Building on the curricular divide explored in Part II, this essay looks beyond policy into the classroom itself, where teachers—not lawmakers—hold the real power over what students learn.
By Charles A. Stone
Curriculum provides structure, but in every classroom, the teacher holds the true power. While policy dictates the framework, it is the instructor’s beliefs, biases, and integrity that determine what students actually learn.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the implementation of ethnic studies in California. Despite the adoption of AB 101 and the creation of a Model Curriculum, the classroom is where ideology meets instruction. And it is here, critics argue, that there is a danger of the classroom becoming a space for indoctrination.
The Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum initially approved as a guide for local educational agencies contains principles that can be interpreted in various ways. In the hands of an educator who respects diverse viewpoints and aims for inclusivity, the class can inspire critical thinking. But when taught by an educator who views ethnic studies as a platform for activism, the classroom becomes an opportunity to train the next generation of ideologues.
Consider that the Liberated Ethnic Studies Curriculum encourages students to become anti-racist leaders who engage in social justice activism. It promotes decolonization, resistance, and critique of systemic oppression, all laudable goals in theory. However, if these aims are filtered through a rigid ideological lens that ignores facts and vilifies entire communities,they become instruments of division.
This is clearly the case when the draft curriculum promotes assignments on the BDS movement.
If a teacher supports BDS—as do many university faculty members involved in shaping the curriculum—the result is unlikely to be a balanced examination. Instead, students may be led to view Israel as an illegitimate state based on historically distorted and false narratives. Students will likely be told repeatedly that Israel is a settler colonial state that practices apartheid and genocide. Any evidence to the contrary will likely be ignored. Galvanized by basic empathy, adolescent passion, and a pseudo-academic authority, students will take to the streets with banners that reflect these lies.
This has certainly been the case at UC Santa Cruz with Associate Professor and Chair of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Christine Hong, who is an outspoken supporter of the BDS and member of the writing team that worked on the Area H ethnic studies course criteria. Part of her activism has included co-founding the antizionist Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism (ICSZ) which acts as a national research group of professors who strive to drive a wedge between Judaism and the legitimacy of Israel as the Jewish homeland. The tactics employed by ICSZ have so far amounted to bullying Jews and Zionists into silence and gaslighting them about the dangers of antizionism.
With the official support of UCSC’s Ethnic Studies department, Hong and her associates have contributed to an environment where antizionist graduate students recently felt emboldened to hold thousands of final grades hostage to demand amnesty for student activists arrested for participating in the campus’s 2023 pro-hamas encampment.
It should come as no surprise then that the state-wide UC Ethnic Studies Council which strongly advocated for Area H and whose members were involved in writing the course content and class materials for the proposed one semester high school class in ethnic studies, have signed statements publicly condemning Zionism and labeling Israel as a settler-colonial state. Some have even framed Hamas’s October 7 massacre as part of a broader anti-colonial struggle. When these views shape the instruction of future K–12 ethnic studies teachers, the potential for biased instruction becomes more than hypothetical.
Zionism is not a settler colonial movement. It is a national liberation movement with a long and complex history. Jews returned to a land where they had historical ties and established a state in the face of existential threats. To teach otherwise is not just an error—it is a distortion.
Professor Benny Morris, in his 2020 review of Rashid Khalidi’s “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine,” dismantled this myth. “Zionism was a movement of desperate, idealistic Jews from Eastern and Central Europe bent on immigrating to a country that had once been populated and ruled by Jews, not ‘another’ country.” The Zionist settlers “were not the sons of an imperial power,” and the enterprise “was never designed to politically or strategically serve an imperial mother country or economically exploit it on behalf of any empire.”
But such views are not welcome in many ethnic studies classrooms. Instead, the narrative is one-sided: Israel is a colonial oppressor, and Palestinians are victims of a genocidal regime. This narrative leaves no room for nuance, no room for history, and no room for dialogue or peace-building.
In adopting this view wholesale, ethnic studies becomes a tool not for justice, but for indoctrination. Students are taught to see one side as righteous and the other as evil. This is not education. It is propaganda.
If ethnic studies is to be a force for understanding, it must include all stories—even those that complicate the dominant narrative. Jewish students deserve to see their identities reflected with dignity, not suspicion. All students deserve to learn about Zionism with historical accuracy, not ideological distortion.
With over 400,000 students graduating annually from California high schools, the scope of influence is vast. If these students are taught that Israel is an apartheid state born of settler colonialism—without any context for Jewish history, Zionism, or Arab-Israeli wars—they will enter civic life with a skewed understanding of international affairs and human rights.
AB 101 which relies on curriculum guardrails to limit antizionist propaganda has yet to be implemented due to the unwillingness of Governor Newsom to authorize the necessary state funding. In response, AB 1468 “Ethnic studies: content standards, curriculum frameworks, instructional materials, and compliance monitoring” was introduced to the California Assembly in February of 2025.
If passed, it would have limited what can and cannot be taught in an ethnic studies classes offered by California public high schools irrespective of the funding status of the previous bill. Its intended goal was to assure California residents that ethnic studies classes would teach history, not ideology, and would foster understanding, not division.
Unfortunately, assembly hearings on AB 1468 have been suspended since May. This vacuum reopened the ethnic studies classroom in California to the risk that antisemitism couched in antizionism will become more widespread and embedded in school curriculums.
However, in May, AB 715, “Educational equity: discrimination” was introduced. This bill seeks to control the curriculum and instructional materials used in California classrooms to protect students from discrimination that is considered illegal.
Set to be presented to the Senate Education Committee on July 9th, this would make California school districts accountable for violations of anti-discrimination laws that occur in the classrooms under their jurisdiction.
Unsurprisingly the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) are applauding the apparent defeat of AB 1468 and rallying against Assembly Bill 715. The kind of baseless and incendiary antizionist rhetoric which is fundamental to the pedagogy of their preferred version of liberated ethnic studies is certainly discriminatory.
AB 715 expands the definition of “nationality” to include not only a person’s citizenship, country or origin and national origin but also a person’s “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics, or residency in a country with a dominant religion or distinct religious identity”. The broadening of the definition of nationality will protect Jewish students from antisemitic lessons designed to be antizionist. But Jews are certainly not the only ethnicity that will be protected by the bill. AB 715 states that “discrimination against pupils who identify as Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Christian, Tao, Shinto, or Buddhist, pupils of native religious groups, pupils of indigenous religious groups, or pupils of another religious group, when the discrimination involves racial, ethnic, or ancestral slurs or stereotypes, constitutes discrimination on the basis of nationality.” The bill will also give parents and students more recourse to the California Department of Education to file complaints and it will make Local Education Agencies more accountable for lessons and teaching materials that discriminate against students based on their nationality. It seems CAIR and JVP are willing to throw any indigenous minority under the bus in their crusade to indoctrinate current and future students to be antizionist in practice and thus antisemitic as a result.
AB 101 offered guidelines to protect students from ideology-pushing teachers and administrators. AB 1468 sought to clamp down on these violations by regulating the ethnic studies curriculum. Now, AB 715 confronts antisemitism head on.
The purpose of education is to open minds, not close them. Teachers must be held to standards that prioritize balance, accuracy, and inclusivity. Otherwise, we risk turning a generation of students into activists without context, critics without knowledge, and voters without an appreciation for the deep and enduring conflict between the Arabs and the Jews between the “river and the sea.” It is unfortunate that this must be legislated but it has become clear that one teacher’s liberation may be a student’s condemnation.
