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[Photo above: Pages 136 and 137 of the Salinas Union High School District Ethnic Studies Curriculum. Credit: Kelly Schenkoske]. The good news is that California education authorities have agreed to drop part of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that encouraged public school students to pray to bloodthirsty Aztec deities. The quaint religious practices of Mesoamericans about 700 years ago included slicing out human hearts along with flaying victims and wearing their skin. The ESMC is needed, the devoutest left-wingers insist, to help teach children about the systemic racism that supposedly defines America. “We are reminded daily that racism is...

California’s long-running descent into madness continues as its bizarre Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) now encourages public school students to pray to bloodthirsty Aztec deities. The California State Board of Education approved the almost 900-page ESMC in March 2021, saying teaching children about the systemic racism that supposedly plagues America has never been more urgent, as Fox News reported at the time. “The curriculum’s unequivocal promotion of five Aztec gods or deities through repetitive chanting and affirmation of their symbolic principles constitutes an unlawful government preference toward a particular religious practice,” Frank Xu, president of Californians for Equal Rights...

Governor Gavin Newsom has signed several notable bills into law in recent days They include a bill that will see California public schools and colleges stocking their restrooms with free menstrual products In another 'woke' bill, large department stores must now display products including toys and toothbrushes in gender-neutral ways It does not completely outlaw traditional boys and girls sections at stores but says large stores must also have a gender neutral section to display On Saturday Newsom signed off on a new law banning gas-powered equipment that uses small off-road engines Gas-powered equipment includes generators, lawn equipment, pressure washers,...

Parents of students in the California public school system have filed a lawsuit against the state's Department of Education in an attempt to remove a chant to Aztec gods that's part of a new ethnic studies curriculum. The lawsuit was filed Friday by the conservative legal firm Thomas More Society on behalf of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, individual taxpayers and parents of current and former students after their Aug. 26 letter to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction demanding withdraw of the Aztec prayer from the curriculum went unanswered. The lawsuit says the “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” has...

Those developing the ethnic studies curricula that could soon be taught to California’s more than 6 million public school children are self-described Marxist revolutionaries.California’s Democrat-controlled state legislature may pass Assembly Bill 101 into law this week. If signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, it will mandate “ethnic studies” as a high school graduation requirement for all California public schools.“Ethnic studies” is a series of courses that focus on history, but through perspectives advocates see as “marginalized,” including black, Asian American, and Latin American/Chicano studies. California’s adoption of the proposal could set a precedent for the rest of the country.We now have...

California's Board of Education voted unanimously to approve a new, multi-million-dollar Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, which will be offered statewide with many of the state's largest school districts making it a requirement for graduation. According to National Review, the curriculum is "probably the most radical, polemical, and ideologically loaded educational document ever offered up for public consideration in the free world." POLL: What scares you the most? On the radio program Tuesday, Glenn Beck reacted to the newly approved curriculum, calling it "the craziest, most terrifying story I have ever had to report." Glenn read an excerpt from the National...

Next week, the California Department of Education will vote on a new statewide ethnic studies curriculum that advocates for the “decolonization” of American society and elevates Aztec religious symbolism—all in the service of a left-wing political ideology. The new program, called the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, seeks to extend the Left’s cultural dominance of California’s public university system, 50 years in the making, to the state’s entire primary and secondary education system, which consists of 10,000 public schools serving a total of 6 million students. In theoretical terms, the new ethnic studies curriculum is based on the “pedagogy of the...

On Thursday, the State Board of Education will adopt an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum for high schools that is four years, four drafts, three public vetting periods and 100,000 comments in the making. *** Over the past two years, the language of ethnic studies — white privilege, implicit bias, white supremacy — has seeped into everyday speech.... *** The most complex disagreement is foundational: Should teaching about past and current racial inequities and injustices be done primarily through the lens of white supremacy, the deliberate oppression by whites in America to gain and maintain power? *** In subsequent drafts, the...

Conservatives and fair-minded liberals are alarmed that high schools are drawing up plans to teach the “1619 project,” the New York Times ’ revisionist account of race and the American founding, in history classes. The reality is turning out to be worse. The largest state in the union is poised to become one of the first to mandate ethnic studies for all high-school students, and the model curriculum makes the radical “1619 project” look moderate and balanced. Last year California’s Assembly passed its ethnic-studies bill known as AB 331 by a 63-8 vote. Then the state department of education put...

A year after it was sent back to the drawing board, California’s ethnic-studies model curriculum is back. The last version, released in May 2019, was radical and jargon-laced. Even many progressives found it fringy. On Aug. 13, the state Education Department presented a new, toned-down draft to the curriculum commission. Not only does it suffer from the same conceptual problems as before, but during their meeting, commissioners directed the Education Department to resuscitate unpopular parts cut from the 2019 draft. The curriculum is moving toward adoption in March by the State Board of Education. Legislation is also advancing to make...

