How Did California’s Public Education Go From Best in the US to Worst?

American teachers and teachers unions have failed children. Teachers unions have become the biggest school bullies, sacrificing school children on the altar of power and control.

My parents were teachers throughout the 1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s, into 2000’s. They saw a lot of educational trends, behavioral trends, new math, old math, English as a First Language become an issue, and the classical liberal arts education turn into an afterthought. They came at education from different political ideologies: My dad was right-of-center, educated classically, took years of Greek and Latin, Logic, Rhetoric, Literature and taught history for 4 decades. My stepmother was a righteous leftist, a 1960’s radical, and complained about the poor quality of child parents sent her to teach. Their dichotomy was representative of public education, particularly from the 1970’s-on.

How Did California’s Public Education System go from best in the United States to one of the worst? How did the classical Liberal Arts education, once made up of rigorous disciplines from the natural sciences to the fine arts, get sidelined by “textbooks and course materials that include multiple perspectives and diverse representation from varied racial, ethnic, sex, gender, sexuality, SES, religion, age, and abilities perspectives -” Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices, as opposed to core curriculum of the seven Liberal Arts: Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Music, and Geometry.

Teachers used to teach Liberal Arts disciplines enthusiastically. Now too many indoctrinate.

Actual curriculum changes include these actions:

• Agendize and normalize DEI discussions and intentionally alter practices that perpetuate barriers.
• Create a curriculum committee handbook that requires a diversity, equity, inclusion, and antiracist lens for the COR.
• Make time for critical conversations, empowering faculty to hold each other accountable for embedding cultural humility in faculty self-reflection and cultural competency into lessons and activities.

This comes from the California Community College Curriculum Committee.

Here is the California Community College Curriculum Committee Glossary of Terms:

● Collectivism – an individual’s sense of connection to and responsibility for members of their group/community (Hofstede, 1984; Triandis,
1995)
● Critical race theory – a way of seeing, attending to, accounting for, tracing and analyzing the ways that race is produced; the ways that
racial inequality is facilitated, and the ways that our history has created these inequalities that now can be almost effortlessly reproduced
unless we attend to the existence of these inequalities (Crenshaw, 2021 as cited in Fortin).
● Culturally responsive teaching – an educator’s ability to recognize students’ cultural displays of learning and meaning making and respond positively and constructively with teaching moves that use cultural knowledge as a scaffold to connect what the student knows to new concepts and content in order to promote effective information processing . . . to create a safe space for learning. (Hammond, Z., 2015).
● Equity-minded – a schema that provides an alternative framework for understanding the causes of equity gaps in outcomes and the action
needed to close them. Rather than attribute inequities in outcomes to student deficits, being equity-minded involves interpreting inequitable outcomes as a signal that practices are not working as intended. Inequities are eliminated through changes in institutional practices, policies, culture, and routines. Equity-mindedness encompasses being (l) race conscious, (2) institutionally focused, (3) evidence based, (4) systemically aware, and (5) action oriented (CCCCO Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Glossary of Terms).
● Euro-centric – privileging European or Westernized values and ways of knowing as the norm or “default” while marginalizing alternative
perspectives, histories and knowledge.
● Individualism – the valuing of the individual over the value of groups or society as a whole (Griffiths, 2015).
● Student-centered – refers to a wide variety of educational programs, learning experiences, instructional approaches, and academic-
support strategies that are intended to address the distinct learning needs, interests, aspirations, or cultural backgrounds of individual
students and groups of students.
● Warm demander – a teacher who communicates personal warmth toward students while at the same time demands they work toward high
standards. The teacher provides concrete guidance and support for meeting the standards, particularly corrective feedback, opportunities
for information processing, and culturally relevant meaning making (Hammond, Z., 2015).
● Warm handoffs – directly connecting students to campus resources and services; a transfer of care between two members of a care team;
teachers providing direct contact names and information to connect students with service representatives such as in syllabi and course materials or directly introducing students to student service representatives with an intentional introduction.
● Watering up – instructional practices with the science of learning that we can apprentice students to be active agents in their own learning, instead of watering them down with the compliance-oriented deficit views. This process requires students to build and braid together multiple neural, relational, and experiential processes to produce their own unique learning acceleration process (Hammond, Z., 2021).

