on right-wing media, including Fox News.

This is a group with a heavy ideological agenda complaining about, as the Chron puts it, “ideology over education.”

Nothing in the Chron story mentions what this group actually is and what it stands for, which would, I think, undermine its credibility across a broad spectrum of San Francisco.

The district scrapped its past curriculum and adopted a new one, called Voices, which is used all over the country. But that was not enough for Jill Tucker’s critics, who said even the new version is unacceptable:

It “promotes ‘dismantling of privilege,’ and encourages students to see themselves as part of a political movement,” the oppositional group said in a statement Thursday. “Students are instructed to create protest art, reflect on how they are ‘complicit in injustice,’ and explore ‘how to resist systems of power.’”

Sounds like an excellent class to me.

Then we get to Amanda Kahn Fried, who is the chief of policy and communications in the SF Treasurer’s Office—and sits on the board that Mayor London Breed created to help oversee the school district’s finances.

On a podcast called The Voice of San Francisco, with John Rothmann, who is a fairly conservative host, Fried announced earlier this summer that the city’s ethnic studies curriculum teaches kids “how to be revolutionaries.” She goes on to say that the course tells students that there are “oppressors and the oppressed” and that “it’s our job to stand up and fight.” Fighting for the oppressed, she said, “is not good enough for a 14-year-old.”

I don’t even know where to start, so let’s hear from Nickhil Laud, who knows a bit about this because he is a long-time educator who supervises the Ethnic Studies program.

For starters, Laud told me, the district has been offering ethnic studies as an elective for high school students for 10 years. The student survey consistently rank the course very highly, and students say the class “helps me understand people with different perspectives.”

“If this was teaching people to be violent revolutionaries, we wouldn’t be getting responses like this,” he said.

More: Stanford University researchers have looked at the SFUSD class, and published data in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences, a top-ranked, peer-reviewed publication, showing that student who took the class were 13 percent more likely to attend school, 14 percent more likely to graduate, and 14 percent more likely to attend college. “No other class at SFUSD has academic performance metrics like this,” Laud said.

Ethnic studies as an academic field had its start in San Francisco, 50 years ago. It’s because of the success of ethnic studies at SFUSD that the state has now mandated at least one semester of that course for all high school students.

The attacks focus on what the right wingers call “indoctrination,” but it’s really just basic history: The United States was, indeed, founded on a struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed (um, the genocide of Native Americans, Slavery, Jim Crow, the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese Internment, The Briggs Initiative … one could fill an entire year’s classes with this. Maybe that’s the point.)

And if we want to talk about “indoctrination” and teaching students what to think, we could start in kindergarten, when they first learn to recite the pledge of allegiance, which includes “one nation under god,” indicating that atheists aren’t good Americans, and ends with “liberty and justice for all,” which suggests that the mass incarceration of Black people in the past 40 years somehow didn’t happen.

Most of our schools and our news media “indoctrinate” us into thinking that capitalism is the best possible economic system in the world. This has been going on for generations, and I don’t hear a lot of complaints about it.

The Chron shows this slide, as if it’s something terrible that no high school student should have to see:

I am a straight white man. I have had immense benefits from straight white male privilege, as have many of my friends. The only thing about this slide that I would change is to add the word “rich” when it comes to what people need to give up—but then according to the right-wingers, I would be criticizing capitalism, which is also apparently unacceptable.

I will add a personal note. I teach students at USF, and I have taught students at City College, and I have taught at programs for high school students. The idea that classroom teachers can “indoctrinate” high school or college students to become “revolutionaries” in San Francisco today, with all the exposure they have to so many different ideas, is at the very least a stretch. Ethnic studies, like any good social science class, teaches students to think critically about what they see and hear and read. It teaches them to challenge the teachers—which, in my experience, they do. And it’s a good thing.

Young people are far more likely to fall into a neo-Nazi far-right conspiracy world by watching YouTube video gamers than they are becoming revolutionaries by taking ethnic studies.

But again: The SFUSD curriculum for what is now a mandated class is “good enough for Des Moines, Iowa, and they are still slandering this,” Laud said.

Fried told me that she was discussing the old curriculum, not the new one. But she said that the lens of oppressor and oppressed isn’t a good way to teach:

In general, I think education should give students a deep, rigorous understanding of history, equip them to think critically, and prepare them to engage with people and ideas different from their own. What worries me is when any course, however well-intentioned, teaches students what to think instead of giving them the tools to analyze evidence and debate constructively. I am confident that a strong Ethnic Studies course absolutely does this, but it has to be built on high-quality, vetted curriculum that encourages both a deep understanding of history along with the ability to engage constructively across differences.

I support teaching about oppression, resistance, and injustice. That is essential to an honest account of U.S. and world history. But I do not believe history should be reduced to a single “oppressed vs. oppressor” lens. Progressive scholars themselves have cautioned that when identity categories are treated as fixed and morally ranked, complexity and dialogue suffer. We lose the chance to explore solidarity movements, internal diversity within communities, and the ways people have built coalitions for change. 

As for students learning to be “revolutionaries,” she said:

I think the curriculum that was publicly posted by SFUSD for the prior school year spent a lot of time teaching 14 year old kids how to fight against something, and as my email above lays out, I think it’s important to teach kids to build understanding first, while tackling difficult issues. 

Solidarity movements, of course, are generally built to fight against systems of oppression. Organizing for change starts with the assumption that the systems we currently operate under are unfair, biased, racist, and rigged in favor of the rich and powerful.

That doesn’t seem like a terrible thing to teach high school kids. Most of them can figure it out on their own, and talking about it in context, in a classroom full of others, would seen to embody just the sort of complex dialogue Fried claims to champion. And there’s no way that the curriculum, then or in the future, uses oppression as the only lens to teach history—but it’s certainly a relevant part.

Still, this is the pushback we’re getting, including from groups using what can only be called Trumpist, far-right talking points and Trumpist inaccuracy. Right here in San Francisco.