Why Ethnic Studies Belongs in Every High School

The debate over Ethnic Studies in K-12 schools is often framed as a culture war. I want to reframe it: it is a question about whose knowledge counts, and whose history is considered worthy of study.

I came to this work as a student who did not see herself in a single textbook until graduate school. I studied California history without learning that the land beneath Silicon Valley was Ohlone territory. I read American literature without encountering a single Chicana author. I took government without learning about the bracero program that shaped my family's migration to the Bay Area.

That absence taught me something, even if it wasn't what the curriculum intended: that people like me were peripheral to the story of America. Spectators, not protagonists.

Ethnic Studies corrects that curriculum — not by erasing what came before, but by adding the full picture. Students who study Ethnic Studies are not being taught grievance. They are being taught the complete history of the country they live in.

What the research actually says is that students who take Ethnic Studies courses attend school more regularly, earn higher GPAs, and are more likely to go to college. This is true for students of every background. The courses build critical thinking, community connection, and civic engagement.

When I helped champion the expansion of Ethnic Studies across our district, I sat through long board meetings where community members expressed fear — that their children would be made to feel guilty, that the courses were divisive. I listened carefully. And then I asked: have you read the curriculum?

Because the curriculum teaches students to ask good questions. To look at primary sources. To understand that history is always told from a perspective. That is not divisive. That is the foundation of rigorous scholarship.

To my fellow trustees and school board members across the state: Ethnic Studies is not optional for the students sitting in our classrooms. For students whose families have been part of this land for generations — through Indigenous heritage, through migration, through labor — seeing their history taught with accuracy and dignity is not a political act. It is a basic act of educational justice.

The students deserve the whole story.