A Curriculum Called ‘Voices’ That Wouldn’t Hear Ours

To read the curriculum that San Francisco will now require every ninth grader in the city to complete, a parent last spring had to do this: call the district, book an appointment during working hours, travel to a district office, and examine the pages under supervision, because the materials could not be taken home, copied, or posted online. The district claimed that these materials were copyrighted. As a consequence, a mother who came to America for her child’s sake had to request permission to read what the state would teach him about who she is.

That is not an accident of bureaucracy. A public institution that is proud of its work does not need to hide it. When it conceals documents, schedules debate in the fine print, and pays for it out of a fund the voters walled off, it is telling us that it is unwilling to listen to our objections.

I have spent years of my life fighting anti-Asian hate. Grandpa Vicha, eighty-four, was killed on his morning walk. Elders in this city learned to cross the street when they saw a stranger coming. I did the concrete, unglamorous work of insisting that the harms inflicted on our community be recognized and prevented. But what San Francisco Unified did to Asian American families with this curriculum was not a street assault. It is something quieter and, in its way, more insulting. It is the state taking our children, telling them their success is a species of guilt, and refusing to let parents into the room to argue.

The Curriculum

On April 28, the San Francisco Board of Education voted 6 to 1 to permanently adopt “Voices: An Ethnic Studies Survey” as the district’s official ethnic studies curriculum. The lone dissent came from Commissioner Supryia Ray, who said from the dais that she could not vote yes because she had been denied access to the full curriculum before the vote. A sitting member of the board could not obtain the complete text of the thing she was being asked to make mandatory for a generation of San Francisco children.

The scale of what she was asked to approve blind was staggering. California’s own ethnic studies statute contemplates a one-semester course. San Francisco requires two. The district took the state’s model, doubled it, and made the full year a condition of graduation beginning with the class of 2029. “Voices” itself is an off-the-shelf textbook from Gibbs Smith Education, brought in as a pilot after Superintendent Maria Su was forced to withdraw the district’s previous homegrown course amid national controversy. Its publisher markets it as a “counter-narrative to US history” built to help students “identify and overcome oppression.” Regardless of whether you admire that mission statement, the process by which it was adopted should raise concern.

The Case

In July, the Friends of Lowell Foundation, the same alumni group that once beat this district in court over Lowell’s admissions, filed a verified petition for writ of mandate in San Francisco Superior Court, Case No. CPF-26-519816. They are represented by James Sutton, the attorney who won the last Brown Act case against SFUSD, the one over the elimination of merit admissions at Lowell. The suit does not place a single lesson on trial. It places the process itself on trial on three separate counts.

First, the petition alleges, they hid the vote. The permanent adoption was folded into a broad “history and social studies” agenda item, and the purchasing contract was parked on the consent calendar among routine administrative business, the consent calendar being where a board approves the paper napkins. Commissioner Ray said it plainly at the meeting: the agenda gave no notice “that would be apparent to a regular person,” it “looks too much like hiding the ball,” and there had been “no forum” for genuine public discussion of either the curriculum or the two-semester mandate.

Second, they refused to let us read it. Before the vote, the district declined to give the public meaningful access to the curriculum, sheltering behind the publisher’s copyright, and the petition argues that California law requires a district to make instructional materials available for public review, copyright notwithstanding.

Third, the petition alleges, they paid with money that was never theirs to spend this way. The suit contends SFUSD funded the curriculum out of the Public Education Enrichment Fund, dollars San Francisco voters expressly restricted to arts, music, sports, and libraries, in violation of the city charter’s command that such money supplement, never supplant, the district’s basic obligations. And here the district’s own account collapses on itself: former board president Lainie Motamedi has stated that district leadership described the required course as “an elective” during budget discussions. One cannot have it both ways. Either it is an elective, in which case it cannot be a graduation requirement, or it is a graduation requirement, in which case the enrichment money cannot lawfully pay for it. The district appears to have called it whichever word unlocked the door in front of it.

Nor is this unfolding in a vacuum. SFUSD is under a federal civil rights compliance review of its parental-notification practices, and Superintendent Su was summoned to Washington in June to answer for this very course before the House Education and Workforce Committee. While federal attention is not itself a verdict, a district confident in its process is unlikely to attract this level of scrutiny.

A Sham Review

The board did not walk into that April vote uninformed. It had already conducted what it called an “independent review,” and Garry’s List has documented what that review actually was. SFUSD paid roughly $147,000 to an outside organization to evaluate the curriculum, seated a panel of 16 ethnic studies teachers, 15 other district staff, and 8 community members, and never established a passing score at all — meaning there was no threshold for failure.

