Opinion: Board should vote on ethnic studies again when it has the whole story

BY DAVE PRICE
Daily Post Editor

It can be a big mistake to sign a contract without reading it. If you don’t look carefully at, say, an auto financing contract, you might end up with higher payments than you were expecting.

We expect the school board to gather the information they need before making a decision. Sometimes that means telling the superintendent that they can’t decide something because they lack information.

Such is the case with the Palo Alto school board’s decision to make ethnic studies a graduation requirement.

I’m not against the concept of ethnic studies. It helps students understand how race, ethnicity, and other factors shape people’s experiences. It also helps students develop critical thinking skills and become informed citizens.

But before making this class a graduation requirement, the board should have had more information about how different groups would be portrayed. There’s a fear among Asian-American parents that the curriculum will downplay their experience while overemphasizing other groups. Jewish families are worried that these classes would denigrate their experience and portray Israel in an inaccurate light. I also fear that these classes could be used by teachers to turn students into protesters rather than productive members of society.

The best way to have dealt with that is for the district to have released a lesson plan for this one-semester class. A plan that shows what would be taught each day. The plan should be so granular that it includes scripts or bullet points of what a teacher would say, since ad-libbing might lead to problems different groups are concerned about.

If the students will be evaluated based on the papers they write, what will be the topics of those papers, and what points do they need to cover in order to get a good grade. Same for tests. What will they be tested upon?

The board needs to put ethnic studies back on the agenda. They should postpone any approval until they have all the answers. All proposed class materials, including books and online readings, should be available to the public long before a final decision is made. 

The approval of ethnic studies has created a massive controversy. Transparency is the only way to bring everyone together for the betterment of our students.

Editor Dave Price’s column appears on Mondays.