Andrea Gabor, a former editor at Business Week and U.S. News & World Report, is the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York and the author of “After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform.” It appeared behind a paywall at Bloomberg News. After she wrote this article, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the proposal to mandate a course in ethnic studies as a requirement for high school graduation. The original proposal would have included the experiences of African Americans,Latino Americans, Native Americans and Indigenous peoples, and Asian Americans. The governor received complaints from other ethnic groups complaining that they should have been included. First Jewish groups complained, then Arab Americans, then Iranian Americans, then Kurdish Americans, and on and on.
In his veto message, Newsom said he values the role of ethnic studies in helping students understand the experiences of marginalized communities and that he supports schools and districts offering such courses. But, he said, there was too much uncertainty about the content of the model curriculum and he wanted to be sure it “achieves balance, fairness and is inclusive of all communities.”This contretemps reminded me of my exposure to California culture wars in the mid-1980s when I was invited by Bill Honig, then State Superintendent of Public Instruction, to join a committee to rewrite the state’s history and social-science framework. I spent three days each month in California for nearly two years, and eventually became the lead writer. Our committee produced a groundbreaking, history-based, multicultural K-12 curriculum. When it came time for public hearings all over the state, we were pounded by every racial, ethnic, and religious group in the state for not giving enough attention to them. We made changes wherever possible to give each group its due, but some were never satisfied. We ended up writing a Human Rights curriculum that added extensive attention to the Armenian Genocide (the Armenian community was especially aggrieved, and the Governor was of Armenian descent).
Gabor wrote:
Trust California to plunge deeper into the culture wars, even at the risk of undermining its own worthy objectives.Under a bill headed for signature by Governor Gavin Newsom, the state would become the first to require that all high-school students pass an ethnic-studies course before graduating. The new mandate follows passage in August of a similar university-level requirement that is set to take effect in the 2021-2022 academic year.
As if on cue, President Donald Trump charged last week that U.S. schools are “indoctrinating children,” and vowed to bring back “patriotic education.” (My Bloomberg Opinion colleagues shared some thoughts this week on how that should go.)
California has the right idea. It’s past time for educators to confront long-standing gaps that have made it too easy for Americans to ignore the dark side of their own history. That’s been a recent goal of some journalists, scholars and the Black Lives Matter movement. Last year, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series sought to reframe U.S. history by arguing that “the start of this nation’s story” was not 1776 or 1787 but rather 1619, the year the first slaves arrived in Jamestown, Virginia. The series has since been integrated into history curricula nationwide. A year earlier, a book by the Harvard University historian Jill Lepore, “These Truths,” won prizes for a nuanced look at America’s founding ideals and the extent to which the nation has lived up to them.
A small but growing number of states agree that schools need to bring a wider lens to U.S. history and integrate the perspectives and contributions of minorities, as well as the losses of indigenous communities. In addition to correcting the historical record, proponents argue that such courses also boost attendance and performance among students otherwise at risk of failing or dropping out. But California’s unfunded mandate to create a separate ethnic-studies course is a flawed approach that risks draining money and attention from history and civics curricula. A better path is being blazed by Oregon, which aims to teach a broader narrative of U.S. history by deepening existing social studies and civics standards.
Under California’s high-school mandate, every district must offer ethnic-studies courses in the 2025-2026 school year, at a time when the state will probably be recovering from pandemic- and fire-induced financial devastation. Under state law, additional funding for the mandated course could take several years to approve. Even then, depending on the state’s fiscal health, the legislature could pay for it by draining some funding from other educational programs, according to Edgar Cabral, an analyst in California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office. (California is already anticipating future budget cuts; it took a decade to restore school funding following cuts made during the recession of 2008.)
California’s approach does offer districts some flexibility to modify existing courses rather than follow an ethnic-studies curriculum now being developed by the state that focuses on African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Native Americans. However, for modified courses, ethnic studies must constitute the “primary content.”
By contrast, Oregon is establishing new statewide standards that broadly define what students should learn in existing courses rather than imposing new-course mandates. The revised Oregon standards, adopted in 2018, aim to “create teaching and learning opportunities for students to examine identity, race, ethnicity, community, religion, nationality and culture in the United States.” Thus, a discussion of the nation’s westward expansion and manifest destiny would include a focus not just on settlers, but also on the people who had lived in what is now Oregon since time immemorial, as well as the contributions of European and Asian immigrants.Some states, including Vermont and Washington, where curriculum is set at the local level, also are focused on developing new ethnic-studies standards and course materials that local districts can choose to adopt, or not, as they see fit.