On November 27, 2019, Harvard University denied tenure to an ethnic-studies professor specializing in Dominican identity. Students and faculty at Harvard and across the country sprung into protest mode. The failure to tenure Lorgia García Peña, they said, resulted from Harvard’s racism. NBC Nightly News, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and other outlets covered the controversy from the same angle. In fact, García Peña had been catapulted into the academic firmament with a speed that most non-intersectional professors can only dream of. She has been showered with benefits. Thirty-one percent of Harvard’s tenure-track professors lost their tenure bids...

Like growing numbers of public high school students across the country, many California kids are receiving classroom instruction in how race, class, gender, sexuality and citizenship status are tools of oppression, power and privilege. They're taught about colonialism, state violence, racism, intergenerational trauma, heteropatriarchy and the common thread that links them: “whiteness.” skip Advocates believe they are within striking distance of making ethnic studies a graduation requirement in high schools across the country, making it a prerequisite for preparing students to navigate the world, much as learning about the Western tradition had once been. Skip “We don’t want students to...

Students who are searching for objective truth should shy away from any course with the word “Studies” in its title. Centered on opinion, persuasion, and propaganda, these courses seldom include rigorous evaluation of provable facts. According to the Hoover Institution, California’s educationists1 have been handed a defeat in their attempt to impose a wildly liberalEthnic Studies curriculum on their students. When the curriculum was circulated for public comment, its authors probably thought that it would be largely ignored. Full of educational jargon, curriculum documents are not easy to read, and seldom attract much notice. This time, an avalanche of public...

President Trump said last week that “we are all Americans. We all share the same home” and “the same heart.” He warned that “radical Democrats are trying to tear this country apart” with identity politics. Left-wing activists are using the same divisive ideology to hijack our kids’ young minds. Across the country, leftists are demanding public schools teach “ethnic studies.” Many of these courses demonize America, label whites as oppressors and indoctrinate students to become “social justice organizers.” California Democrats are pushing to make ethnic studies a high school graduation requirement statewide. Their draft curriculum defines ethnic studies as the...

Like most Americans, I have always assumed that color blindness is our ideal. Not any more: color blindness is now become the new racism. So much for a 70-year struggle to fulfill Martin Luther King Jr.’s wish that his children be “judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” So much for the noble aim to treat people as individuals rather than as representatives of an identity group. How is color blindness not a virtue? Is it really racist now? Where on earth does such an idea come from? The answer seems to...

Education School researchers at Stanford found that ethnic studies courses boost grades and attendance. Apparently, it never occurred to them to ask what exactly the students learn in them. "New research shows gains in attendance and GPA of at-risk high school students from incorporating culturally relevant pedagogy," Brooke Donald reported in a news release from the Stanford Graduate School of Education. "A high school ethnic studies course examining the role of race, nationality and culture on identity and experience boosted attendance and academic performance of students at risk of dropping out, a new study by scholars at Stanford Graduate School...

For years, Maira Perez thought to be healthy she had to eat salad -- and certainly not the food her grandparents and parents grew up eating in Mexico. Even her doctor once suggested she "slow down on the tortillas," she recalls, as they discussed managing her weight. After a string of short-lived and frustrating diets, the CSU East Bay student found the inspiration she needed in professor Luz Calvo's ethnic studies course, which gave her a new, healthier take on traditional Mexican food, inspiring her to cook "the tamales, the beans, the fresh tortillas, nopales -- the things we thought...

A University of Colorado-Denver administrator, already suspended for operating a phone sex website, was apparently also operating an adult escort site offering to go on paid “dates” at the same time she was employed by the state of Colorado. But her racy outside jobs will not cost her her job. A CBS4 Investigation into Resa Cooper-Morning, the Cultural Diversity Coordinator in UCD’s Ethnic Studies department, has now found the $68,000 per year state employee operated a website called Fantasy Elite offering “Fantasy Romantic Companionship” for $175 per hour. Her website noted that her hours of availability were from Saturday after...

At the Modern Language Association (MLA) 2013 meeting in Boston, a professor claimed the existence of a “textbook describing slavery as a TransAtlantic trade triangle.” Yet when asked to provide a title, she offered none. Cynthia Franklin of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who made the claim, suggested googling the phrases “TransAtlantic trade triangle” and “Texas textbook guidelines.” This yields many articles which also make that assertion but fail to link to the original primary source—the Texas Education Agency (TEA). This correspondent did not recall that phrase from the TEA guidelines. Indeed, typing the phrase “TransAtlantic trade triangle” onto...

On January 1, 2011 a law banning certain “ethnic studies” classes went into effect in Arizona. The law makes it illegal for a school district to teach courses which “promote the overthrow of the US government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ‘ethnic solidarity’ instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” (1) But it was not the ever-compassionate, ethnicity-conscious left which wrote and implemented legislation making it a crime to teach violence and racism. Rather, the law was passed by the Republican controlled...