SF Teachers Get a Warning: Leave Your Politics Out of the Classroom

As you may know, California has mandated that kids complete one semester of ethnic studies in order to graduate high school. When Gov. Gavin Newsom signed that requirement into law in 2021, San Francisco already had an ethnic studies elective on offer, but at the start of last year SF upped the ante and made a full year of ethic studies a requirement to graduate.

As I wrote here, you can probably imagine what an entire year of ethnic studies is like in San Francisco. It’s so bad that, even in one of America’s bluest cities, parents were complaining about the amount of outright left-wing indoctrination involved.

Last July, parent Viviane Safrin wrote a memo, obtained by The Standard, to school officials articulating concerns about ethnic studies material that had been posted to the district’s Online Resource Library. The flagged material included presentations equating capitalism with racism and exercises in which students rank various racial, socioeconomic, and gender identities based on the amount of power they have in the world today. One assignment had students role-playing as Israeli soldiers herding Palestinians into refugee camps.

Safrin said in the memo that the curriculum teaches “a contentious ideological framework” that lacks “open inquiry” and “factual integrity.” She noted that only “four lessons out of 55 highlight contributions by ethnic groups,” and the word “hegemony” appeared 81 times…

“They are taught how to organize — what it means to resist,” Safrin told The Standard. “They’re taught about dominant and counter narratives. It’s an upper-level college course for one way to examine history, but it is not teaching any actual history.”

One exercise still in use places the Red Guards, a student-led paramilitary organization from Mao’s Chinese Cultural Revolution, alongside the U.S. civil rights and feminist movements as emphasizing “the resistance that oppressed groups have shown in history.”

“I would not place them in the same category,” Stanford sociology professor Andrew G. Walder, author of a book on the Red Guards, said. “They would belong in a different unit on authoritarianism and violent political extremism.”

Another current exercise has students read a 2012 article called “Straight white male: The lowest difficulty setting there is” and asks, “What would white males need to give up (or relinquish) in order to make a more equitable society?”

And of course, given the left’s fixation on badmouthing Israel and freeing Palestine, there were also claims that that the handling of Israel in the curriculum was especially egregious.

In October, students at one high school were shown a presentation claiming that Israel’s founding was an “invasion” that “decimated Indigenous populations,” akin to European settler-colonial projects in Australia and the Americas. Following pushback from parents and students, that slide was removed from the presentation…

Since Oct. 7, 2023, Jewish parents have grown increasingly concerned that SFUSD’s curriculum, including the ethnic studies course, omits Jewish history and promotes enmity toward Israel. No Jewish groups were among those that co-signed the resolution that made the course a graduation requirement.

“It’s absolutely ridiculous sometimes,” said the parent of a girl who took the class this year and whose husband left Russia due to antisemitism. “When you list Jews as oppressors, that means you haven’t read history at all, because they were oppressed most of the time. If the school can’t talk about Jewish issues properly, they shouldn’t talk about them at all.”…

“SFUSD is a religious institution,” said one parent who noticed that her kid was being taught that Genghis Khan was actually peaceful. “They’re teaching unfalsifiable ideas.”

Maybe it was the objections of parents or maybe it was the fact that the Trump administration was threatening to cut funding to schools that didn’t get a handle on antisemitism. Whatever the case, this year teachers in San Francisco are getting a special lesson from the district about keeping their politics out of the classroom.

Days before the start of classes, San Francisco school leaders reminded teachers that they can’t express political opinions during the school day, including in what they say, wear or put on their walls…

In recent years, Bay Area schools have seen an uptick in politically motivated instruction and the opinions of staff and educators publicly displayed. That has included student walkouts, bolstered by teachers and their unions, as well as posters and staff clothing reflecting beliefs, including candidates, government policies and the war in Gaza. 

Accusations of antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of harassment in schools have grown specifically since the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the retaliatory bombing of Gaza, with hundreds of official complaints filed at the district, state and federal level…

State education law requires an education free of harassment and bias and equal access to learning regardless of race, religion, national origin or other protected status. But that has been broadly interpreted across public schools in San Francisco and the Bay Area and, at times, rarely enforced.

In short, the behavior of these teachers, which was encouraged by their leftist union, has always been illegal, but in San Francisco those rules have mostly been ignored. At least one teacher said they’d never received such a warning before.

This year, one veteran teacher said it was the first such training in their career.

“Many teachers have been dangerously misled about their professional freedoms and responsibilities,” the educator said. “K-12 teachers don’t have the same academic freedoms as university instructors. Our students are minor children.”

Will these teachers get the message or will this only encourage them to defy the rules? My guess is some of both. The hardcore activists who see leftism as their entire identity are not going to stop and my guess is the school district won’t do anything (beyond the warning) to stop them. The only hope for actual change is that parents who aren’t leftist nitwits continue to complain when teachers like this break the law.