by Mark McDermott
The Manhattan Beach Unified School District Board of Education is preparing to offer two new courses for the 2025-26 school year that would each meet the state of California’s legally mandated ethnic studies requirements.
A yearlong course, titled “U.S. History: Diversity and Cultural Studies,” would expand on a pilot course offered this year by teacher Andy Caine and would satisfy both the state’s ethnic studies and history graduation requirements. A semester-long course titled “Visual Arts: Diversity and Cultural Studies,” has been designed by teacher Kate Heredia and would satisfy the ethnic studies requirement.
The presentation of new courses, delivered to the MBUSD Board of Education January 22, came only days after President Donald Trump specifically targeted such educational efforts in his inauguration address. Caine referenced those remarks at the outset of the meeting.
“I want to address something President Trump said in his inaugural address, as he denigrated the idea of diversity education and diversity and inclusion programs, in particular. I couldn’t disagree more with him,” Caine said. “He said that these programs are designed to make white students feel guilty. That is quite far from the truth, and I believe his attitude is a disservice to the young people of our country….It is impossible, by definition, for any young person in a class right now, for any of us, to be guilty for acts that happened so long ago — slavery, Jim Crow, antisemitism, Islamophobia, etc. We’re not guilty for those things, but we should feel bad about them, and we should recognize the truth of the United States and what’s happening here right now, and with that knowledge, try to make this place better. That’s what diversity education is about, learning about each other, seeing the problems and trying to fix them together.”
The new classes are the result of Assembly Bill 101, which became law in 2021, making California the first state to require all students to complete a semester-long course in ethnic studies to earn a high school diploma. The law takes effect with the graduating class of 2029-30, though high schools must start offering courses by the 2025-26 school year.
After the passage of AB 101, MBUSD formed an Ethnic Studies committee composed of parents, students, and teachers in order to help develop the new courses. Last March, the board approved two Diversity and Cultural Studies courses, both a yearlong and a semester long section. Those courses are taught by Caine.
Irene Gonzalez Castillo, the assistant superintendent in charge of instructional services, told the board the classes have been very popular — 129 students signed up for the four sections, three of which are yearlong and one a semester-long course, averaging 32 to 33 students per section.
“So it’s exciting to see those numbers and the continued interest of our current students and also with us, but also new students who have come to join Costa recently,” Gonzalez-Castillo said.
The two new courses fulfill direction given by the board last March to add integrated class options that would also meet the ethnic studies requirement and give students additional options. An integrated course is an existing course with an additional focus on ethnic studies. “U.S. History: Diversity and Cultural Studies” integrates an existing history course with ethnic studies and meets state graduation requirements in both areas.
“It is the United States History course that involves more perspectives,” said Jonathan Erickson, MBUSD director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. “The United States history standards already have a lot of [ethnic studies] embedded in it. A big part of it, though, is trying to capture many stories that are missing within the typical narratives of United States history…And when you think about an integrated course, it really is one of the ones that fits most naturally.”
“History, like we’ve said, already has so many of these topics in it. This just gives it an extra clear focus, in particular on groups that may not have been recognized as much in traditional US history courses…We’re looking at history in the classic way of studying events and how they happen. But this goes a little bit deeper into the perspectives of people and the social movements that were connected with it.”
Historian Ronald Takaki’s “A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America” is a textbook for the new U.S. History: Diversity and Cultural Studies” course that will be offered at Mira Costa High School.One of the key textbooks for the course is a classic in the field, “A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America,” by Ronald Takaki. The book won the American Book Award in 1994. Takaki was considered a pioneer in multiculturalism.
“My grandfather emigrated from Japan to work on the cane fields of Hawaii in 1886, and my mother was born on the Hawi Plantation,” Takaki wrote in his introduction to A Different Mirror. “As a teenager growing up on Oahu, I was not academically inclined but was actually a surfer. During my senior year, I took a religion course taught by Dr. Shunji Nishi, a Japanese American with a Ph.D. I remember going home and asking my mother, who only had an eighth-grade education: ‘Mom, what’s a Ph.D.?’ She answered: ‘I don’t know but he must be very smart.’ Dr. Nishi became a role model for me, and he arranged for me to attend the College of Wooster. There my fellow white students asked me questions like: ‘How long have you been in this county? Where did you learn to speak English?’ They did not see me as a fellow American. I did not look white or European in ancestry. As a scholar, I have been seeking to write a more inclusive and hence more accurate history of Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans as well as certain European immigrant groups like the Irish and Jews. My scholarship seeks not to separate our diverse groups but to show how our experiences were different but they were not disparate. Multicultural history, as I write and present it, leads not to what [historian Arthur] Schlesinger calls the ‘disuniting of America’ but rather to the re-uniting of America.”
