Leftists love using our education system to advance their utopian visions by “teaching” students that America is irredeemably racist and must be completely transformed. They have gotten bolder and bolder, turning classrooms into indoctrination camps.

In California, the left pushed for a radical “ethnic studies” program requiring that any student who wanted to attend a University of California school would need to have taken a course in high school designed to instill grievances and guilt. Almost unbelievably, the idea was rejected, and in today’s Martin Center article, UCLA professor Richard Sander tells the story.

He writes:

During the 2010s, many liberated ethnic studies (LES) advocates, with strong support from teachers’ unions, pressed for the adoption of a statewide mandate that all public high-school students complete an ethnic-studies course as a graduation requirement. They won only a partial victory. In 2021, the legislature passed (and Governor Newsom signed) AB 101, which articulated such a requirement for high-school students graduating in 2030 and later, but with two contingencies: first, that the state pass separate legislation ‘funding’ the new mandate (the cost of implementation was estimated at around $250 million) and, second, that the content of particular ethnic-studies courses would be under the control of local school boards.

That did not satisfy the progressives, so they came up with a new plan (called Proposal H) to make all students sit through their propaganda, namely for the UC system to add LES as another requirement for applicants.

But there were problems with that, as Sander explains:

Of course, even if one agreed with some or all of the LES agenda, there were serious problems with Proposal H. First, both state law and the university’s bylaws require that the university operate “entirely independent of any partisan or sectarian influence.” Mandating that high-school students take a highly political, partisan course to even be considered for UC admission obviously violates this principle. Second, the state legislature had just deliberated on the issue of ethnic studies in high school and had clearly determined that course content was a matter of local control; Proposal H was — indeed, was designed to be — an end run around a specific state policy. Third, Proposal H would force schools that lacked an existing LES course to create one. Forcing an unfunded mandate upon local school districts would be unprecedented.

Unexpectedly, the UC governing system defeated Proposal H. Who would have thought that California academics would say no’ to a leftist scheme for dominance?

Read the whole thing.