San Francisco parent advocates are furious over what they call an “unvetted and illegal” ethnic studies course that was rammed through without meaningful input — citing divisive lesson plans like a “privilege wheel” that sorts student into an “oppressor/oppressed framework,” according to a legal warning sent to city leaders.
The Friends of Lowell Foundation, which advocates for academic merit at San Francisco’s premier public magnet school Lowell High, blasted a year-long ethnic studies course just permanently adopted by San Francisco Unified School District — making it a requirement for ninth graders.
The scathing letter accuses the San Francisco Board of Education and district leaders of quietly pushing a $7 million, required course for ninth graders called “Voices” that has largely been concealed from concerned parents.
“Children are being sorted, labeled, and instructed according to race-based ideological frameworks that no parent consented to and that no reasonable reading of federal civil rights law permits,” said Lee Cheng, a civil rights attorney and co-founder of Friends of Lowell Foundation, which successfully sued SFUSD to reinstate a merit admissions system after it was branded “elitist” and scrapped in 2021.
“This is precisely the kind of state-sponsored racial classification that federal civil rights law was written to prohibit,” Cheng said.
San Francisco ninth graders are presented with a “wheel of power and privilege,” created by educator Sylvia Duckworth, that sorts individuals into various vectors of “power,” such as race, gender identity, religious identity, marital status, disability and “indigeneity.”
The textbook’s goal is to give students “terms and tools they need to analyze the impacts of race and ethnicity in US history and the present day,” according to its website. Voices is broken out into units on Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Latino Studies, and Asian American/Pacific Islander Studies.
Friends of Lowell Foundation calls it a “thoroughly politicized document” that, rather than informing students about their world, teaches “racial determinism and despair.”
The foundation alleged in a 53-page memo that the district hid the curriculum from parents — requiring in-person appointments during work hours to view the Voices textbook, obfuscating agenda items at the Board of Education and scheduling discussions of ethnic studies on Jewish and Muslim religious holidays, violating families’ civil rights.
The year-long ethnic studies requirement also deprives students of the chance to take electives that help them get into college, said SFUSD parent Liz Le.
“It puts San Francisco students at a unique disadvantage and that comes with legal ramifications,” said Le. “We’re losing students are we’re losing money.”
In 2021, California lawmakers made one semester of ethnic students a requirement for high school students.
San Francisco chose to expand the requirement to one year, initially launching a “home-grown” ethnic studies course that was riddled with controversial content, such as referring to Chairman Mao Zedong’s Red Guards as a “social movement,” the US as the “so-called United States,” and comparing parental authority to a “system of oppression.”
San Francisco Superintendent Maria Su announced a “new approach” to ethnic studies after a massive backlash to the prior program.
Though Voices is now the district-approved ethnic studies curriculum, individual teachers are still using the old lesson plans, The Frisc reported.
“The United States is not a perfect country … but these students are being taught to hate their peers and hate their country, and that’s really at the core of this,” said Christine Linnenbach, attorney and president of the Friends of Lowell Foundation.
The San Francisco district lost thousands of students over the past 10 years, triggering a plan to close schools.
Critics say they aren’t opposed to ethnic studies and support giving students an honest view of American history. But the foundation says the Voices curriculum makes unsupported, sweeping claims that collapses diverse histories into “narrow themes of oppression, resistance and activism.”
Le pointed to a section on “whiteness” which claims that “white” is not just a race, but a reference to one’s position “in the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic hierarchy.”
She said an ethnic studies guest teacher at her teenage child’s school had led a discussion about “real life monsters” that grouped police officers in with Hitler and serial killers — and other lessons she called “simplistic, almost discriminatory.”
Linnenbach believes it’s part of a larger effort to force a political agenda on students.
“Everything is framed, through these policies and the curriculum, in terms of race. It’s not acceptable to create this victim/victimizer relationship where 14 year old kids are learning to despise one another based on the color of their skin,” she said.
The Friends of Lowell Foundation demanded a meeting with Mayor Daniel Lurie and city officials to discuss the alleged legal violations. Although SFUSD is largely supported through state funding, the city of San Francisco provides support to the district.
The district didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Lurie’s office pointed to a statement he made last year in support of an “effective program that aligns with local and state requirements and effectively serves our students across the entire district.”
Only 41% of San Francisco eighth grade students were proficient in math last year, compared to a target of 65%. Third-grade reading proficiency was just 51.8%, below a target of 62%, the San Francisco Standard reported.
Linnenbach said she is prepared to escalate the issue to the Department of Justice and even the White House if her group’s concerns aren’t addressed.
“This issue is happening up and down the state of California,” she said. “We have decide to take our issue to out elected leaders because school districts, not only in San Francisco but in California, are not responding to the needs of parents.”