A curriculum consultant contracted by a California school district will provide professional development training that includes guidance to white teachers on how to teach ethnic studies, highlighting a nationwide trend of racialized programs in public schools.
The Napa Valley Unified School District is paying over $38,000 to the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium to train its teachers on how to teach ethnic studies courses, which high school students must take in order to graduate, per state law.
According to documents obtained by the parent activist organization Parents Defending Education, the training materials include a course session titled “White Teachers and White Students in Ethnic Studies” and another titled “Ethnic Studies for White Teachers.”
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During the sessions, teachers will be trained on “how white teachers can engage in ethnic studies work and teaching through an understanding and reflection on their privilege, power, and positionality.”
The Napa school district said the contractual partnership with the consultancy organization was “critical to the design of a high-quality ethnic studies course, development of curricular resources, and training for staff.”
“The proposed partnership would bring content and pedagogical experts in the field of ethnic studies to support the development of curricular models that include lessons/unit plans on Chicanx/Latinx, American Indian/Native Americans, African American/Black Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Arab Americans,” the district wrote in an internal document.
Ethnic studies courses in public schools have drawn significant attention amid a national grassroots backlash to critical race theory in public school classes.
Critical race theory says that American institutions and culture are systemically racist and oppressive to racial minorities, and aspects of the theory have been found to be incorporated into public school classes such as ethnic studies in school districts nationwide.
On its website, Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium says its goal is to “promote the advancement and implementation of well designed Ethnic Studies courses and programs for the purpose of advancing students’ academic achievement, educational equity, community activist scholarship, and community leadership skills.”
Among the materials available for review on its website is a 60-second video that says a parent who expects their child will get a good education is a beneficiary of white privilege.
In a document obtained by Parents Defending Education, the consortium outlines seven “guiding values, principles, and outcomes” of teaching ethnic studies.
One goal is to “center and place high value on pre-colonial, ancestral, indigenous, diasporic, familial, and marginalized knowledge,” while another says ethnic studies should “critique empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, xenophobia, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”
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Rhyen Staley, a researcher for Parents Defending Education, said it was a “major red flag” if a curriculum “requires special trainings for white teachers and students.”
“Liberated ethnic studies requires students to become trained activists to ‘end oppression.’ Ethnic studies should be for students to learn and appreciate the histories of other cultures but should not be used simultaneously to disparage the United States and Western Civilization,” Staley said.
