Schooling California
The California Department of Education will vote next week on the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, a proposed new program for all public elementary, middle, and high school students. The curriculum, focused on “African American, Chicana/o/x and Latina/o/x, Native American, and Asian American and Pacific Islander studies,” aims to “guide” California schools and is marinated in progressive ideological language, requiring that the curriculum “validate students’ lived experience” and “creat[e] space for all students regardless of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, or citizenship…” It seeks to “decolonize” California education, and promotes the Marxist-based “ideology of the oppressed” that denigrates Western Civilization. The curriculum discusses how ethnic studies can “address the causes of racism and other forms of bigotry including, but not limited to, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, xenophobia, antisemitism, and Islamoph