A Golden State Victory for Common Sense

Most readers would agree, I think, that it is desirable to keep politics out of K-12 classrooms. And one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who favors having universities force secondary students to “learn” a particular political agenda. Yet that is what almost transpired in California this past spring. The story of how this came about, and the (at least partial) success of efforts to stop it, is one worth telling.

Courses in “ethnic studies” have become a popular offering at high schools across much of the United States. In some school districts, taking a course in ethnic studies is a graduation requirement. These courses come in a variety of flavors. Some simply explore the topic of ethnicity, teaching students something about the history and development of a range of ethnic groups and introducing them to distinctive cultures. Other courses, sometimes called “inclusive ethnic studies,” deal with many ethnic groups’ contributions and struggles and present a variety of perspectives on topics such as discrimination and racial prejudice.

Liberated Ethnic Studies takes for granted that “structural racism” is real and pervasive in the United States and other Western countries. A third variety, known as “liberated ethnic studies” (LES), have a fairly explicit political edge. They take for granted that “structural racism” is real and pervasive in the United States and other Western countries; that “colonialism” taints all relationships between the West and the developing world; and that a version of Marxist economics—called “racial capitalism” because race is substituted for class as the main axis of exploitation—is essential for understanding market economies.

A recent review found that, among California school districts that offer an ethnic-studies course, over four-fifths offered a variant of LES. In California at least, the LES brand of ethnic studies is dominant. A recent review of school-district websites found that, among 125 California school districts that offer an identifiable ethnic-studies course, over four-fifths offered a variant of LES. LES was particularly dominant in the largest school districts, including Los Angeles Unified—the nation’s second-largest K-12 district. It is unclear, however, how many school districts require students to take such a course.

During the 2010s, many LES advocates, with strong support from teachers’ unions, pressed for the adoption of a statewide mandate that all public high-school students complete an ethnic-studies course as a graduation requirement. They won only a partial victory. In 2021, the legislature passed (and Governor Newsom signed) AB 101, which articulated such a requirement for high-school students graduating in 2030 and later, but with two contingencies: first, that the state pass separate legislation “funding” the new mandate (the cost of implementation was estimated at around $250 million) and, second, that the content of particular ethnic-studies courses would be under the control of local school boards.

Almost immediately, LES advocates, many of them faculty within the University of California (UC), hit upon a new strategy. For many decades, UC had required all California applicants to have met certain curricular requirements in high school. These standards, which covered seven distinct fields (e.g., English, science, math, etc.) and were thus known as the “A-G requirements,” required not only that students take courses in certain fields (e.g., four years of English) but that the courses meet certain levels of quality and coverage that would prepare students to handle challenging university-level coursework. LES advocates now proposed adding an “H” component, which would require UC applicants to complete a one-semester course in ethnic studies—specifically, an LES course. The “H” proposal, as it came to be known, would be a stunning coup if the university could be persuaded to approve it. All California schools, both public and private, would essentially be forced to offer an LES course, since all California high schools aspire to send many of their best students to a UC school, and nearly all students would likely take it (to preserve their UC eligibility). The “liberated ethnic studies” curriculum, with its highly politicized narratives and training for advocacy, would thereby become a standard part of every California high-school education. As one of its faculty advocates noted, “We have an opportunity to work to develop area H course criteria that reproduces ethnic studies as a socially transformative field [that] will serve as a model for the rest of the nation, so this is extraordinarily consequential.”

Of course, even if one agreed with some or all of the LES agenda, there were serious problems with Proposal H. First, both state law and the university’s bylaws require that the university operate “entirely independent of any partisan or sectarian influence.” Mandating that high-school students take a highly political, partisan course to even be considered for UC admission obviously violates this principle. Second, the state legislature had just deliberated on the issue of ethnic studies in high school and had clearly determined that course content was a matter of local control; Proposal H was—indeed, was designed to be—an end run around a specific state policy. Third, Proposal H would force schools that lacked an existing LES course to create one. Forcing an unfunded mandate upon local school districts would be unprecedented.

Proposal H advocates dealt with these issues by … lying. Proposal H advocates dealt with these issues by … lying. They falsely claimed that the California legislature had, in fact, funded AB 101 or that the mandate existed regardless of whether it had been funded. Accordingly, they asserted, Proposal H merely filled in substantive details about the mandate that the legislature had failed to provide, just as the A-G requirements detailed what math skills should be developed in, say, an algebra course.

What is striking to me is how close these arguments, and the radical content of Proposal H itself, came to carrying the day. What is striking to me is how close these arguments, and the radical content of Proposal H itself, came to carrying the day. Fundamental changes to UC admissions requirements must pass through a multi-stage process of review, which is designed to weed out unsound ideas. The final three stages are (a) review by the UC Academic Council, a roughly 20-member body that includes the chairs of the academic senates of each of UC’s 10 campuses; (b) approval by the UC Assembly, a larger body that includes four to eight representatives of each UC campus, as well as several at-large members; and (c) review and approval by the Regents of the University. In 2022, Proposal H made it as far as the Academic Council, which sent it back for further revision to remove some of its most blatantly political language. In 2024, a slightly modified Proposal H was back before the Academic Council, even though the Academic Senate committee reviewing the proposal had voted against advancing it. The Academic Council approved Proposal H, and the UC Assembly considered it in December 2024. Only the mobilized opposition of several hundred faculty members, and a careful piece of journalism documenting the funding requirement behind AB 101, persuaded a majority of the Assembly to postpone consideration of the proposal until its April 2025 meeting. During that interim, many Assembly members came to better understand the radical content of the proposal and the dissimulations of its proponents about state funding. When Gov. Newsom’s proposed 2025-26 budget conspicuously failed to provide funding for AB 101, Proposal H was decisively rejected by the Assembly at its April meeting.

The defeat may be a significant turning point in University of California governance. My observation, over my 36 years as a UC faculty member, is that administrators are instinctively deferential to any agenda advanced by progressive faculty, particularly if the agenda purports to advance racial justice. That deference (perhaps better called “pandering”) was behind the establishment of ethnic-studies programs and departments in the 1970s and 1980s, the growth of the DEI bureaucracy, the stealth reintroduction of racial preferences in admissions despite Prop 209’s explicit ban on the use of such preferences by UC, the elimination of the SAT from the admissions process in 2020, and many other measures. These administrators have always seen much to gain by portraying themselves as champions of the progressive racial agenda and much to lose if they stood out as critics. There has been a similar tendency among UC faculty to assume that any measure advancing a progressive racial agenda is either worth supporting or dangerous to openly oppose.

What occurred in the Proposal H debate was a willingness of rank-and-file faculty to organize and make their voices heard, the emergence of strong voices in the Assembly willing to question the proposal, and the eventual discrediting of key factual claims made by proponents. And, remarkably, none of the critics have been “canceled”—some have, in fact, won praise. In other words, UC faculty are learning to say out loud that the emperor has no clothes and that the longstanding taboos against candid, critical discussion of race-related initiatives are starting to lift.

We should not, however, roll out the champagne. LES remains the dominant way that ethnic studies is taught in California high schools, and I suspect the fall will bring yet another crop of UC freshmen under its spell. The fight to replace political propaganda with critical-thinking skills, and fair consideration of all points of view, still has a long way to go.

Richard Sander is an economist and law professor at UCLA, where he has taught since 1989.