Teachers and principals warn against canceling class this late
by JESSICA BLOUGH June 26, 2025 (MissionLocal.org)
The San Francisco Unified School District is considering canceling its ethnic studies program in the fall while the district reviews teaching materials, the superintendent told principals Thursday afternoon, prompting criticism from educators who said doing so on such late notice would be unprecedented and create a logistical nightmare.
Superintendent Maria Su is weighing a pause to the ethnic studies program to look over materials that have come under scrutiny in recent months. Her choice comes after months of organized opposition from a group of parents who insist that the class pushes liberal politics and was hastily organized.
She was expected to announce her decision to administrators on Thursday, but instead told them during a Zoom meeting that she would hold off until school principals had a chance to attend a forthcoming meeting with Phil Kim and Jamie Huling, the president and vice president of the school board.
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“The Superintendent is currently in active discussions with principals and various stakeholders regarding high school curriculum and course sequencing for social studies, including Ethnic Studies, in fall 2025,” a district spokesperson wrote in a text to Mission Local. “We are committed to keeping our community informed as soon as we have an official update.”
District veterans said that they could not remember any other instance of a course being paused while the district undertook a review.
“Stopping the course while auditing is, to me, a disproportionate response and one that doesn’t make a lot of sense, given the chaos it would cause, and the cost,” said school board member Matt Alexander, a former district principal.
“If we had curriculum issues in a math course, would we stop teaching math for a year? And create massive destruction over the summer? I don’t think so,” he said.
Sarah Ballard-Hanson, a principal at Thurgood Marshall High School, pushed back against the proposed cancelation during public comment at Tuesday’s school board meeting.
“The push to pause ethnic studies is about a national wave against DEI and truth-telling in schools,” she said. “SFUSD must resist,” she said.
San Francisco public schools made a year of ethnic studies mandatory at the beginning of the 2024-2025 school year, though the district has included ethnic studies as an elective course offering for 15 years. Ethnic studies courses cover a wide range of topics, including white supremacy, transphobia, activism and social movements.
Though graduation requirements are set by the school board, which has not said it would change the ethnic studies mandate, the superintendent can choose what classes are actually taught.
Some parents have complained that the SFUSD ethnic studies program contains content that misrepresents history or discriminates against white and Jewish students.
They complained about a since-removed listing of the Red Guards, a militant student movement during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, among historical social movements, and a reading about white male privilege from 2012.
The district removed several examples that parents complained about, and published the ethnic studies materials on its website. It also included a concern form.
‘Behemoth of a logistical nightmare’
Teachers and school administrators said that the superintendent’s proposal would be disastrous for scheduling. At Tuesday’s school board meeting, educators questioned why the superintendent’s decision was happening in June, during summer break.
“It should take a good teacher weeks to carefully construct a curriculum for their students; weeks and months. But they don’t have weeks and months,” an ethnic studies employee, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, told Mission Local.
Teachers go back to work on Aug. 12, which would leave them just six days to change their curriculum before school starts.
“Every school will be on their own to figure out this behemoth of a logistical nightmare,” added a high school principal.
Students enrolled in ethnic studies for the fall would be moved to world history, though some have already taken that class and would have a gap in their schedules. Some schools are anticipating textbook shortages because the number of students enrolled in world history would double.
Studies from Stanford University and the University of California, Irvine, show that ethnic studies courses at SFUSD improve attendance and overall grade point averages for students. The academic improvements, school workers said, could be a result of a greater sense of belonging.
The courses “[help] create a sense of community and a sense of empathy among students,” while teaching “a different lens and a different way to think about world history and U.S. history,” said Anna Klafter, the president of the SFUSD administrators union and a principal at Independence High School.
“It helps create deep critical thinking, and it helps students understand their place in the world,” she said.
Surveys from the end of this school year of about 300 ethnic studies students, shared with Mission Local, showed that more than half said the course helped them understand themselves and their backgrounds better. Sixty percent said they “felt a sense of belonging” in class.
Teachers and administrators emphasized that the course is particularly impactful for students of color.
As the result of a 2021 law, California requires students to have one semester of ethnic studies coursework to graduate high school, though Gov. Gavin Newsom has since withheld funding from the requirement.
San Francisco schools have been a leader in ethnic studies programs since the 1960s, when protesters at San Francisco State University made the adoption of an ethnic studies curriculum one of their demands.
Earlier this year, state Sen. Scott Wiener coauthored a bill in the California legislature that would require ethnic studies courses in schools to “foster multicultural respect and understanding and focus on the domestic experience,” an addition that critics said was targeted at conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and bordered on censorship.
That bill was withdrawn in May. Another bill, rewritten in May and coauthored by Wiener, would prohibit using curriculum that discriminates against a student, with an emphasis on antisemitism or Islamophobia.
Wiener’s office declined to comment, citing scheduling issues.
JESSICA BLOUGH
Intern. Jessica is a multimedia journalist based in San Francisco. She’s getting her Master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley and was previously an editor at Alta Journal and The Tufts Daily. She enjoys reading, reviewing books, teaching writing, hiking and rock climbing.More by Jessica Blough
