CA Students Urge Assembly Members to Pass AB

May 26, 2021 The Honorable Members of the California State Assembly State Capitol Sacramento, CA 95814 RE: Thousands of CA Public School Students Strongly Urge Support for AB 101 Dear Members of the Assembly, We are a coalition of California high school and college students known as Teach Our History California. Made up of the youth organizations Diversify Our Narrative and GENup, we represent 10,000 youth leaders from across the State fighting for change. Our mission is to ensure that students across California high schools have meaningful opportunities to engage with the vast, diverse, and rich histories of people of color; and thus, we are in deep support of AB101 which will require high schools to provide ethnic studies starting in academic year 2025-26 and students to take at least one semester of an A-G approved ethnic studies course to graduate starting in 2029-30. Our original petition made in support of AB331, linked here, was signed by over 26,000 CA students and adult allies in support of passing Ethnic Studies. Please see appended to this letter our letter in support of AB331, which lists the names of all our original petition supporters. We know AB101 has the capacity to have an immense positive impact on student education, but also on student lives as a whole. For many students, our communities continue to be systematically excluded from narratives presented to us in our classrooms. By passing AB101, we can change the precedent of exclusion and allow millions of students to learn the histories of their peoples. We ask that you let educators teach our histories—we urge you to support the passing of AB101. We understand that the fight for Ethnic Studies in California has persisted for many years, followed by debates over the chosen draft of the Model Curriculum. We must take into account, however, the constantly changing nature of our histories and the ways in which we interpret them. As said by activist Dr. Lisa Lowe, Asian American culture is “an alternative site where the pampliset of lost memories is reinvented, histories are fractured and retraced, and the unlike varieties of silence emerge into articulacy.”1 This statement applies to culture as a whole, for peoples of all racial backgrounds. Given that white supremacy is a global structuring logic and system predicated on the erasure of colonized and racially marginalized people, the act of remembering and reconstructing history is a profound form of resistance and healing. And because we are in constant states of remembering and reclaiming control of narratives, we are constantly shifting and retelling history. The model curriculum serves primarily as a framework and is in a much better place than previous iterations. As the model curriculum is a living, breathing, fluid document, we aim to continue restructuring and relearning these stories over time. Ethnic Studies is not a static discipline; rather, similarly to the curriculum, it is constantly evolving like other scholarly fields, with frameworks that continue to be molded. The debates over the curriculum are plenty—but ultimately, they all center on the creation of a more historically accurate curriculum that honors the histories, contradictions, struggles, and victories of communities of color and would represent the diverse student population that makes up California. We ask that you allow students the opportunity to learn the critical histories that have been neglected in and systematically withheld from school settings. When creating this coalition of high school and college students, we sat down and discussed our own academic experiences. The coalition is made up of a variety of students form all across California, with students from a broad range of backgrounds in class, race, school size, and more. Very few of us had been taught about events such as the burning of Black Wall Street or the multiracial organizing work of the Third World Liberation Front that led to the creation of the first institutional Ethnic Studies department. Students felt that their histories had largely been excluded. For example, many of us had never even been assigned books written by people of color in our English classrooms. We understand the importance of Ethnic Studies in equipping us with the tools and knowledge to address the root causes of the historically ongoing social, economic, and environmental issues impacting our communities. AB101 is particularly important because it outlines an interdisciplinary application of Ethnic Studies. The bill specifically touches upon the intersection of race in all topics, from STEM to the social sciences. We underscore the necessity to include race in our analysis of all academic subjects given that race exists as a structuring feature of the social world from which academics emerge. To students of color who wish to enter STEM fields, we hope to speak of great scientists such as NASA Engineer and Black woman Mary W Jackson, 2 or Dr. Susan La Flesche Picotte, 1 Lowe, Lisa, “Immigrantion, Citizenship, and Racialization: Asian American Critique,” in Immigrant Acts (Duke 1996), 6. 2 “Mary W Jackson.” 2021. