“A nonbinary Black person named Jay is walking through their neighborhood park one day wearing a dress when a Karen stops them. The Karen asks what Jay is doing in the park. Jay says, ‘Walking.’ The Karen says, ‘This park is for residents of Lakefront Community only. I’m calling the police. Strange men aren’t allowed.’ Jay says, ‘I am a resident of the community, and I’m not a man.’ The Karen rolls her eyes and says, ‘Of course you aren’t.’
“Which of Jay’s intersecting identities are being targeted? What evidence shows this? What could Jay do to resist?”
The above is not a parody. It is a real homework lesson for real students at a real American school: George Washington High School in San Francisco. Those who believe that “peak woke” has passed may yet be in for a rude awakening.
Among other things taught at the school, students are learning that George Washington was a racist, Sydney Sweeney’s jeans advert was an example of white supremacist messaging, and Elon Musk is a fascist. The class in question – American Ethnic Studies – is now a matter of growing controversy for the beleaguered San Francisco Unified School District, which governs curriculum and assessment in America’s most famously liberal city.
Racist Sweeney
That the course materials stray far from objective fact and into extreme left-wing proselytizing can be established from even a brief examination of the slides presented to students.
In one slide, for example, students are taught explicitly that Sydney Sweeney’s famous American Eagle “good jeans” advert was racist – and not merely racist, but suggestive of eugenics. The case against the actress is then strengthened by reference to the claim that Sweeney is a “Trump supporter”, though she has never publicly confirmed or denied this.
The implication is revealing: an objectively neutral act, such as appearing in an advertising campaign, can apparently become more or less racist depending on the presumed political preferences of the person carrying it out. This is not the teaching of history or civics, but rather the teaching of ideological interpretation as fact.
In another slide, students are taught that Elon Musk is a Nazi. Another slide is titled “Cops Are Not Workers” and states that “police unions are not true unions”. Yet another defines a “Karen” as a white woman who may express fear in the presence of a Black man, citing the example of Amy Cooper – the New York woman whose life became a culture-war flashpoint after she called the police on a Black man who she believed posed a threat to her dog.
The point is not that controversial subjects should never be discussed in classrooms. However, the curriculum indisputably presents a highly specific ideological worldview as the framework through which students are expected to understand race, gender, policing, advertising, capitalism and American history.
Curriculum Controversies Continue
Perhaps the most extraordinary part of the story is that the new material at Washington High follows an earlier and substantial controversy in San Francisco about ethnic studies.
Last year, an ethnic studies curriculum called Voices was introduced by SFUSD across the city, provoking outrage from parents who considered it vastly too political and left-wing for high school students – especially students who were to encounter its contents before they had even studied American history in any serious depth.
In response to the criticism, the district introduced a revised and milder, though still controversial, version of the curriculum. But the adoption of that curriculum by schools is not mandatory.
What appears to have happened at Washington High is that the school’s ethnic studies department declined to use the district’s revised “official” curriculum and instead produced one of its own – a version more radical again than the curriculum the district had already been forced to amend.
The department head, a teacher called Sarita Lavin, told local TV station KQED in September that Voices was flawed because “it has no mention of trans people or queer people or their struggles, which is pretty appalling considering the student populations we serve and the fact that we are in San Francisco, which has been a historic hub for queer resistance and rights”.
That statement is revealing. The complaint was not that the official curriculum was insufficiently factual, rigorous or balanced – it was that it was not activist enough.
Politics Taught as Fact
Responding to criticism last year, the school district said that the lack of a standardized curriculum gave teachers the option to “supplement the current District framework”. In practice, this appears to mean that individual teachers and schools are free, under San Francisco’s rules, to teach children radical left-wing politics as though they were settled fact.
This is the central issue. The district can say that no single curriculum is mandatory. But if the result is that teachers are free to substitute their own political materials with little meaningful oversight, then the absence of standardization is not moderation. It is abdication.
The freedom of San Francisco to do this has become a culture-war flashpoint. Republicans in Congress are eager to highlight the city’s alleged radicalism as a political issue and to use examples like this as evidence that “left-wing radical” teachers are indoctrinating students. Progressives, meanwhile, cite America’s constitutional arrangement – which prioritizes federalism and states’ rights – as evidence that they are fighting back against Trumpist overreach.
Trump himself seems torn by the topic. On the one hand, his administration is entirely opposed to the San Francisco curriculum and the ideology it represents. On the other, a standardized national approach to education would offend key Republican constituencies who favor homeschooling, local control and curricula of their own – some of which would horrify progressive sensibilities in blue America.
Trump's De-Federalization of Education
The president has vowed to abolish the federal Department of Education altogether, a project being overseen by his education secretary, Linda McMahon. Under this approach, education would become almost wholly a matter for the states, which in turn often devolve power to local elected school districts.
In theory, this allows democracy to flourish and permits local parents to exercise significant control over what their children are taught. Yet in practice, in cities like San Francisco, it can mean that the classroom becomes intensely politicized, with schools serving less as institutions of education than as engines of ideological formation.
In a divided America, this raises an uncomfortable prospect: a generation of young people being radicalized into deeply opposing political camps long before they are old enough to vote. In San Francisco, students are taught extreme left-wing ideas about gender, sex, racism, policing, capitalism and climate. In Alabama, they may learn something completely different.
A country cannot easily sustain a common civic culture when its children are being taught incompatible accounts of reality. The classroom is no longer merely a place where America’s political battles are discussed. Increasingly, it is where those battles are being fought.