SF district spent thousands on ethnic studies consultants as test scores fell

A broke school district shelled out nearly $400,000 to extreme ”ethnic studies” consultants obsessed with defunding the police and tearing down capitalism rather fixing the students’ appalling reading and math scores.

The San Francisco Unified School District, which is facing school closures and a catastrophic budget deficit, has inked taxpayer-funded contracts with consultants Liberatory Visionaries Curricula, UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project, and organizations founded by Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, a radical activist who branded classrooms a “a battlefield” where teachers wage war.

The district paid $260,000 for “professional development” sessions between 2022 and 2025 with a UC Berkeley project that hawks lessons on “divesting from systems of policing,” “drag pedagogy,” penning custom “land acknowledgments” for classrooms and making anti-capitalist signage as a classroom activity.

Loopy lesson plans include a “10-step guide for designing political graphics” and an “Abolition and Disability Justice Course” that slams capitalism as “the true crisis.”

Another contractor — Liberatory Visionaries Curricula, founded by Ashia Ojore Bomani, an ethnic studies consultant and ex-SFUSD teacher, according to her Linkedin — was paid $55,000 this fiscal year to shape San Francisco’s controversial ethnic studies curriculum.

One $10,000 contract approved in February promotes a fringe textbook she co-authored called “Carry On Tradition” which is described as a “history of righteous resistance and rebellion.”

Critics have slammed the SFUSD’s ethnic studies courses as “unvetted and illegal.”

SFUSD was placed under strict state oversight two years ago due to fiscal issues — and remains seriously strapped with a $26 million projected deficit in 2028, according to public documents.

Only 41% of San Francisco eighth grade students were proficient in math last year, below a target of 65%. Third-grade reading proficiency was an abysmal 51.8% — below the target of 62%, the San Francisco Standard reported.

District budget documents shared with The Post show another consultant, Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, collected more than $270,000 from SFUSD and another city agency, Department of Children Youth and Their Families, since 2019 through two organizations called P@nay Educational Partnerships and Community Responsive Education.

The latter group’s website says its goal is to “use education as a vehicle for liberation through the awakening of students’ critical consciousness,” offering strategic consulting and teacher coaching.

“We are teaching critical race studies…we’re very, very clear about that,” Tintiangco-Cubales said at a 2021 high school conference.

According to contract details posted online, Tintiangco-Cubales was paid $16,000 between 2018 to 2020 to “make social justice a reality” at Malcolm X Academy in San Francisco — where only 13% of students are proficient in reading, according to Niche.

Her organization Community Responsive Education collected $38,000 from SFUSD between 2019 and 2024 for “anti-racism” trainings.

San Francisco’s “ethnic studies” curriculum has attracted widespread controversy, with Superintendent Maria Su facing a congressional grilling over the district’s parental notification policies onTuesday.

The district spent $7 million on a textbook called “Voices: An Ethnic Studies Survey” that critics say pushes far-left political ideology rather than preparing students for college.

One recent ethnic studies course was riddled with shocking claims such as labeling Chairman Mao Zedong’s murderous Red Guards as a “social movement” and even denying the legitimacy of the United States.

It was pulled after an embarrassing public outcry.

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Fuming parents say the eyewatering spending on ethnic studies reveals the district’s misplaced priorities.

SFUSD rammed through the Voices textbook as a mandatory two-year requirement for ninth graders this year, despite parental protests.

The textbook heavily cites the Marxist philosopher Paolo Freire, who penned the socialist tome “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.”

Some individual teachers have simply designed their own ethnic studies lessons.

Critics like Sarah Stettler, a San Francisco parent, say the book features an “identity wheel” that ranks students by “privilege” and contains offensive assertions about racial groups, such as insinuating that Asian Americans are really white.

“It’s being used by a lot of teachers to teach a lot of extreme views as fact, it is brainwashing a lot of our kids, and it’s not helpful,” Stettler said of the ethnic studies course.

She said the district should spend its money instead on proven literacy programs to help kids — such as a tutoring program called Chapter One that’s been credited with rapidly improving students’ reading.

“Right now the proficiency of our students is terrible, and every instructional minute is crucial,” Stettler added.

“SFUSD ninth graders are mandated a two-semester ethnic studies course that serves zero University of California requirements for graduation, while disrupting all other track classes that start freshman year — from language arts to music, STEM, etc,” parent activist Liz Le told The Post.

“For what? A class that teaches kids America, educators and capitalism are oppressive and require dismantling.”