Marci Miller, of the Brandeis Center, told JNS that the curriculum was “unvetted” and “rushed.”
Aaron Bandler | The Jewish News Syndicate | July 8, 2025
Maria Su, the superintendent of the San Francisco Unified School District, announced on June 30 that the district, which serves about 50,000 students in 122 schools, plans to introduce a new ethnic studies curriculum for the next academic year. Experts and parents told JNS that they have concerns about the curriculum, which they said hasn’t been properly vetted.
“We must take deliberate steps to ensure our ethnic studies curriculum reflects both educational excellence and our values,” Su said. “I remain deeply committed to the importance of ethnic studies in developing critical thinking, cultural understanding and civic engagement among our students.”
She added that two semesters of ethnic studies will be required for graduation.
Earlier this year, the Santa Ana Unified School District in southern California settled a lawsuit and agreed to pause several ethnic studies courses and remove antisemitic content from the classes.
Marci Lerner Miller, director of legal investigations at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told JNS that the curriculum, which is “unvetted” and “rushed,” appears to be based on a “liberated” ethnic studies program.
“By calling it a ‘pilot course,’ they believe they’re getting out of a requirement to give notice to the public twice” under the 2021 state law AB 101, which mandates that ethnic studies be a high school graduation requirement starting with the class of 2030, Miller said.
“The community is very upset about this, and they want to see some transparency and the opportunity to review everything,” she told JNS. (JNS sought comment from the district.)
Parents told JNS they are concerned about the curriculum. “No one has seen the slides yet, but it looks as if it’s being framed as the oppressor-non-oppressor narrative, which is the harmful rhetoric curriculum that was being taught before,” Natasha Saravanja, who has a Jewish son in the district, told JNS.
“A lot of black and brown children see themselves in this ethnic studies course, and I don’t want them to lose that,” she said. “I want Jewish students to see themselves in this ethnic studies course positively, and the same for those other communities also.”
“I’m not in favor of doing away with ethnic studies altogether,” she added. “I think there needs to be a pause, and we can find a curriculum that is more comprehensive and comes from a place of love and celebration.”
“As a Jewish mom and community advocate, I’m deeply troubled that SFUSD is forcing thousands of students into an unvetted, ideologically driven course without transparency, without public input and without following its own curriculum review process,” Viviane Safrin, another parent with a child in the district, told JNS.
“I’m not against ethnic studies. I want my child to learn real history, but no parent should have to accept a course that sidelines Jewish identity and shuts out community voices,” Safrin said.
Elizabeth Statmore, a math teacher at Lowell High School, which is part of the district, told JNS that the district “is still refusing to adhere to its own mandated public processes for curriculum adoption, which leaves Jewish families wondering how they can trust that this board’s free-style decision on this curriculum will be any safer than the last?”
“By bypassing its own rules, the district has left Jewish and Israeli-American students vulnerable and at risk,” she told JNS. “Our community is demanding answers.”
‘Adopt accurate educational materials’
Oleg Ivanov, executive director of the Northern California region for StandWithUs, told JNS that “we fully support educating students about the rich diversity of their community and country.”
“However, ethnic studies courses at SFUSD and in many other California school districts have promoted bias and bigotry against Jews and Israelis,” Ivanov told JNS. “We urge SFUSD to remove its ethnic studies graduation mandate until the course has been fully vetted by the board of education, in a transparent process that includes public input.”
Ivanov called on the district “to adopt accurate educational materials about the Jewish community and antisemitism, along with professional development for all teachers, who will be using the curriculum to better acquaint them with these issues.”
Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, co-founder and director of the AMCHA Initiative, told JNS that her group is “alarmed” by the district’s decision “to pilot a new prepackaged ethnic studies curriculum while ‘auditing’ its current program—an unmistakable admission that what’s being taught is failing students.”
Rossman-Benjamin said that the state law AB 101 “handed control of ethnic studies to activists, opening the door to extremist content, including antisemitic narratives, without any enforceable standards, oversight or even funding.”
Antisemitic and other disturbing content has come up in ethnic studies courses in other districts in the state, according to Rossman-Benjamin.
The district’s “scramble to clean up its program isn’t an isolated failure,” she said. “It’s a warning. AB 101 must be repealed before more school districts inevitably subject their students to toxic and deeply harmful instruction and face pricey lawsuits to correct.”
Marc Levine, Central Pacific regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, told JNS that “while it is encouraging to see initial responsiveness from SFUSD to remove antisemitic materials from the curriculum, there remains serious concern among parents about how content will be taught in the classroom.”
“ADL will continue to hold the district accountable for keeping students safe and protected from antisemitism,” he said.
Mitch Siegler, founder of the THINC Foundation, which advocates for inclusive ethnic studies education, told JNS that his organization believes that the district’s process, “focusing on academic rigor, establishing an independent committee composed of community members and layering in other transparency measures,” makes “a solid foundation for a thoughtful and systematic approach to curriculum development.”
“Those commitments, combined with procedures which align the curriculum with State of California Department of Education guidelines, should lead to outcomes which better represent best practices than the ideological and divisive approaches that emanate from ‘liberated’ ethnic studies advocates,” he said.
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