The gradual public disclosure of San Francisco Unified School District’s (SFUSD) “Liberated Ethnic Studies” materials continues to uncover deeply controversial teachings. Among the latest is an Adultism Workshop sponsored by SFUSD on,April 26, 2025, at John O’Connell High School in the South of Market district. Titled “Youth as Knowledge Producers: Challenging Adult Supremacy Through Ethnic Studies,” the workshop featured both morning and afternoon sessions as part of a full-day event.
According to the Friends of Lowell Foundation, the nonprofit organization that launched legal strikes against SFUSD, the training framed the fundamental relationship between teachers and students as inherently oppressive. Educators were positioned as “oppressors” and students as the “oppressed,” consistent with core tenets of liberated ethnic studies ideology. Participants were further instructed that academic rigor is a Eurocentric and harmful imposition, and that teachers have a duty to resist administrative mandates that emphasize it.
A screenshot captured by an attendee summarized the presentation: “Due to systemic power dynamics, the relationship between students and educators is inherently an oppressive one,” with the educator cast as oppressor and the student as oppressed.
Public education remains ‘crafted around Eurocentric notions of success’ deemed ‘dehumanizing’ and in need of active resistance.
Adults are “oppressors” and kids should stop listening to their parents and teachers and resist academic “rigor” because it is a colonialist ideal. | Liz Le for the Voice]
These revelations surfaced nearly a year after the SFUSD Board of Education voted to adopt the “Voices: An Ethnic Studies Survey” curriculum, without board members or the public having full access to its contents, in apparent violation of standard curriculum review protocols and state law. Requests for transparency from educators and parents were reportedly ignored or denied.
A decade of unofficial curriculum
SFUSD’s original “homegrown” ethnic studies course, developed internally around 2014 by district employees, was distributed districtwide through Google Drive folders and taught to ninth graders for a full decade. It was never formally or legally adopted by the elected Board of Education, contravening board policy and California education law.
In response to parental backlash, district leadership sidelined this homegrown version and fast-tracked the Voices curriculum. On July 29, 2025, the board approved a one-year pilot of the Gibbs Smith Education textbook for a $100,000 contract. Amid significant community backlash, a last-minute, inconsistently implemented opt-out process was introduced for automatically enrolled 2025-2026 incoming ninth graders.
On April 28, 2026, the board voted to make Voices permanent, even though parents and community members sent over 2,100 petitions in protest. Board Member Supryia Ray publicly stated she had been denied access to the full curriculum prior to both the pilot and permanent adoption votes. The publisher provided only a limited two-week trial, and physical copies were available only under restricted conditions at district headquarters. Separately, SFUSD contracted with Education Leaders of Color for $147,000 to conduct an evaluation widely criticized, including by the San Francisco Standard, for lacking methodological rigor and exhibiting confirmation bias. Eight parent reviewers were significantly outnumbered by 31 SFUSD employees, most of whom were ethnic studies teachers, administrators, or instructors already familiar with and supportive of the Voices curriculum.
Critically, the adoption did not formally rescind the original 2014–24 materials, which remain available in the district’s instructional inventory and could be reintroduced as “supplemental” resources. San Francisco taxpayers continue to fund the implementation and promotion of this curriculum, via educational bonds (for example, Public Education Enrichment Fund, PEEF) that are meant for noncore curriculum, such as music, arts, sports and libraries.
Superintendent Su has been summoned to an educational Congressional hearing on June 10, where she will be in the hot seat for ideological transparency, educational priorities, and adherence to legal and procedural standards for SFUSD.
