After the San Francisco Unified School District hastily switched its ethnic studies curriculum this summer in response to controversy, officials said they would issue a progress report on the new material in November.
Instead, the district has delayed that report until February. It’s part of a longer evaluation of the new curriculum, which is a one-year pilot program. SFUSD will decide in April whether to make it a permanent course, starting in the 2026-27 school year.
The Board of Education must approve the curriculum to make it permanent. There is no indication that the board’s vote in the spring could be delayed.
At the end of the previous school year, the district’s homegrown ethnic studies course drew fire when parents and others objected to material, including some that teachers had introduced without the administration’s approval.
One exercise that came to light asked students to role-play as Israeli soldiers and Palestinian refugees. Another exercise described Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, which tortured and killed people during the Cultural Revolution, as a social justice group akin to American suffragettes and the Civil Rights movement.
By the end of June, Mayor Daniel Lurie had weighed in, calling for “a thorough review of the process that led us here,” in a statement to The Chronicle.
Superintendent Maria Su said at that time the district would scrap the homegrown course and find a replacement for the fall semester. Su said her staff would comply with the board’s request to find an option that met state requirements and came from a “reputable” publishing house.
Su also promised a review of all supplemental course materials to make sure teachers weren’t inserting their own political agenda.
“Our staff combed all districts up and down the state to look for what other districts are doing,” Su said at the July 29 Board of Education meeting. “We only found one curriculum that several districts are using to implement ethnic studies that satisfy both of those nonnegotiable standards.”
The district selected Voices: An Ethnic Studies Survey from national publisher Gibbs Smith Education. Voices is a two-semester class for ninth graders. Ethnic studies is a graduation requirement for all SFUSD students starting with the class of 2029. Freshmen can opt out but must eventually take the course to graduate.
We need to go through a real process of curriculum review and adoption as required by our policies and procedures in the law, which we have not done.
SFUSD Board OF EDUCATION MEMBER Supryia Ray
The scramble to find a new course intensified an already fraught situation. At its July 29 meeting, the board had to vote on the purchase of the course — nearly $100,000 — without having seen most of the material, which was a point of contention.
A raw discussion resulted in a botched vote, which meant the vote had to be redone at the next meeting. “We need to go through a real process of curriculum review and adoption as required by our policies and procedures in the law, which we have not done,” said board member Supryia Ray at the Aug. 26 board meeting. “We’ve had the time to do this, but sadly we haven’t fulfilled all of our obligations.”
Before the vote that night, Ray’s board colleague Parag Gupta said he looked forward to scrutiny of the pilot.
At those meetings and into September, parents and others spoke both for and against the curriculum — and ethnic studies more generally — and continued to demand more transparency. According to the district’s timeline a first evaluation, dubbed an audit, was expected this month but is now due in February. A longstanding SFUSD contractor WestEd is conducting the audit.
Next semester, a different consultant, Education Leaders of Color, will run a broader evaluation process that includes creating a committee with SFUSD. The contract also says the firm will “collect and analyze data.” (SFUSD is paying the firm $147,000.)
With the new delay, that leaves only two months between the release of the initial report in February and the final evaluation and board vote in April.
SFUSD did not announce the delay. In response to questions about the initial plan to release the report this month, spokesperson Laura Dudnick directed The Frisc to the updated timeline on the district’s ethnic studies website.
Dudnick did not answer questions about reasons for the delay.