LOS ALTOS (KPIX 5) — A group of students at Los Altos High School want California history textbooks revised, claiming the current textbooks don’t tell the whole story.

The students claim the version of American history taught in California classrooms is at best incomplete and at worst biased and inaccurate: failing to adequately cover the experiences, accomplishments and frequent mistreatment of communities of color and women.

“There’s definitely value at looking at the good things we have done, there’s definitely value at being proud of those things, and there’s even more value in acknowledging what we haven’t done correctly,” one of the students said.

Members of a history club at the school, which calls itself “The Left Guild” for its left-leaning politics, say they spent months reviewing the state’s history standards.

In a letter to State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, the group describes the current curriculum as “sanitized” and “misrepresentative” of the actual historical record.

In one of the group’s more controversial claims, they said U.S. foreign policy after World War II represents an “actual holocaust” which has resulted “in the needless deaths of hundreds of millions.”

“If we’re not, on the one hand, learning about the true scope and scale of crimes against humanity upon which the United States was formed, the genocide of Native Americans, the realities of slavery, we’re not going to understand the similar crimes playing out in the present tense,” said Seth Donnelly, the group’s faculty advisor.

San Jose State University Professor Bob Rucker said reassessing the textbooks is long overdue, that our history books themselves have a long history of neglecting the stories of minorities and women.

“More people were involved in the history of this country, so more people should be included and seen as part of the learning of the history of this country,” Rucker told KPIX 5.

The state’s Department of Education said they will hold a series of public meetings, in a process that’s expected to take months, if not years.