Ethnic Studies

The ethnic studies curriculum will be a historic win for communities and students that public schools have traditionally ignored.

The politically fraught work of developing an ethnic studies curriculum for California public high schools just got more contentious. In a Wednesday letter to the state Board of Education and Department of Education, the original curriculum’s authors and former advisory committee members demanded their names be removed from the text because its “guiding principles … […]

If ethnic studies is done right, it has the potential to teach us to love deeply, to fight hard and to stand in solidarity with communities of color.

Ethnic studies has become celebratory of heroes and holidays, and now it is being further diluted and reconstituted as “diverse studies.”

1. California widens mental health conditions insurers must cover In the past, state law only required treatment for nine serious mental illnesses. Even before the pandemic, more than half of Californians said most people with mental health conditions couldn’t get the help they needed. Some families even dropped private insurance to qualify for treatment in […]

At the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, California students led the nation in creating college ethnic studies programs that explored the histories and cultures of people overlooked by the dominant European-centric curriculum. It was a time of national racial introspection and wide-scale protest. Echoes of then are loud and clear in […]

The proposed model curriculum still follows a framework which divides students into victims and oppressors.

The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum for California responds to a need that should not be abandoned.

Ethnic studies courses offer California high school students a valuable educational opportunity – but the devil is in the details.

The third draft of a model ethnic studies curriculum for California high school students has been released and it is a big improvement on its predecessors.