Making the courses optional, however, undermines a goal of public education: to create one culture out of many. Ethnic studies have been controversial since they were first conceived in the 1960s. The Cornell University literature professor Noliwe Rooks has noted that the Ford Foundation backed early university Black-studies programs at least in part to keep students from being “lured into more radical politics like that of the Black Panther Party.” In the 1970s and 1980s, budgetary crises weakened funding for ethnic-studies programs.
In extreme cases — notably in Arizona — a backlash against ethnic studies at the high-school level provoked a ban, later reversed, on any public-school courses that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of one ethnic group, or advocate ethnic solidarity.”
Today, historians are pushing to correct distortions and omissions of America’s historical record. That’s a worthy goal for educators, but it could fail if it heightens social tensions. It’s also dangerous to drain funding and focus from civics instruction, which has declined over the last two decades as standardized testing regimens focused on math, science and English.
By contrast, developing standards that include a broader ethnic and racial perspective in American history and civics courses could serve to deepen education for everyone.
To contact the author of this story:Andrea Gabor at Andrea.Gabor@baruch.cuny.edu
Diane FYI I sent the following note to A. Gabor:
Hello Dr. Gabor:
I’ve read Diane Ravitch’s blog note about your article on California’s ethnic studies programs. Of course, we cannot name every group that are victims of bias; and so the general-theoretical signifier is “group bias.”
With the above reference, I only want to point you in a direction that may help with the background study of such bias and make the idea more amenable to all concerned?. . . in the work of Bernard Lonergan; and particular in his “Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,” published under:
Lonergan, B. J. F. Collected Works 3: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (2000). Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press.
Be well,
Catherine Blanche King
My e-mail
I think that widening the scope of the social studies and civics education is a better solution as there are hours in the school day for all the academic demands. If students want to learn about other cultures, they can do a project on their own cultural background and present it to the class. Teachers can also invite parents in as well to share some aspects of the family’s culture with the class. This a wonderful way to build a sense of inclusive community in elementary and middle school classrooms. It is a great, meaningful pick-me-up for the instructional dead zone of Friday afternoon, and nobody feels excluded or offended.
retired Such activities as you suggest can also come in under the rubric of history. CBK
Talk about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good!
Bob Explain? CBK
A multicultural education course is sorely needed in every school. It’s a shame to kill this because of squabbling about it from various groups. It would be easy enough to design a course that would deal with major ethnic groups in the United States, by population, with unspecified time for treating particular groups common in the communities that the school serves.
As a history teacher, I am accutely aware that inclusion of every detail in the story is as impossible as pouring the Gulf of Mexico into a five gallon bucket. While I believe that telling the darker tales of the development of any story is often necessary, it is of little use to tell nothing of the good as well. History is all story, and the story you tell cannot help, at the high school level, being an incomplete truth. It is no more true to start the narrative at the arrival of the first slave ship than it is to start at the pilgrims or Jamestown.
I have my own opinions about how a story of America should be told. I guess everybody does.
Roy I have my own opinions about how a story of America should be told. I guess everybody does.
. . and then there is a teachers’ awareness of the many warps and weaves of our present students and their own historical context, who and which differ with each time, place, and class. Teaching is not for intellectual sissies. CBK
Much needs to be done to broaden the curriculum generally. It’s really a shame that kids graduate from our schools having at least heard of the Iliad and having read portions of the Odyssey but not having, in most schools, read a word from the Ramayana or the Mahabharata.
Many states have a requirement for one year of World Literature in high school, and some get this in that year, but alas, due to the Common Coring of our curricula, much of the traditional World Lit class, like must in English classes generally, is now given over to test prep.
Bob Yes, test prep . . . and the circle downward is that the prep is for what is in a curriculum that has pared down to focus on STEM, and so World Literature (and all the other courses aimed at student development) doesn’t end up on the test, and downward we go. CBK
By “Common Coring,” I mean, of course, “Common” in the sense of “base, vulgar” and “Coring” in the sense of “hollowing out.”
