When property tax reform via Proposition 13 led to fiscal challenges for California’s public school system in 1978, the Legislature strengthened the role of the local watchdog, the county superintendent of schools.
If a local school district is on a path to insolvency nowadays, the county superintendent can step in and, if necessary, force some tough spending decisions.
There is no similar cure for school districts guilty of academic bankruptcy, such as banning books or making curriculum decisions based on extreme views rather than educational needs.
The latest California school district to go this twisted route is in Temecula in northern San Diego County. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta earlier this month sought answers as to why the Temecula Valley Unified School District Board of Education rejected a social studies curriculum that contained a mention of the late Harvey Milk, a gay activist and San Francisco County Supervisor. The board’s chair, without any evidence, had declared Milk to have been a pedophile.
Since then, the situation in Temecula has degenerated further. The board has fired its superintendent. And the community is quickly balkanizing into those who defend or those who want to recall the board.
“What you have here is not just the banning of a book, but the firing of the superintendent associated with the banning of the book,” said Dave Gordon, superintendent of the Sacramento County Office of Education.
Now, California has a school district with no leader and no social studies curriculum for four grades as teachers head into the summer break. And there is essentially nothing any governor, attorney general, parent, superintendent or voter can do about it. There is no higher government backstop. There is simply chaos.
Ironically, California has an elaborate and extremely effective curriculum system to provide choices for public schools and the primary grades. The California Office of Education provides a comprehensive array of curriculum options, and then it’s up to the local school districts and their elected boards to select from these options.
California even has a path for a district to come up with its own primary school curriculum separate from anything the state has sanctioned. None of the intolerant curriculum warriors have taken this path. That is because a truly new and local curriculum would be an exhaustive process that would require the full support of teachers.
“Our tradition of local control is meaningful,” said Gordon, who sees for himself an educational role in explaining the curriculum processes to local districts. “But it has to be well-informed.”
Curriculum debates that flirt with California’s ideological fringes are not confined to one side of the political spectrum. Take, for example, ethnic studies.
The California Legislature in 2021 approved the first-ever requirement in the nation for high school students to receive a required semester of education in ethnic studies — should annual state budgets fund this requirement.
A first draft of that curriculum from an advisory panel for the California State Board of Education proposed a “liberationist” education plan. Former State Superintendent Bill Honig sensed a troubling agenda.
“Presenting non-whites as victims and whites, individually and collectively through institutions, as oppressors, liberationists hope to create activists who will radically transform their schools, their communities and our nation,” Honig wrote in the publication EdSource.
Newsom blasted the proposal. The Board adopted a different draft curriculum. But school districts remain free to pick their method of teaching ethnic studies. School districts can adopt the liberationist curriculum.
“A lot of people are afraid to speak out about this,” Honig said in a recent interview.
When challenging backers of a liberationist ethnic studies curriculum, “they are going to be canceled or called a racist,” Honig said. He advances an ethnic studies message that “we don’t have a perfect union, but the union has high ideals and we are trying to live up to them. A lot of people say those ideals are not legitimate.”
With these new ethnic studies curriculum proposals facing both litigation and long-term financial uncertainties, there are calls to abandon the pursuit entirely.
Unlike Temecula, the ethnic studies debate has yet to impact those who really suffer from these wars: the students.
To prevent repeats of Temecula, Gordon wishes for one last curriculum change in either the fourth or fifth grades. He suggests a stronger dose of civic education.
“You have to take part in the process,” he said. “And in doing so, you have to understand how the process works. How our democracy works. The protection against this stuff is vested in each and every one of us. And unless each and every one of us takes responsibility and plays a part, things like this happen.”
