Dems tackle controversy over ethic studies curriculum

Just days after three major Jewish organizations announced that an Orange County school district had agreed to settle a lawsuit over controversial ethnic studies courses, 31 Democrats in the Assembly and State Senate introduced a bill they hope will prevent situations like that from happening again.

In September 2023, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law, sued the Santa Ana Unified School District, alleging that the district circumvented state law to create antisemitic classes in secret.

Specifically, the organizations claimed that Santa Ana Unified violated California’s open meeting law, the Brown Act, by providing vague descriptions of ethnic studies coursework that was under consideration by its school board in 2023.

In April of that year, the board approved courses that included watching a video called Firing Zone 918 – An Exercise in War Crimes by B’Tselem, a Jerusalem-based organization dedicated to documenting “human rights violations committed by Israel in the Occupied Territories,” as well as reading from the book The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing by Michael Mann, a UCLA research professor of sociology.

The ADL and the Jewish Federation of Orange County criticized the material as antisemitic and one-sided. Palestian and Arab American groups responded by arguing that the materials accurately portrayed the reality of Palestinians and urged the district to maintain the ethnic studies curriculum as is.

The debate, already highly politicized, became supercharged weeks after the suit was filed when Hamas launched the deadliest terrorist attack in Israeli history, killing about 1,200 and taking more than 240 civilians hostage.

On February 20 of this year, the three Jewish organizations announced that Santa Ana Unified had settled the lawsuit and would stop teaching three ethnic studies courses until they could be redesigned with public input. The orgs also said that the district had agreed to “recognize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a controversial issue,” according to a press release announcing the settlement.

On February 24, AB 1468 was introduced to standardize ethnic studies curriculum across the state. It calls for the California State Board of Education to develop content standards for ethnic studies with the guidance from an advisory board, appointed by the governor, made up of academic experts in African American, Latino/ChicanX. Asian American/Pacific Islander and Native American studies as well as representatives of communities frequently targeted by hate crimes.

The bill essentially seeks to tweak the implementation of  AB 101 by former Assemblyman Jose Medina, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021. That bill established that California students must take an ethnic studies course in order to graduate beginning with the class of 2030.

AB 101 left it up to school districts to develop ethnic studies curriculum or to rely on others to develop it. That was a problem, says Assemblyman Rick Chavez Zbur, D-Hollywood, a primary author of the new bill.

“Ethnic studies, if done the right way, can have a huge positive impact for kids,” he says, adding that it can build “multicultural respect.”

The press release announcing the introduction of AB 1468 obliquely referenced the Santa Ana Unified lawsuit, stating, “Unfortunately, in California, the lack of clear standards for ethnic studies has resulted at times in lawsuits, divided communities, factually inaccurate materials, and harmful, antisemitic environments for Jewish students and families.

“And for many Jews, fears intensified after October 7, 2023 [sic] when some ethnic studies curriculum and instruction contractors glorified Hamas and the violence committed that day.”

The press release went on to say that “While the Jewish community is currently experiencing the consequences of the lack of standards and infusion of bias into ethnic studies, other vulnerable communities are at risk of facing similar situations if standards are not swiftly implemented.”

A day after AB 1468 was introduced, the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ California branch put out a statement urging the bill’s defeat.

“This bill is part of a broader right-wing effort to suppress discussions on race, history, and global justice. If passed, it would place curriculum decisions in the hands of politicians instead of educators, silencing vital conversations on human rights and social justice,” CAIR California said under the headline “Tell Your Representatives to Vote NO on AB 1468.”

CAIR’s San Francisco Bay Area office said on its Instagram account that the bill “seeks to redefine Ethnic Studies on political terms, diluting its integrity and erasing critical histories such as the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine and the genocide in Gaza,” and deemed it a “MAGA-like attack on ethnic studies in California.”

Zbur calls this criticism of the bill “ridiculous,” saying, “This is not coming from the MAGA right. This is coming from the Jewish caucus in the legislature, all of whom are Democrats.”