The Hayward Unified School District apparently ignored guidance from California’s new Ethnic Studies law and adopted a contract with the drafters and supporters of a curriculum long ago rejected by the State Board of Education for being antisemitic and discriminatory. The leaders of the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium produced a curriculum which contained antisemitic and extreme anti-Israel bias and excluded antisemitism from the glossary of different forms of oppression and prejudice. During a period when violence and hatred towards the Jewish community is at an all-time high, HUSD has opened the schoolhouse doors to antisemitism and bigotry.
The State Board of Education worked for years to approve an Ethnic Studies curriculum free from bigotry and antisemitism. California lawmakers also clearly oppose use of the rejected problematic content from incorporation into any Ethnic Studies curriculum. AB 101 states the Legislature’s explicit intent that local educational agencies developing their own Ethnic Studies curricula “not use the portions of the draft model curriculum that were not adopted by the Instructional Quality Commission due to concerns related to bias, bigotry, and discrimination.”
Contracting with the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium invites the drafters and supporters of a curriculum that includes the excised antisemitic and anti-Israel content that runs afoul of the Education Code into classrooms. It creates conditions that may expose students, including Jewish and Israeli students, to antisemitic and gratuitous anti-Israel content and likely violates district policy, the state Education Code and the new law.