PICO RIVERA, Calif. – Beginning in 2016, students in California’s El Rancho Unified School District will have to pass an ethnic-studies class before they’re allowed to graduate.



Leaders of the predominately Latino district believe students need to develop ethnic “pride” and “understanding” in order to gain the confidence they’ll need to succeed in college and in their chosen careers, LATimes.com reports.

“When students learn about themselves, their history, it gives them self-worth and self-esteem and they do better in school,” Jose Lara, vice president of the El Rancho Board of Education, told LATimes.com.

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“We want to make sure that we’re producing students who go to college and are entering fields that Latino students typically don’t go into,” Lara added.

Board President Aurora Villon explained that focusing on students’ differences is “a beautiful way to unite people.”

Actually, Villon couldn’t be more wrong.

An ethnic studies class in the Tucson school district – dedicated to Chicano/Latino stories, feminist and African-American literature, LGBT writings, and “critically conscious hip-hop” – devolved into a propaganda session.

Instead of being educated in their unique cultural heritage, district and state officials deemed that students were being taught to focus on all the wrongs the various ethnic groups had suffered at the hands of the white majority.

In 2011, Arizona lawmakers voted to bar schools from offering any classes that are primarily designed for a particular ethnic group or those that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” reports LATimes.com.

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That same outcome is likely to occur in the El Rancho school district, if not immediately, then over time. The education profession is already filled with activist teachers; there’s no doubt “social justice” agitators will eventually end up controlling the district’s ethnic studies curriculum and turn it into a training program for future political radicals.

El Rancho Unified is believed to be the first California district to make ethnic studies a condition for graduation, but it probably won’t be the last. The California Legislature is considering a bill that could create a “standardized ethnic studies curriculum in high schools statewide.”

The bill – introduced by Assemblyman Luis Alejo – is awaiting action in the Senate.

Americans outside of California shouldn’t conclude this “ethnic studies” movement won’t appear in their local school system. Quite the contrary. As the nation’s school districts absorb the tens – perhaps hundreds – of thousands of immigrants who are illegally streaming into this country, Americans can expect the call for ethnic-based learning to intensify in the coming years.

It may take a decade or two, but rest assured, progressives in virtually every state and school district will one day demand that schools to replace American history (the story of “white, heterosexual men who despoiled a continent”) with more cultural and ethnic studies.

When that happens, it will be time to change the motto on the Great Seal of the United States from “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”) to something more relevant – perhaps “This is what ‘fundamental transformation’ looks like.”