Three days before the start of the 2024-25 school year, the San Francisco Unified School District sent an email telling freshman parents that their kids had been automatically enrolled in a two-semester ethnic studies class. The course — which covers such topics as structural racism, colonialism, and the relative merits of capitalism versus socialism — had been an elective for a decade, but families were now being told it had been made a requirement of graduation. 

What parents didn’t know was that the day before, Lainie Motamedi, the school board president at the time, had sent a different email — this one to the district’s general counsel. In it, she noted that the board had never approved funding for the year-long requirement. Motamedi presented two options: The district could seek immediate approval from the board, or pause plans to teach the course.

It did neither.

District leaders have maintained that they moved forward with the mandate for the new ethnic studies requirement properly. But to Motamedi, the way the situation went down was emblematic of a district that lacks “controls, accountability, and transparency,” as she put it in one of several internal emails that were obtained by The Standard.

“I would describe it as hubris and ignorance,” Motamedi said in an interview. “It is the imposition of adult agendas on what students need, and, at the same time, the obstruction of kids getting to choose courses based upon their interests.”

While some parents were able to badger the district into opting their children out of the ethnic studies course for 2024-25 year, those same freshmen are now being told they will have to take it in their sophomore year, SFUSD families say. Students have raised concerns that they might not be able to fit into their schedules electives such as art, or even core classes like biology, world history, or Spanish, as a result.

Motamedi maintains that the district misled the board en route to misappropriating funds for the mandate, noting that a budget presented to the board in June had referred to the course as “an elective” and said it would only become required “in subsequent years.” In September, she resigned. Matt Wayne resigned as superintendent a month later after botching the rollout of a since-rescinded schools closure plan.

The battle over the ethnic studies course goes beyond questions of procedural propriety. Parents have been raising alarms about what they see as content that’s inappropriately political in nature and strangely out of step with the needs of high school freshmen and a school district that’s desperately short on resources. In light of those critiques, the district’s end run around Motamedi could be seen as an attempt to enact a controversial educational agenda with minimal resistance.

Last July, parent Viviane Safrin wrote a memo, obtained by The Standard, to school officials articulating concerns about ethnic studies material that had been posted to the district’s Online Resource Library. The flagged material included presentations equating capitalism with racism and exercises in which students rank various racial, socioeconomic, and gender identities based on the amount of power they have in the world today. One assignment had students role-playing as Israeli soldiers herding Palestinians into refugee camps.

Safrin said in the memo that the curriculum teaches “a contentious ideological framework” that lacks “open inquiry” and “factual integrity.” She noted that only “four lessons out of 55 highlight contributions by ethnic groups,” and the word “hegemony” appeared 81 times.

A couple of weeks after Safrin sent the memo, Associate Superintendent Karling Aguilera-Fort responded, saying some of the content had been added to the library without approval and had since been removed. Samples of the ethnic studies curriculum, he said, would henceforth be publicly available on the district website. 

Safrin and other parents criticized the course for pushing into high schools the kind of postmodernist theoretical frameworks that have taken colleges by storm over the last couple of decades.

“They are taught how to organize — what it means to resist,” Safrin told The Standard. “They’re taught about dominant and counter narratives. It’s an upper-level college course for one way to examine history, but it is not teaching any actual history.”

The resolution that inspired the ethnic studies mandate was cowritten by former school board vice president Alison Collins, now infamous for a series of tweets comparing the Chinese community to a “house n****r.”

One exercise still in use places the Red Guards, a student-led paramilitary organization from Mao’s Chinese Cultural Revolution, alongside the U.S. civil rights and feminist movements as emphasizing “the resistance that oppressed groups have shown in history.”

“I would not place them in the same category,” Stanford sociology professor Andrew G. Walder, author of a book on the Red Guards, said. “They would belong in a different unit on authoritarianism and violent political extremism.”

Another current exercise has students read a 2012 article called “Straight white male: The lowest difficulty setting there is” and asks, “What would white males need to give up (or relinquish) in order to make a more equitable society?”

One ethnic studies teacher, David Ko of Washington High School, defended the article, saying it is part of his curriculum every year.

“There’s definitely moments with that article topic where students might feel uncomfortable,” Ko said. “The extreme alternative is to avoid all discomfort, which means, at least potentially, not talking about anything that would make anyone feel uncomfortable. That means there’s a lot of curriculum that’s off the table.”

Even parents who support the subject of ethnic studies wonder why every student needs to take the class — or why SFUSD didn’t adopt the state’s model curriculum.

“Parts of SFUSD’s curriculum seem questionable,” said Meredith Dodson, director of the SF Parent Coalition, “which is not giving families confidence right now that it will best serve our students.”

The district remains committed to its homegrown ethnic studies curriculum, pointing to a Stanford study that showed freshmen with GPAs of 2.0 or lower were more likely to graduate after taking the course, since it gave them an opportunity to learn about, appreciate, and celebrate their origins.