Board trustee Cathey Graves, who was a board representative on the MBUSD ethnic studies committee, recalled a Mira Costa student who also served on the committee expressing incredulity that American history would ever be taught without a multicultural perspective, given the diversity that is at the heart of the American story.
“I recall one senior at the time said, ‘We shouldn’t have to do this course. This is the way history should be taught. It should include all of these stories, and then we wouldn’t have to have a separate course,’” Graves recalled. “But in fact, that’s not the way the textbook writers have included history, and so this course really, truly answers to that student, in particular, and really teaches the way history should be taught.”
The course includes 12 units, beginning with an introduction to ethnic studies issues and American values and ranging through areas of study such as migration and displacement, nativism, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the American homefront during WWII, and the Civil Rights movement of the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. Erickson said that students will be able take deeper dives into areas they would like to study more deeply.
“A big theme that occurs in these courses is students choosing what they want to study further,” he said. “None of these courses can cover all the different subgroups, all the different cultures that we want to cover in a course. But one great thing is by teaching some very specific examples, then students are equipped with the tools to do deeper research into a chosen particular group….So while there’ll be certain examples, students will have the chance to, as a group, research a particular person or group, talk about the obstacles and adversity that they faced, and what achievement they overcame in that process.”
An example could be the Japanese-American experience during WWII. Francis Uyematsu immigrated from Japan early last century and built a prospering nursery business before he and his entire family were interred at the Manzanar War Relocation Center. After the war, Uyematsu sold the 40 acres that became Mira Costa High School in order to regain financial footing after crushing financial losses of the war years.
The other new integrated course, the semester-long Visual Arts: Diversity and Cultural Studies,” is a multi-media art course in which students will both study artists and create their own. “The course will provide an introduction to the study of the diverse peoples of the United States and their experiences, using a lens from the Visual Arts,” says the course description. “Students will develop and cultivate respect, empathy, and solidarity with historically underrepresented people (Asian and Pacific Islander, Black, Latinx, and Native American) through Visual Arts, recognizing and celebrating their contributions. Additionally, students will gain the foundational knowledge and skills necessary to creatively express themselves as individuals and members of their communities through art.”
The course uses another American Book Award winner, “The Best We Could Do,” by Thi Bui, which chronicles her family’s experience before, during, and after the Vietnam War, and their subsequent immigration to the United States.
Among the assignments, students will “conduct self reflection about their own identity including journal entries, a poem and interviews with family,” according to the course description. “Students will consider what their life would be like if they experienced a situation similar to the character in the novel, hypothesizing where they would go if they were forced to leave their home and what that experience would be like.”
Both courses are in the crosshairs of an executive order issued by President Trump on January 29 that would withhold funding from school districts that offer such courses.
“Parents trust America’s schools to provide their children with a rigorous education and to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation and the values for which we stand,” the executive order reads. “In recent years, however, parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies….In many cases, innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics.”
Legal and education scholars do not believe the executive order will survive legal scrutiny.
“Whether the federal government can influence curriculum in this way is a completely open question,” Jonathan Zimmerman, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies education history, told the Washington Post. “If they were actually able to compel school districts to alter their curriculum, that would be the first time the federal government had done that. Ever.”
California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta has already joined in lawsuits challenging this executive order and others relating to education.
“The President has displayed a repeated disregard for the U.S. Constitution, unfortunately,” Bonta said at a press conference last week. “We do still need to begin with the fact that the right to education and equal protection under the law are protected by the U.S. Constitution and the California Constitution.”
Federal funds, at any rate, amount to less than 4% of MBUSD revenues, and none of the ethnic studies classes are federally funded. In fact, neither of the two new classes will have a budgetary impact on MBUSD — the arts course will be funded by Prop. 28 funds earmarked for arts education, and the history course falls under preexisting state funding.
Graves said the additions to MBUSD curriculum give the students more learning opportunities, and in particular the integrated options allow students to fulfill multiple requirements with a single class.
“I think it’s just fabulous,” she said. “And in particular, in light of world events, I think this education is more important than ever.”
Student board member Alex Weinbaum said she wished such options had existed throughout her time at Mira Costa.
“If I was a freshman coming in seeing all of this, I just know how comforted I would feel,” she said. “Especially with all of the current events happening in the world, it’s a little bit scary for a teenager, especially a teenage woman going into the future.”
The school board unanimously voted to add the new classes at its February 5 meeting. ER