Critical ethnic studies couldn’t enter through the front door of California public schools, so now followers of the historical perspective which is seen by many as both anti-white American and anti-Semitic are trying to enter through the door. ‘back.

Struggling with the prospect of developing new ethnic studies programs for middle and high schools, districts in many parts of California are hiring co-authors and funders of a rejected first version of the new model curriculum state ethnic studies as well-paid consultants.

Such courses are not yet required to earn high school diplomas in this state, but will soon be if lawmakers pass a bill known as AB 101. This bill empowers local school districts to design their own ethnic studies programs and not to use the new, better validated courses.

With few consultants available to help, many early adopters of ethnic studies appear to be influenced by adherents of Critical Ethnic Studies (CES), whose focus is largely on the past persecution of minority groups who today constitute the majority of people. the Californian population.

CES’s strong focus on the roles of slavery and white supremacy in American history and the role colonialism played in world history has been widely dismissed in the state’s model curriculum. . But many districts seem poised to spend millions of dollars on their own curricula, which would once again bring these factors to the fore, advancing themes rejected at the state level because they were factually incorrect and likely to fuel ethnic discord.

Some districts use the authors of the flawed first version of the state curriculum to create their own programs. These would remain in effect under AB 101 if it passed.

The Hayward Unified District School Board in the East Bay suburb of San Francisco, for example, voted last month to spend $ 40 million on a program designed by the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Institute (LESMC), a consultancy firm aimed at selling versions of the first state-rejected draft, which openly contained bogus anti-white, anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist elements. This group’s website lists several contributors to the abandoned project as member consultants.

The categorically rejected program taught that virtually all white people historically supported racism and slavery, despite realities like these: About half of the “Freedom Riders” during the civil rights movement of the 1960s were white and a quarter were white. Jews. Whites and Northern Jews established and funded schools to continue the education of freed slaves and their children during post-Civil War reconstruction, when public education was denied them in the old Confederation. Many other historical facts also contradict the claims of the CES, which falsely contend that virtually all white immigrants to America quickly gave up their old identities in favor of the new “white privilege.”

The San Diego District appears poised to approve a $ 77 million plan to emphasize ethnic studies in all subjects taught from kindergarten to grade 12. As designed, its program would largely be written by a LESMC member who also helped draft the abandoned state plan.

And the Jefferson Elementary School Board in Daly City approved a $ 40,000 consulting contract with another LESMC member.

Additionally, LESMC members consult with the State Board of Education and with the influential Instructional Leadership Corps at Stanford University.

This adds up to an image of something like a taxpayer-sponsored guerrilla war waged on many fronts by ETUC advocates whose anti-white and anti-Semitic ideas could not gain state approval, even under a liberal director of black public schools.

Now it is up to local citizens to let their school boards know that they will not tolerate this subversion of the new emphasis on ethnic studies.

“The Jewish community alone does not have the bandwidth to oppose LESMC in each of the hundreds of school districts (in California),” said Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, director of the AMCHA initiative, which tracks the anti-Semitism in education.

This makes the new reality one of the needs of local activism: if parents and other citizens do not act, critical ethnic studies could soon become standard fare for many California schoolchildren, unnecessarily creating even more divisions than those currently afflicting this state and nation.

Email Thomas Elias at [email protected]