For years, San Francisco’s public school ethnic studies program has been a flashpoint, surviving a mayoral rebuke, a curriculum overhaul, and a community revolt.
Now, after a review that some participants describe as rushed, opaque, and a foregone conclusion, the school board is set to vote Tuesday on the curriculum that will become a permanent fixture of every student’s high school education.
In fall 2024, the San Francisco Unified School District implemented ethnic studies a two-semester graduation requirement, approved by the Board in 2021 (opens in new tab), without what the Board President at the time thought was proper board approval or funding. Its original homegrown curriculum — which characterized Mao’s Red Guards as a social justice movement and asked ninth-graders what white men should “give up” to achieve equity — drew the ire of parents and city officials, including Mayor Daniel Lurie, who viewed the curriculum as ideologically driven rather than academically rigorous.
Officials then scrapped the program and promised a thorough independent review before anything replaced it permanently. But community members recruited to review the new curriculum say that process had a preordained conclusion.
“This did feel like a done deal,” said Scott Kravitz, an SFUSD parent who sat on the review committee. “We were just looking at the curtains on the windows — we weren’t kicking the tires.”
The SFUSD, and the consultants hired to review the coursework, say some of the critics cloaked their ideological objections to the curriculum as concerns about the process. The district says much of the feedback during the review was positive.
When the district’s homegrown curriculum came under scrutiny last year, Superintendent Maria Su at first defended it before telling city officials and community members that she planned on suspending the graduation requirement for a year.
Some teachers and students pushed back, and the board landed on a third option, adopting publisher Gibbs Smith’s “Voices: An Ethnic Studies Survey.”
This decision was taken July 29, 2025, at a cost of $100,000 and just weeks before the school year began, giving board members little time to review the curriculum and teachers little time to prepare to teach it. The selection was framed as a one-year pilot that would be placed on every freshman student’s schedule for the 2025-26 school year, with a promise of rigorous independent review before any permanent implementation.
But the process had critics. Board member Supryia Ray voted against the purchase. “We need to go through a real process of curriculum review and adoption as required by our policies and procedures in the law,” she said at the board’s Aug. 26 meeting. “We have not done that.”
Despite those doubts, the pilot moved ahead. That fall, the district commissioned an independent audit of the homegrown curriculum that teachers had developed and used for more than a decade, which said it “partially” met expectations. The district’s response was to shelve the program entirely, meaning “Voices” became the only curriculum the formal evaluation committee would examine. By contrast, the new K-12 history/social studies curriculum, which is also on the agenda (opens in new tab) for Tuesday’s meeting, was chosen from a review of 17 curricula for elementary, middle, and high school.
On March 5, the district sent invitations to third parties to join the Curriculum Committee — with a three-day window to sign up for a 15- to 17-hour commitment across two Saturdays. The committee included 16 ethnic studies teachers, 15 other SFUSD educators and staff, and eight community members. Five of those community members spoke with The Standard.
Community participants arrived March 14 at an SFUSD facility in the Richmond and were assigned to groups of four. Participants received the textbook at the end of the first session, which reviewed the grading rubric, and were sent home to read it before returning the following Saturday.
The curriculum was evaluated against four criteria, with scores running from 0 to 3. No minimum passing score had been established before the committee convened — meaning the threshold for adoption was never defined in advance.
Panel members said the strict rubric and the requirement to submit consensus scores across the four rubric criteria ended up minimizing individual participants’ concerns. In some groups, a consensus could not be reached, and the scores were averaged across the participants.
Scoring documents from one group, obtained by The Standard, show how dissent was handled. Kravitz scored the curriculum 0.5 and 1 out of 3 on the two primary criteria — alignment to state standards and culturally responsive teaching. The other three members — teachers and a district employee — scored it between 2.5 and 3.
But the group’s official submission recorded averages of 2.25. The dissenting view was appended only as a footnote, noting concerns about a curriculum that “only presents one interpretation — that of seeing the world through oppression and marginalization.”
The committee broadly found that “Voices” does what an ethnic studies curriculum is supposed to do. The majority of the feedback, which came from SFUSD employees, including teachers of the subject, was enthusiastic, crediting how the curriculum “thoroughly centers the achievements, contributions, strengths, skills, and knowledge of historically marginalized people and communities.”
Others noted that it invited “students to question and critique dominant narratives across past and present contexts” and “utilizes and synthesizes the concept of oppressive narratives vs. counter-narratives by revealing the media’s power of presenting stereotypes and perpetuating tropes.”
The district paid Education Leaders of Color (opens in new tab), a Los Angeles-based nonprofit (opens in new tab) whose mission is to “catalyze the academic and economic advancement of young people of color,” $147,000 to run the evaluation, according to documents. A district spokesperson said EdLoC was chosen for its “robust and high-quality history of similar work done nationally.”