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/content/mary-w-jackson-biography. the first Indigenous woman in America to get a medical degree.3 It is understanding how people of color have often been overlooked in American history, removed from the narrative, and how we are fighting to reclaim that power. As children, we were taught that we would learn the most vital, fundamental principles throughout our K-12 education. We learned the history of our founding fathers, the narratives of Gatsby and Shakespeare; we learned how to read,write, and think critically. But for many of us, we never learned about the construction of race or how to critically include race in any of our analyses. We never learned about our identities and the histories that led to the structuring of our lived experiences. For many of us, it was not until college that we were able to learn about the role of race in our society. Students should not have to wait until university to be taught these frameworks. As movements such as Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate continue to proliferate through our society, many of us have begun to reflect on the absence of these perspectives in our mainstream and mandated education. By learning both our own stories and the stories of our peers, we hope to foster a more inclusive and accepting community for our students and California residents overall. Through shared narratives, we strive for justice and equity. We, the students of the Teach Our History Coalition, see AB101 as a step in this direction. We once again urge you to vote yes on AB101. In solidarity, The Teach Our History California Coalition (E): [email protected] CC: Honorable Gavin Newsom, Governor of the State of California, Honorable Tony Thurmond, Superintendent of Public Instruction Honorable Anthony Rendon, Speaker of the California State Assembly, Honorable Toni Atkins, President pro Tempore of the California State Senate, Honorable Jose Medina, Assemblymember for the 61st Assembly District, Linda Darling-Hammond, President, State Board of Education, Brooks Allen, Executive Director, State Board of Education, Ben Chida, Chief Deputy Cabinet Secretary, Governor’s Office, Joey Freeman, Chief Deputy Legislative Affairs Secretary, Governor’s Office, Alex Stack, Deputy Communications Director, Governor’s Office, Angie Wei, Legislative Affairs Secretary, Governor’s Office, Stephanie Gregson, Chief Deputy Superintendent, California Department of Education 3 “Dr Susan La Flesche Picotte.” 2003. Changing the Face of Medicine. https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_253.html. Signatories Youth - Led Organizations: ● Teach our History Student Coalition ● GENup ● Diversify Our Narrative ● Bayarea Student Activists ● Oakland Students for Public Education ● Justice in the Classroom ● All For One ● California Youth Progressive Alliance ● Capistrano Unified School District Students Against Racism ● Step It Up ● Students Rise ● AAPI Youth Rising ● Dear Asian Youth ● DICCEE September 13, 2020 The Honorable Gavin Newsom Governor of the State of California State Capitol, First Floor Sacramento, CA 95814 Re: Support for AB 331 (Medina) Dear Governor Newsom, Current events are evidence that we, California students, exist in the midst of complex systems of privilege, inequality, and injustice. Our education system owes it to us to equip us with the tools to adequately navigate these systems, yet our history courses largely focus on the highlights of European and American history, disregarding the negative impacts of the European experience and misinforming us on how the U.S. government harmed and discriminated against marginalized groups. The rich BIPOC history is often minimized and not wholly discussed or taught. Not only do our textbooks have an inaccurate historical lean, but many of our History and Humanities teachers also enable and facilitate biased ideas and discussions. And as we are taught a largely biased curriculum, students take this information as fact, which allows and enables their own biased opinions that cause great harm to our BIPOC students. Our schools are facing a two-pronged issue regarding education: first, our history classes teach biased information; and second, we are not taught the importance of reevaluating our biases. It is pertinent to note that simply infusing representation of racially and ethnically diverse people into curriculum only marginally affects students’ attitudes because racial attitudes are acquired actively rather than passively. Ethnic Studies curricula that embeds the issues of racism within it will have a stronger positive impact than curricula that portray diverse groups but ignore racism. AB-331 seeks to remedy this issue by requiring at least one semester of Ethnic Studies, based on a model curriculum in ethnic studies, as a graduation requirement at all California high schools--including charter schools--beginning in the 2024-2025 school year. A student may satisfy the ethnic studies course requirement by completing either (A) an ethnic studies course, or (B) an ethnic studies course taught as a course in another subject.

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