“As a school district that celebrates our diversity and inclusivity, we must provide an educational experience for every student that honors their lived experiences and the District’s core values,” said Maria Su, the district’s superintendent. “I’ve heard the concerns about our Ethnic Studies curriculum and I am committed to addressing concerns.”

But a pattern of on-the-fly changes made to the curriculum over the course of the 2024-25 year raises questions about how thoroughly the syllabus was vetted before it was rolled out as a requirement.

In October, students at one high school were shown a presentation claiming that Israel’s founding was an “invasion” that “decimated Indigenous populations,” akin to European settler-colonial projects in Australia and the Americas. Following pushback from parents and students, that slide was removed from the presentation.

A week later, the principal of the school visited the class to tell students that their concerns surrounding the course were heard and appreciated. The principal spoke in vague terms and didn’t bring up the slide or Israel.

“They said the course is brand-new, so the curriculum isn’t fully set,” said one student.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish parents have grown increasingly concerned that SFUSD’s curriculum, including the ethnic studies course, omits Jewish history and promotes enmity toward Israel. No Jewish groups were among those that co-signed the resolution that made the course a graduation requirement.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous sometimes,” said the parent of a girl who took the class this year and whose husband left Russia due to antisemitism. “When you list Jews as oppressors, that means you haven’t read history at all, because they were oppressed most of the time. If the school can’t talk about Jewish issues properly, they shouldn’t talk about them at all.”

“Nobody’s going to feel good about being called an oppressor,” said another parent. “It doesn’t help us. We all have to live together and take care of each other.”

Other parents of freshmen, many of them self-proclaimed liberals, took issue with what they characterized as lectures and assignments that demonize the United States and Western civilization.

Citing the politically charged nature of the material and surrounding discourse, most of the parents who raised issues with the ethnic studies course to The Standard requested anonymity. They described fear of being labeled as racists or right-wing and of having their children singled out at school.

“SFUSD is a religious institution,” said one parent who noticed that her kid was being taught that Genghis Khan was actually peaceful. “They’re teaching unfalsifiable ideas.”

SFUSD students also requested anonymity. They voiced different complaints than their parents: that the class is boring and uses academic jargon they don’t understand.

“Media literacy” units that should take weeks take months, said one student. Others said a teacher often goes on rants against President Donald Trump and deportations.

One student said that during the first semester of the course, there was an exceptional amount of homework. In the second semester, the class collectively decided to stop doing it, and the teacher stopped assigning it.

“She realized no one wanted to do it,” a student said. “Our homework now is just watching videos.”

Parents who attended an open night at high schools last fall were eager to learn what their kids would be learning.

Instead, they were led through an exercise in which they talked about their own histories and identities.

Said one parent: “It was an icebreaker, but it took the whole time.”

San Francisco was a different place in 2021, when the graduation requirement — but not the funding or curriculum for it — was originally approved. So was the school board, run at the time by Gabriela López and Collins.

As schools were closed for almost the entirety of 2020-21, the board’s attention was focused on renaming schools, eliminating merit-based admissions at Lowell High, and getting rid of algebra for eighth graders.

The district was sued for all of those directives. In February 2022, all three members of that school board who were eligible for a recall, including Collins and Lopez, were recalled by margins as wide as 50 points. It was the first successful recall in the city in more than a century.

And yet, the ethnic studies mandate left behind is still in place. Meanwhile, Gov. Gavin Newsom has revoked funding for a bill that would have required students statewide to take one semester of ethnic studies, other districts in the state are settling lawsuits over their own curricula, and the University of California system has not moved forward with ethnic studies as an admissions requirement.

This week, SFUSD paused its rollout of a controversial “grading for equity” program amid public outcry. Last month, popular field trips were cut due to budget concerns. As the district faces a $113 million deficit, around half of the students don’t meet state benchmarks for math and reading.

SFUSD Superintendent Maria Su and the school board, led by Phil Kim and Jaime Huling, are now faced with deciding if the ethnic studies mandate is legitimate.

“Any time you have a new curriculum, particularly in a controversial area, the board should approve it,” said Carol Kocivar, former director of the state PTA who served on the advisory committee for the Public Education Enrichment Fund, which funds $1.7 million of the $2 million spent on the ethnic studies program. “Should they be spending money on a course that isn’t mandated by the state at a time when they’re struggling to balance their books?”

In a May 2024 email to PEEF director Edwin Diaz, Kocivar voiced concern that the curriculum was never approved, as required by district policy and state law. Diaz responded by saying that ethnic studies staff had reminded him of “an important point”: since the program was created by SFUSD teachers, “formal approval from the board is not requisite.”

“I think it’s important for the district to have a curriculum that’s been vetted with community input,” said Kocivar, rejecting Diaz’s logic.

And still, members of the class of 2029 are being told they must take ethnic studies to graduate — even if they don’t see the point.

“We already have ethnic studies,” said one student. “It’s called ‘world history.’”