Since the October 7, 2023, massacre perpetrated on Israeli citizens by Hamas, with the subsequent response by Israel to declare war and enter the Gaza Strip to defeat Hamas, overt anti-Semitic sentiment has erupted on college campuses across America. Citing reports of “widespread antisemitic harassment,” the U.S. Department of Education is now actively investigating 60 institutions of higher learning.
Unfortunately, anti-Semitism is also playing out in K-12 education, particularly in a number of Northern California school districts like Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD), Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD), and Menlo Park City School District (MPCSD). These and other districts are embroiled in controversy over California’s Ethnic Studies curriculum mandate.
Many Californians are aware that in October 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 101 (AB101) into law, requiring all students graduating from high school in the 2029-2030 school year to take at least one semester of ethnic studies. The intent, per the state’s California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, is to encourage cultural understanding of the struggles of equality, equity, justice, racism, ethnicity, and bigotry that have been prevalent throughout the history of America.
What is less known is that California first considered a draft Ethnic Studies curriculum co-authored by Community Responsive Education (CRE) founder and director Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, which was rejected by the State Board of Education as being offensive to the Jewish community. Consequently, upon signing AB101, Newsom wrote a letter to the State Assembly that noted the bill “expresses the Legislature’s intent that courses should not include portions of the initial draft curriculum that had been rejected by the Instructional Quality Commission due to concerns related to bias, bigotry, and discrimination.”
The distinct anti-Jewish bias in the previous draft curriculum led Jewish community leaders, as well as the California legislature’s Jewish caucus, to lobby for removal of the offensive material. But that didn’t stop Tintiangco-Cubales, with other like-minded educators, from marketing the rejected curriculum, which they have labeled the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum or simply “Liberated.”
Given that AB101 allows school districts to either adopt the revised model Ethnic Studies curriculum or develop their own, PVUSD initially elected to bring on Tintiangco-Cubales and CRE as the sole contractor to develop a custom curriculum. As feared by the Pajaro Valley Jewish community, the PVUSD ethnic studies curriculum has been infused with “Liberated” anti-Semitic language in English, History, and Art classes, as well as one standalone ethnic studies class mandated by California.
In a recent article examining the “Liberated” ethnic studies curriculum, Sarah Hernholm noted how the curriculum characterizes Zionism as a settler colonial movement. Such a description deprives the Jewish people of their historical ties to the land of Israel, dating back to around 1000 B.C., as well as their right to self-determination as a people. The “Liberated” curriculum also links to a site calling for a ceasefire in Gaza which describes the root causes of violence in Gaza as the “Israeli military occupation and apartheid.”
Concerned Jewish organizations have written letters to PVUSD expressing their opposition to the “Liberated” curriculum. The Simon Wiesenthal Center asked PVUSD to not renew its contract with CRE due to its blatant anti-Semitism. Local Santa Cruz County rabbis asked the same, and further asked PVUSD to develop a curriculum that will unite, not divide, the PVUSD community. And from the very beginning, the California Legislative Jewish Caucus has argued that this curriculum promotes anti-Semitism by denigrating Jewish identity and singling out Israel for condemnation.
The Pajaro Valley Jewish community members I spoke with made it clear they support ethnic studies but oppose anti-Semitism and what they assess as an erasure of the American Jewish experience in the curriculum. After hearing testimony from the community in September 2023, the PVUSD board decided not to renew the contract with CRE and stuck to their decision, despite pressure from vocal activists who support CRE.
Yet while the controversial curriculum remains, board members and members of the community have been publicly attacked as white supremacists, racists, and genocide supporters by ethnic studies teachers, students, anti-Israel activists outside PVUSD, and University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) professors who have waded into the PVUSD controversy.
Jewish community members fear that adoption of this ethnic studies curriculum is a portent of things to come nationally. Dr. Christine Hong, Department Chair of the openly anti-Zionist Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) at UCSC (who was subject to a recent federal investigation into charges of faculty anti-Semitism), has led the charge of UCSC faculty, appearing many times at PVUSD board meetings and insisting that Tintiangco-Cubales and CRE provide PVUSD what she deems as the only acceptable ethnic studies curriculum.
Alarmingly, Dr. Hong has also been actively involved in a working group seeking to develop the California high school ethnic studies requirement for admission into the UC school system. This would have national implications – if the curriculum is accepted for admission to UC schools, the requirement could then be imposed on all other states as well.
California has exported bad policies to other states in the past — on energy, gig workers, and firearms, to name a few. It now seems to be flirting not only with inflicting on its own students a divisive approach to teaching ethnic studies but exporting its radical teaching nationwide. Hopefully the U.S. Department of Education will take note of what’s going on at the K-12 level in California before it too becomes a national problem.
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Walter Myers III is a Senior Fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and an adjunct faculty member at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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