California’s Push for Ethnic Studies Runs Into the Israel-Hamas War

Not surprisingly, as would any history program:

California has grand ambitions for ethnic studies. By 2025, the state’s public high schools — about 1,600 of them — must teach the subject. By 2030, students won’t be able to graduate high school without it.

For policymakers, a goal is to give California students, 80 percent of whom are nonwhite, the opportunity to study a diverse array of cultures. Research has shown that ethnic studies classes can raise grades and attendance for teenagers at risk of dropping out.

But even in a liberal state like California, scholars, parents and educators have found themselves at odds over how to adapt the college-level academic discipline for high school students, especially because of its strong views on race and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While the name “ethnic studies” might bring to mind a broad exploration of how ethnicity and race shape the human experience, the discipline, as taught in universities, is narrower — and more ideological.

Ethnic studies focuses on four groups: Black Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans. It aims to critique various forms of oppression and spur students to take action, often drawing analogies across disparate expanses of time and geography. The Palestinian experience of displacement is central to that exercise, and has been compared by some scholars to the Native American experience.

In reworking ethnic studies for high school, California came up with a 700-page model curriculum that captures much of the discipline’s leftist, activist spirit. But it added the stories of other ethnic groups, including Jewish Americans, while eliminating discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It said lessons should include “multiple perspectives” on political issues.

Now some prominent ethnic studies scholars and educators say the state has bowed to political critics and censored their field. They are promoting a competing vision, which they call “liberated ethnic studies.” It is truer to how the subject is taught in colleges, but more politically fraught. It largely excludes the histories of ethnic groups, including Jews, who are typically understood as white within the discipline’s context. (Arab American studies is defined as fitting into Asian American studies.) And it offers lessons that are critical of Israel — and, some argue, antisemitic.

A number of California school districts are working with curriculum consultants who embrace liberated ethnic studies, while other districts are drawing upon these materials in creating their own classes.

The dueling approaches have prompted several lawsuits and sparked a heated debate: How should millions of California teenagers engage with these explicitly activist concepts in the classroom?

Resolutions to this question may shape education across the country. States including Oregon, Vermont and Minnesota plan to introduce K-12 ethnic studies in the coming years.

Source: California’s Push for Ethnic Studies Runs Into the Israel-Hamas War