I had commented but was moderated. I think it is difficult to include every nasty thing we as human beings have done to each other. History is to replete with atrocity. Still, a balance will naturally be reached if we try to have lots of discussions with history teachers and their partners in the humanities about the good, the bad and the ugly of history. It needs to start with the Victor Hugo approach: that redemption is the goal of every human attempt, no matter how feeble.
History shouldn’t be an exercise in patriotism. Our history like all people is flawed. Despite our shortcomings there is still plenty that Americans can and should be proud of. There remain other things in our present and past that should make us cringe.
The National Endowment for the Humanities developed a program called Picturing America. This project was guided by then Deputy Chair of NEH, Lynne Munson. Lynne led a team that selected and produced large format reproductions of works of art, all sent to schools in a portfolio. The program no longer exists but remnants, including the multi-ethnic content can searched by grade levels, curriculum emphasis (e.g., civics, history, visual art) and media meaning audio-visual and online resources. Taxpayers invested in this. Take a look. https://edsitement.neh.gov/teachers-guides?f%5B0%5D=teachers_guide_subject_topic%3A9391
Laura I think a general rule that applies to more complex curricula that pertain to levels of long-term human development . . . like the potentialities in the arts and humanities, and materials that are unlike STEM . . . is that the less important the material is, the easier it is to develop “standard” and easy-to-give tests for.
This relates to one of the good reasons to have smaller classes: The developmental value of consistent and thoughtful student writing is well-known. But reading student writing and giving qualified comments takes loads of teacher time and consistent interest. With such education, having even 25 students is overload. CBK
This top down mandate might have be a good idea, but of course it would eliminate an elective course that a student might take. Better, I think, if this material was incorporated in the courses that are already required for students.
In my late-’60’s college days, the trigger for many a campus protest was establishing a Dept of African-American Studies. I think that was a good idea & has been implemented in many places. And perhaps a couple of decades were required for those depts to develop independent research…
Or not. In retrospect it seems like just another academic silo whose research has not been integrated into the broader curriculum. Maybe it would have made more sense for them to have been advisory feeders into history, lit, socialism, labor-relations, et al depts, constantly sharing curricular addenda from the get-go.
I think Afro-American studies and its core, the history of slavery/ Reconstruction/ sharecropping, great migration [North & West] cannot easily be combined with ‘ethnic studies.’ Nor can the study of how colonials and settlers chased and moved around Native Americans from their lands, how they were influenced by Catholic missions, and worked with pioneers during the transition from Spanish to American settlement, and ultimately ended up on federal reservations. Those are two independent threads from the history of European immigration and subsequent Asian, S Asian, & Muslim immigration. All three need inclusion, & there’s lots of crossover from which all current ethnic groups can learn.
The very term “ethnic studies” promotes division, not unity, at a time when America desperately needs more unity. We rightly blame Trump for dividing us, but the Left is guilty too. As a California history teacher, I’m glad Newsome vetoed this, especially since I do not trust the “experts” on curriculum in this state to produce a good curriculum for it. I suspect it would end up being light on facts and heavy on a version of Ibram X. Kendi’s noxious theories.
Diane, your excellent 1994 CA history standards, properly taught, ARE a K-12 ethnic studies curriculum. In Grade 7, for example, students are supposed to study the Maya, Aztecs, Incas, Arabs, West Africans, Chinese and Japanese. I augment the standards by teaching about European ethnicities, emphasizing my Latino students’ Latin (Roman) heritage. This, along with Maya/Aztec knowledge, is a robust foundation for Latino self-knowledge. The problem is that these excellent standards are not being taught in many districts at the K-5 level, having been jettisoned for extra math and ELA. A further threat is the new frameworks which indicate that teachers can skip topics, and content more generally, in lieu of “teaching” amorphous “history thinking skills”. Another problem is that, even without these threats, it is almost impossible to teach all the standards in a single daily period. We almost need two periods per day to teach them. One year I was teaching a three period ELA/history “block” class. Surreptitiously I devoted most of it to history. That was the only year I was able to cover all the topics in the 7th grade standards.
A better way to promote ethnic studies in CA would be to devote more time to the current multicultural history standards.
Thank you, Ponderosa. They were actually adopted in 1988 after hearings across the statements and thousands of teacher reviews. Every hearing was attended by speakers representing groups that were angry that they didn’t get more attention. It’s a tough balancing act. We tried to bring in diverse histories and weave them into a fabric. I thought it worked.