What’s going on with the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum for California schools? To start with, the twenty ethnic studies educators and writers who produced a draft of the curriculum for the California Department of Education have seen the department make major changes to their work. These educators have asked that their names be removed from the new draft because the “ethnic studies guiding principles, knowledge, frameworks, pedagogies and community histories have been compromised due to political and media pressure.” They clearly don’t see the changes as improvements.
The major change in the new draft was that Arab American Studies, which universities have always included in Asian American studies departments is now in an appendix without the original lessons. Palestinians were erased from the story all together. The Israel Lobby was the source of the political pressure. They erased the story of Palestinians. The California Department has buckled under this attack.
According to enabling legislation and guidelines the Master Curriculum is supposed to guide school districts in developing lesson plans specific to their students in four areas: Black/African American studies, Chicano/a studies, Native American Studies and Asian American Studies. These disciplines study the experience of persons who have been under-represented in public school history books.
Now let’s be clear. There is considerable right wing push back on the whole matter of ethnic studies. Part of the opposition has to do with whose stories were selected. The people ethnic studies educators focus on are change-makers and radicals. But aren’t historical figures always the change-makers? Weren’t the suffragettes radicals in their day?
Ethnic Studies also includes materials to assist students in understanding systems of oppression and institutionalized racism. This is a real problem for reactionaries. They’d prefer to sweep our nation’s history of settler colonialism, slavery, Japanese internment, and the social and economic institutions that enabled oppression of marginalized people under the rug and keep it there. An education that enables young people to challenge the system is simply not welcome. Truth telling is not the revisionists concern.
Reactionaries want the old stories of Colonial settlers, “mostly-white” ethnic groups, the union movement, Ronald Reagan’s political conversion and sympathetic freedom riders featured in the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. In other words, they want Ethnic Studies turned into a good old white guy history instead of one designed to help students hear and understand the stories of oppressed minorities. They want to silence the very groups that ethnic studies are about.
Today’s students live in a highly diverse nation that’s getting more diverse every day. The value of curriculum that helps marginalized students gain agency and everyone understand, respect, and even love the complexity and gifts of that diversity has been demonstrated by gains in student self-esteem, achievement and engagement in school and community. Ethnic Studies is about building a nation where everyone is free and equal. California’s students deserve no less.Gloria Fearn