Castlemont High School in southeast Oakland looks more like a small county jail than a school. There are metal cages over the windows. An iron fence with locked gates surrounds the campus. Shattered glass from broken car windows cover the streets. Adults loiter in groups on surrounding streets; some catcall the girls.

This is the reality David Flores, a teacher in his mid-20s, faces every day. To meet the challenges of teaching an underserved district, Flores unapologetically admits that he’s commandeered English and social studies as ethnic studies classes.

Flores’ lesson plans use the students’ personal experiences to discuss and teach wider historical and sociological phenomena. The words “migrant/migrante,” “immigrant/inmigrante,” and “rights/derechos” are written on the dry-erase board mounted beneath posters of famous revolutionaries and Latino artists.

Instead of a simple geography lesson, Flores engages with each student’s history of migration to the United States. Then, Flores delves into a history lesson on African American diaspora after emancipation. As he weaves the students’ individual stories into a larger narrative of U.S. immigration history, he appeals for solidarity between the cultures.

All of the students are attentive and engaged. The curriculum meets their needs and prepares them for the world they will encounter.

During the 2015-16 session, the state Legislature passed AB2016. The law set up a formalized ethnic studies curriculum for public middle and high schools in California. A model curriculum was supposed to be adopted by the state Board of Education by March 2020. But what was submitted has been criticized as being riddled with jargon, propaganda, and opinion. It was rejected and tabled until next year.

Critics charge the program as politically motivated and unfit for general education. Jewish and other minority communities are upset by their severe lack of representation. These criticisms are valid and deserve to be addressed in a second draft. However, the controversy is delaying a discourse that needs immediate attention.

The lack of structural urgency is something of a routine for California’s most underfunded communities, like the Oakland Unified School District. While legislators toil over language and budgets, a few teachers, including Flores, are fortifying generic curriculum with critical social theory and people’s history to better equip their students to understand their own realities.

Flores, who was a Woodrow Wilson-Rockefeller Brothers Fund Fellowship recipient in 2013 at UCLA, sees it as his duty to carve out impactful coursework in a harsh public education system.

“The extra effort students give for a teacher who cares and uplifts them, the number of outcast youth who skip class all day but make sure to show up and pass their favorite class, the difference in students’ ability to embody humanizing practices after leaving my class — these things I’m blessed to experience daily,” Flores said. “It doesn’t show up in the data, but this work is necessary for liberation.”

Another fact does shows up in data: California’s Department of Education reports that over half of the approximately 6 million students in California public schools are Hispanic. Less than a quarter are white, approximately 10% are Asian, and 5% are African American. Efforts to update the curriculum to reflect the experiences of this diverse student body have been continuously delayed or dismissed at a legislative level.

Ethnic studies offers students from multicultural, minority, and impoverished backgrounds essential support and agency. It addresses systems of power that inhibit them from experiencing the privileges others receive. The students are empowered to embrace their cultural backgrounds and understand their history from a sociohistorical context. They learn to not blame themselves for their struggles. These are tools for survival and success.

Ethnic studies can be preventative as well as restorative. If students in all communities of California were to receive a thorough education on the multicultural experience of historical and contemporary United States, it would help to bond fragmented cultures rather than perpetuate the fear and anger that comes with cycles of accusation and ignorance. It’d build a much-needed empathy bridge.

California legislators can speculate on language, but they can’t speculate on the objective fact that massacres, lynching, enslavement, cultural erasure, displacement, oppression and imperialism are intrinsic to understanding our history.

Whitewashing these facts is fantasy. Abundant resources have made all these truths easily available and common knowledge to those willing to receive them.

Avoiding them is no longer an option.

The implementation of a formalized ethnic studies curriculum would do more than assimilate children into the California public school system, it would foster cultural and socioeconomic cohesion. It’s a worthy step forward on the path of progress.

Daniel Talamantes is a writer, editor, journalist and musician from San Francisco. His work has also been published in Wall Street International, the Santa Clara Weekly, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Goodtimes Magazine and many other places.

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