California will be the first state to require an ethnic studies course for high school students. Last Friday California Governor Garvin Newson signed AB 101 into law according to CBS 8. AB 101 will require high schools to offer ethnic studies courses starting in 2025, which will be a one-semester course required class for graduating starting in the 2029 school year. Several Californians petitioned against the bill.

“What is the rush? What we’re asking is put a pause on it,” Masha Merkulova, founder and executive director of Club Z, an after-school club for Jewish teenagers told the news station.

“There’s no oversight. A teacher who is an activist can bring anything they want into the classroom. It doesn’t have to be approved,” Merkulova said. Out of the three available curriculum options, Merkulova said two are racist and anti-Semitic, for using terms like “white supremacy” and “settler colonialism.”

“Yes, racism needs to be addressed. Injustices need to be addressed. However, it needs to be through accurate history, through facts. Not through perspective. Not through personal narratives,” Merkulova said.

“It’s most definitely not a racist curriculum,” Dr. Sean Arce, who teaches Chicano studies to both high school and college students told CBS 8.

Dr. Arce a member of the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Coalition, an educational advisory group who worked to create the courses teachers will have to choose from under AB 101. The group argues ethnic studies is necessary to understand our state’s history.

“We have fought 52 years for an ethnic studies requirement for California’s majority student of color population. The curricular framework is up to each district within reason. We are a discipline. We have principles,” LESMC member, Dr. Theresa Motano, said. In 2020, Newsom vetoed a similar bill saying the curriculum was “insufficiently balanced.” Revisions were made and it was adopted by the state Board of Education earlier this year.

“The fact that no less than seven ‘guardrails’ were deemed necessary for preventing AB 101 from facilitating the widespread promotion of antisemitism is itself a stunning indictment of the bill and the dangers it poses for Jewish students and the Jewish community. And by law those so-called guardrails are purely optics. They carry zero weight when it comes to preventing school districts from bringing the rejected and blatantly antisemitic original ESMC curriculum or its far worse Liberated cousin into the classroom. 

“Making matters significantly worse, California’s teachers’ unions and public universities’ ethnic studies departments proudly support those overtly antisemitic curricula. Both the original ESMC draft and Liberated’s curriculum are endorsed by California’s two largest teachers’ unions and ethnic studies departments and faculty on Cal State and University of California campuses.