Beginning with the Class of 2030, California high school students must pass an ethnic studies class to graduate, after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a Riverside legislator’s bill into law Friday, Oct. 8, making the state the first with such a requirement.
The third time was the charm for Assembly Member Jose Medina, D-Riverside, a former ethnic studies teacher at Riverside’s Poly High School and an ex-Jurupa school board member.
“The inclusion of ethnic studies in the high school curriculum is long overdue,” Medina said in a statement released by his office. “Students cannot have a full understanding of the history of our state and nation without the inclusion of the contributions and struggles of Native Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. The signing of AB 101 today is one step in the long struggle for equal education for all students.”
He first introduced a bill to make ethnic studies a high school graduation requirement in 2018, two years after Gov. Jerry Brown signed a 2016 bill requiring the state to create an ethnic studies curriculum. Brown vetoed an ethnic studies graduation requirement bill in 2018 and Newsom vetoed a second one in 2020.
Under Assembly Bill 101, ethnic studies courses will have to be offered at high schools starting in the 2025-26 school year.
Getting the ethnic studies curriculum right has proven tricky. Earlier drafts were accused of being anti-Semitic and leaving out various minority communities. After four years, the state board of education approved a model ethnic studies curriculum in March. The curriculum looks at the histories and contributions of Asian, Black, Latino and Native Americans, along with lessons on Arab Americans, Jewish Americans, Pacific Islanders and Sikh Americans.
The new bill had been accused of being “critical race theory.” Though critical race theory is a graduate-level and law school theory that looks at how the U.S. legal system is shaped by and shapes race relations in the country, it’s been a hot topic on conservative media in recent months, often conflated with other discussions of race or racism by educators.
“Gavin Newsom has signed a bill to make CRT a high school graduation requirement, two years after saying the draft ethnic studies curriculum would ‘never see the light of day,’ Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, R-Granite Bay, wrote on Twitter on Friday. Kiley is vice chair of the Assembly Education Committee and a former public high school English teacher.
“This is a dark day for Jewish students in California and the dozens of other states that historically follow California’s lead,” Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, initiative director for the Amcha Initiative, which opposes the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement on college campuses, wrote in a news release Friday.
Rossman-Benjamin expressed concern that local districts would use an earlier, rejected version of the ethnic studies curriculum.
“This bill could and should have been stopped at the legislative level and must not be forced on the Jewish community to fight in each of California’s 1,300 school districts,” she wrote.
Others cheered Newsom’s decision to sign AB 101 into law.
“After decades of advocacy, ethnic studies will finally be a California high school grad requirement!” Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, tweeted . “Our students deserve to see themselves and their stories reflected in their educational curriculum.”
“The majority of our social problems are happening because people don’t know their own true history or the true history of each other,” Corey Jackson, a Riverside County Board of Education member and member of the Riverside County Alliance of Black Elected Officials, said Friday. ” We have got to do a better job of understanding the struggles and life experiences of our neighbors.”
Jackson wishes the requirement would be in place sooner than the Class of 2030, but said “we’ll take what we can get.”
School districts don’t need to wait until then, of course.
“We hope that people won’t wait until the deadline, but they will try and bring it to students as soon as possible to be part of the solution,” Jackson said.
Some California school districts made ethnic studies a graduation requirement on their own, while ethnic studies bills made their way to the governor’s desk repeatedly. Medina’s previous employer, the Riverside Unified School District, did so in September 2020. The requirement kicked in with the Class of 2025 — this year’s freshmen.
The San Francisco, Fresno and San Diego unified school districts already require ethnic studies to graduate and, starting next year, Fresno Unified will as well.