Also present throughout the sessions, was Nikhil Laud, the district employee who oversees the ethnic studies program. One source described him as the “ringleader” of the review. The district said his involvement was standard practice, noting that “the supervisor of a content area” is routinely present at curriculum evaluations. When approached for comment, EdLoC and Laud referred The Standard to SFUSD’s communications office for comment.
The consultant’s response to critics of the review was that their objections weren’t really about the curriculum but about ethnic studies itself. Dissenters who argued that the course was one-sided or failed to foster genuine critical thinking were told in the committee’s final report (opens in new tab) that they were disagreeing with the principle — not the rubric. The report states, “In several groups, an individual member described the curriculum as ideologically one-sided or presenting history through a binary ‘oppressor/oppressed’ lens. These views reflect disagreement with the foundational approach of ethnic studies as a discipline rather than rubric-based findings that the materials fail to meet the evaluative criteria.”
An SFUSD parent who participated and asked not to be identified said she came to the committee as a supporter of ethnic studies and wanted the course to succeed. What troubled her wasn’t the subject — it was the process.
“The momentum was way further along in accepting the curriculum, and I was coming in as sort of a blank slate,” she said. “I felt a little bamboozled. There was no room for my voice. And if there’s no room for my voice in the review, what does that say about what happens in the classroom?”
Dana Bernstein, an SFUSD parent who has taught history at San Jose City College for 25 years and supports ethnic studies as a discipline, returned to the second session with nearly 100 specific objections documented from her review of the textbook. Among them: that an introductory “identity wheel” exercise forces students to classify themselves as powerful or marginalized based on race, nationality, family income, gender, marital status, and other factors, and that Paulo Freire, whose Marxist pedagogy underpins much of the course’s framework, is presented as a role model without critical context.
But when she tried to raise these concerns, Bernstein said she was shut down by the EdLoC staffer running the review. “[She] kept coming over and hovering over me,” she said. “She’d say, ‘No, you’re not supposed to give an example like that.’”
“They were incredibly rude — eye-rolling, exchanging looks, making snide comments,” Bernstein added. “They couldn’t hear another point of view. At one point I said, ‘Why are you angry at me for voicing an opposing opinion? We’re talking about a curriculum here.’”
When asked about community members’ concerns, the district said it “respectfully disagrees” with those characterizations, adding that it is “sharing both positive and negative feedback on the materials” with board members.
School districts across the state began ethnic studies courses in large part to comply with Assembly Bill 101, passed in 2021 following the death of George Floyd and the protests that followed, which required one semester of ethnic studies for the graduating class of 2029-30.
But as cultural mores have changed, so has the appetite for funding ethnic studies. Newsom excluded funding for ethnic studies from the 2025 state budget, essentially putting the policy on ice.
SFUSD educators who took part in the review say the course — which comes before U.S. and world history in the district’s high school social studies sequencing — is essential to its goals of achieving equitable outcomes. But concerned parents say the course is a distraction from more important matters, such as teaching about civic engagement.
The city’s controversial multiyear effort has come as traditional measures of academic performance have declined among the general student population and minority groups.
Eighth-grade math proficiency fell from 42% in 2022 to 41.2% in 2025, against a target of 65%. Third-grade reading proficiency slipped from 53.1% in the fall of this school year to 51.8% in the winter, against a year-end target of 62%.
Supporters of the graduation requirement say the two — better academic outcomes and increased awareness of systemic issues in society — are not mutually exclusive. A study released this month (opens in new tab) found that SFUSD students enrolled in ethnic studies saw average improvement of 0.17 points on their GPA.
Although much of the feedback about the process and the ethnic studies program was positive, to some concerned parents the curriculum is part of a progressive movement that the city is trying to get past. It was a different board that created the requirement — one that more than two-thirds of San Francisco voters ousted, due to its directives to end merit-based admissions at Lowell High School, rename schools, and get rid of algebra for eighth-graders.
Those initiatives have since been reversed, but the ethnic studies requirement remains.
“The district has become so alienating that it’s a place that people just don’t want to send their kids to,” said the anonymous parent who sat on the review committee. She said she supports social justice movements outside of the classroom but thinks the district should be focused more on improving core subjects so as to increase their declining enrollment. “Curriculum shouldn’t come from a movement.”
Bernstein, who went into the process hoping to strengthen the curriculum, finds herself in the same place. “The fact that the teachers were not able to even hear a different point of view,” she said, “is just really concerning for the state of education at SFUSD.”
District staff is recommending that the curriculum be approved at Tuesday’s board meeting (opens in new tab).
Correction: An updated version of this story clarifies that the SFUSD Board will vote Tuesday on the Voices curriculum, not the graduation requirement itself. The graduation requirement was approved in 2021.
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