Santa Rosa students are expected to ‘engage in collective action that challenges inequality directly by raising consciousness.’
A California school district paid a consulting firm more than half of a million dollars to implement a vast ethnic-studies curriculum, one focused heavily on critical race theory, equitable social-justice goals, and systems of oppression.
Santa Rosa City Schools first signed an agreement with Acosta Educational Partnership in 2021, at which point the district paid $99,000 for Acosta to instruct teachers and administrators on “culturally responsive sustaining and humanizing education,” “Ethnic Studies pedagogy,” and “culturally responsive curriculum.” In total, the district spent $530,000 contracting with Acosta: $161,000 in 2022, $142,500 in 2023, and $127,500 in 2024, according to documents obtained by parental advocacy group, Parents Defending Education, which were first shared with National Review.
The ethnic-studies courses feature ideologically slanted discussions on race, gender, and identity, according to the internal documents. The middle-school curriculum for example, “teaches students to explore their identity, their family history, and their community history through the lens of race, ethnicity, nationality, and culture” and “seeks to educate students to be politically, socially, and economically conscious about their personal connections to local and global histories.”
Through the course, students are expected to “recognize unfairness on the individual level (e.g., biased speech) and injustice at the institutional or systemic level (e.g., discrimination),” “plan and carry out collective action against bias and injustice in the world and will evaluate what strategies are most effective,” and “engage in collective action that challenges inequality directly by raising consciousness and focusing on improving conditions for under-represented groups.”
Middle-school students also discuss “the privilege that they may have and how to use it, identify inequities in their own lives, and identify ways in which they may be perpetuating or challenging them” before writing “a personal essay describing how your understanding of race and identity has evolved over the duration of this course.”
The high-school ethnic-studies curriculum is “rooted in social justice,” an overview of the lesson plan says, and “examines the history, culture, identities, and experiences of colonially and institutionally oppressed communities in the United States, with particular attention to African American Studies, Native American Studies,Latino and Chicano Studies, and Asian American/Pacific Island Studies.”
Students engage in “a range of anti-bias, multicultural, and social justice issues,” and many texts, including radical social activist Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” Zinn’s book has been criticized by fellow historians as “a book animated by an intense spirit of debunking: debunking of classic American heroes, from Columbus to FDR, and debunking of American claims to altruism or exceptional virtue.”
Students also learn to “evaluate notions of ‘acting White’ amongst People of Color and reasons to behave in ways that are deemed to be professional and scholarly,” and are asked “What are the experiences of a person of color in the LGBTQ community?” and “What is cisgender privilege and how does acess [sic] to it benefit or inhibit us?” Other high-school courses discuss at length critical race theory, land acknowledgements, microaggressions, the patriarchy, heterosexism, and white supremacy. One question asks “How did racism and white supremacy play a role in American imperialism?”
“These courses are another example of districts pushing far left ideologies on young minds with the intent to turn them into leftwing social justice activists,” PDE researcher Rhyen Staley said. “These classes promote division and resentment and have no place in K-12 classrooms.”
Acosta Educational Partnership is a culturally responsive consulting firm that provides “dynamic training for educators that is centered on the cultural and community wealth of students and their families.” Social activist and educator Curtis Acosta founded the group. In 2020, Curtis Acosta led a webinar that “[used] environmental issues as an entry point for pedagogy that compares the ongoing impact of settler colonialism in Palestine to the US/Mexico border region,” and in 2021, he led a workshop “to build understanding of settler colonialism in the US and in Palestine.”
In March of last year, before Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack on Israel, a Central California school district not far from Santa Rosa terminated its contract with Acosta Educational Partnership, after community members alleged that the firm’s ethnic studies training promoted antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Mountain View Los Altos (MVLA) School District parents accused the firm of describing Jewish people as genocidal ethnic cleansers.
“Unfortunately, it is clear that the MVLA Ethnic Studies pilot curriculum has resulted in classroom lessons that elevate violent role models, divide students into victims and oppressors based on the color of their skin and advocate for one-sided political action,” the Alliance of Constructive Ethnic Studies (ACES) said at the time.
Facing financial decline, Santa Rosa City Schools is currently looking to close schools and increase staff layoffs to save money. And, the district’s elementary school students are about 30 percent proficient in reading and 25 percent proficient in math, senior advisor for PDE Michele Exner noted.
“Despite the dire state of academic performance, leaders in the schools decided to spend half a million dollars so a consultant can come in and teach race division on students,” Exner said. “It is a dereliction of their responsibilities and a disservice to families in the community.”