The community members who sat on that panel have told the story themselves. The Voice of San Francisco interviewed reviewers who described arriving for two Saturdays in March only to learn, for the first time and in the room, that the sole curriculum on the table was the “Liberated Ethnic Studies” model. Moderators told them that the content of the teacher’s edition would not be evaluated, because the content itself was not what they were there to assess. In other words, parents were recruited to review a curriculum and then informed that the curriculum was not under review. More than 2,100 parents and community members signed petitions in opposition, and were ignored.

If the pattern feels familiar, it should. This is the district that scheduled its ethnic studies discussions on Jewish and Muslim religious holidays, and that required parents to make in-person appointments during working hours to glimpse the textbook. When an institution keeps engineering the public’s absence, it is not mere oversight. It’s intentional.

A Long History

Ethnic studies was not handed down by a textbook company. It was won, on this peninsula, by students who looked like me. In 1968 and 1969, the Third World Liberation Front, a coalition of Black, Latino, Asian American, and Native American students, struck at San Francisco State and then at Berkeley, and forced into existence the first ethnic studies department in the United States, at San Francisco State in 1969, at the end of one of the longest campus strikes in American history. Asian American students did not sit that strike out. We helped build this discipline. Its purpose, in the words of John Rothmann, who served on the original committee that drafted San Francisco’s ethnic studies program, was “to study civilizations, cultures, art forms, history, religion, and philosophy of different cultural groups.” His verdict on what came later: “some current implementations shifted towards political agendas.”

That shift has a date. Around 2019, faculty across the University of California and California State systems drafted a “Liberated Ethnic Studies” model that re-centered the field on oppression, resistance, and power, drawing heavily on critical race theory. This is the version California’s own State Board of Education rejected as ideological and one-sided before it would let AB 101 pass. SFUSD’s earlier homegrown course carried the drift into actual classrooms: an activity in which students role-played Israeli soldiers herding Palestinians into refugee camps, and a slide deck likening the American civil rights movement to Mao’s Red Guards, the youth cadres who beat and humiliated their elders during China’s Cultural Revolution. To the many families in this city who fled exactly that history, comparing a movement for dignity to the Red Guards is not a provocative teaching device. It is a wound reopened on purpose. And some ethnic studies teachers told KQED they had never seen those materials.

Notably, the State of California does not currently require any of this. AB 101 made ethnic studies a graduation requirement only “contingent upon state funding.” The Legislature never appropriated the roughly $276 million a year the mandate would cost; it allocated a single one-time $50 million and nothing since, included no money in the 2025-26 budget, and the state’s own Department of Finance confirms the requirement “remains contingent upon a future funding appropriation.” The statewide mandate is, as of this writing, not in force. No student anywhere else in California is being held to it. San Francisco chose to impose a doubled version anyway, make it a graduation gate, and, the petition alleges, to pay for it from unapproved funds. This was not compliance, but a conscious decision.

This Is Anti-Asian

Ethnic studies, taught well, is a good thing. Our children should learn the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment, the Third World Liberation Front, the strike that built this discipline in this city. The plaintiffs say the same: they support ethnic studies and oppose only what they regard as its capture. This was never a fight about whether to teach our history. It is a fight about whether a public body may install one contested, ideologically loaded version of that history while refusing to let the people whose history it claims to teach read a single page. On that question I am not neutral, and I will not pretend to be.

Garry’s List has reported that the adopted textbook teaches students that Asian Americans, along with Jewish Americans, underwent a process of “whitening,” an absorption into the category of white. A fourteen-year-old Chinese American kid, whose grandmother was afraid to leave her apartment three winters ago, is going to be taught, by the government, in a required course, that his family’s climb has quietly enrolled him in whiteness.

This is the model minority myth in a graduation gown. Scholars have warned for years that the stereotype “pervades school curricula” and gets “manipulated by legislators to suggest that Asian Americans have overcome racism.” The old version of the lie flattered us into silence. The new version indicts us. It takes our success, the thing our parents crossed an ocean and worked two jobs to build, and reclassifies it as a moral debt. You cannot in one breath ask this city to grieve Grandpa Vicha, an elder targeted for being Asian, and in the next breath teach his grandchildren that being Asian and successful has made them honorary oppressors.

There is also the material cost. A doubled, mandatory, year-long course is not free. It is a full year of a student’s academic life, and for the students likeliest to spend that life reaching for the hardest courses available, the children of striving immigrant families, it is a year confiscated. We have seen this before. The board abolished merit admission at Lowell. The district stripped algebra from the eighth grade for over a decade. Each time, families with capital purchased their way around the damage, private school, private tutoring, while families without it simply absorbed the loss.

This is the same maneuver in a new costume, and the invoice is addressed, once again, to the community with the thinnest cushion and the fewest exits.