This is quite a remarkable story. An Ethnic Studies teacher in San Francisco, one who previously went on the record denying that the content of these classes contains extreme left-wing material, has been caught teaching students that Sydney Sweeney’s jeans ad was white supremacy, that white women in public schools are oppressive and that students need to be activists for social justice.
The teacher in question is named Sarita Lavin. In San Francisco, students are required to complete a full year of Ethnic Studies in order to graduate. Last summer there was some pushback on these classes when reports indicated the classes were basically left-wing political indoctrination.
On a Facebook group for San Francisco parents, several people weighed in on the new graduation requirement and especially the second semester emphasis on “self-empowerment and civic engagement” as detailed in the course overview.
It’s about “how to organize, resist and show solidarity to a particular world view,” wrote one person. “And all of this taught before world history? It’s like TikTok- getting children emotional and outraged, making them impervious to history and facts that follow. I’m not for this.”
In one case, the district’s curriculum encourages students to write to Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther sentenced to death in 1981 for murdering a Philadelphia police officer. Abu-Jamal became a best-selling author and commentator, and the subject of a “free Mumia” movement, before he was spared execution…
Another unit that asks students to do a project on a social movement that has “pushed for change and justice” includes the Chinese Red Guards, along with the civil rights and farmworker rights movements and suffragettes. The Red Guards often used violence — including torture and execution — to suppress dissent against Mao Zedong’s communist revolution.
When those complaints cropped up, Sarita Lavin was quoted by KQED denying that any teachers were actually using that curriculum.
SFUSD ethnic studies teacher Sarita Lavin…told KQED they had never used, or heard of any of their colleagues using, those materials in their classrooms…
“That is not something as an ethnic studies department that we are promoting or teaching en masse,” Lavin said. “I think that that’s just been wildly overblown.”
Despite the denials, San Francisco adopted a curriculum based on a textbook called “Voices” which Lavin specifically objected to because it didn’t feature enough trans people. Teachers were also given a warning at the start of last year that the classroom was not a place for their personal politics.
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.
Sarita Lavin apparently didn’t get the message. In fact, she decided not to use the new curriculum at all, which was not mandatory. Instead she replaced it with a curriculum of her own which is substantially worse than the one parents complained about last year.
Last July, an American Eagle ad(opens in new tab) of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed actress in head-to-toe denim closed on a pun: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” Critics called it(opens in new tab) a racist dog whistle. Others thought the outrage was overblown. The company’s stock price soared(opens in new tab). And within weeks, it had become a ninth-grade lesson at San Francisco’s Washington High School.
A presentation slide from three of the school’s ethnic studies classes, a year-long graduation requirement at the San Francisco Unified School District since 2024-25, claims that the ad implies that Sweeney’s white DNA makes her “more beautiful.” The slide labels the premise “eugenics,” asserts the ad is “oppressive,” and sits “in a racist political context with [Sweeney] being a Trump supporter.”…
We’ve been over all this before but the ad never said Sweeney had “better” genes than anyone else. But that didn’t stop far left cranks from pretending it did.
One slide walks students through Washington’s response to “No taxation without representation” — “He was the slave torturing leader of the Revolution,” it reads. “The British were not giving him the ballot, so he gave them the bullet.”
“Americans LOVE this story,” it continues, and “celebrate on the 4th of July, have BBQs and blow things up because we just LOVE the idea of a man FIGHTING for his people’s freedom! It’s very American!” Another slide lists the names and ages of people Washington enslaved.
Another assignment from Lavin’s class asks students to chart “at least 12 ways you see hegemony in your life today” and to identify “something oppressive everyone accepts.” A slide defines hegemony as “oppression society treats as normal.” Examples include “white women in public schools,” “baby boomers in U.S. government,” and “English-only instruction.” Another slide labels the male/female gender binary as “hegemonic.”…
Another slide displays the faces of tech CEOs Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai — with Elon Musk’s face crossed out and replaced by an explosion. Musk and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon are called “Nazis.”
This is just wokeness 101. It’s the kind of thing you see on X and Bluesky from far-left progressives. What it’s not is an academic presentation of history for high school students.
Two parents on the district’s curriculum review committee who had previously raised concerns about “Voices” reviewed Lavin’s materials at The Standard’s request. Dana Bernstein, who has taught history at San Jose City College for 25 years, described the materials as “worse than ‘Voices,’” and said they present the framing of oppression versus resistance “as fact.” Scott Kravitz rejected the idea that the lessons depart from the “Voices” curriculum, which he said “opens the door to this one-sided narrative with a focus on activism and violent rebellion.”
Again, all of this is being taught by the same teacher who denied last year that extremism had made its way into Ethnic Studies classes. Lavin refused to comment for the story. She should really be fired for turning a required class into her own personal incubator for student radicals.
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