One of their references is “What is critical race theory?” published by the New York Times.

A few years ago the Globe discussed the curriculum shift with Lance Izumi, Director of Education Studies at the Pacific Research Institute. Izumi said what has infiltrated California’s public school curriculum “is Critical Race Theory which says objectivity and meritocracy are racist measures of people.” Critical Race Theory developed from Communism.

Izumi noted that Critical Race Theory is designed to eliminate dissent, but is being sold as having greater discussion about race and points of view. “However, the Left defines the terms of discussion,” Izumi said. “If you as a student, don’t get to bring up your point of views, that is racism.” Izumi said it does not make it any easier in the classroom for students who oppose Critical Race Theory.

This goes on throughout the state, in all grades, even though is it a violation of the California Constitution. Californians passed the California Civil Rights Initiative, known as Proposition 209 in 1996 by voters 55% to 45% based on the exact language of the 1964 U.S. Civil Rights Act, which protects all Californians from discrimination. Proposition 209 said that the state cannot discriminate against or grant preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, and public contracting.

Also notable is that voters defeated Proposition 16 in 2020, which if it had passed, would have reversed Prop. 209. Prop. 16 was defeated, even by liberal California, 57.23% to 42.77%.

Izumi noted that Prop. 16 was campaigned against and defeated largely by Asian Americans, who merely wanted to prevent public universities from discriminating against Asian applicants with higher scores, instead favoring lower-scoring minorities. But now they have to fight for this. “They wanted color blindness,” he said, noting many of the poorest Asians came from countries which imposed policies exactly like Critical Race Theory.

“Jewish students feel they have a target on their backs,” Izumi said. “So do Evangelical Christians, which also are strong supporters of Israel.”

But that never stopped the most radical of social justice warriors from enacting their dream legislation, and instead, over the years since 1996, the California Legislature and the California Department of Education has chipped away at California’s civil rights initiative.

This current ethnic studies curriculum stems from a bill signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2016 that mandated new ethnic studies programs in California’s public schools. Gov. Newsom signed another in 2021 requiring California high school students to complete a semester of ethnic studies in order to graduate, starting with the class of 2030. Ethnic studies also was made a requirement for community college students to graduate.

The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum slowly chips away at and replaces classical liberal arts education disciplines. We know this because ethnic studies curriculum replaces a semester of geography.

A few key issues to know about Ethnic Studies Curriculum, directly taken from the 2020 Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum:

• “At its core, the field of Ethnic Studies is the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with an emphasis on experiences of people of color in the United States.
• It is the xdisciplinary, loving, and critical praxis of holistic humanity – as educational and racial justice.
• Ethnic Studies grapples with the various power structures and forms of oppression, including, but not limited to, white supremacy, race and racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, islamophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia, that continue to impact the social, emotional, cultural, economic, and political experiences of Native People/s and people of color.
• Ethnic Studies is xdisciplinary, in that it variously takes the forms of being interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary, undisciplinary, and intradisciplinary. As such, it can grow its original language to serve these needs with purposeful respellings of terms, including history as herstory and women as womxn, connecting with a gender and sexuality lens, along with a socioeconomic class lens at three of its intersections. Terms utilized throughout this document, which may be unfamiliar to new practitioners of the field, are defined in the glossary.”

And no, those are not typos (xdisciplinary, herstory, womxn); this is the latest inoffensive way to present language that does not automatically infer (white) male dominance.

Here is California Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) in a House Education & Workforce Committee hearing, asking President Donald Trump’s Education Secretary  Linda McMahon to investigate California’s anti-semitic ethnic studies mandates:

UPDATE: This article has been updated to reflect that The National Association of Scholars obtained “DEI in Curriculum: Model Principles and Practices”  through a FOIA request to the California Community Colleges. They did not author it. The Glossary of Terms belongs to the CCC Curriculum Committee’s.