By Marsha Sutton
Times of San Diego
CARLSBAD, California — The importance of the Feb. 19 court decision against the Santa Ana Unified School District, for approving flawed and biased ethnic studies course material without public notice, cannot be overstated.
Its outcome, which has even reached newspapers in Israel, has implications for other California school districts, including those in San Diego County, that are approving or using discriminatory material and doing so without proper public notice.
The Santa Ana decision came 18 months after a coalition of organizations sued the district in Sept. 2023, accusing it of violating California’s open meetings Brown Act and not protecting the public, including members of the Jewish community, from intimidation and harassment at board meetings.
The coalition included the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the Potomac Law Group. Supporting this litigation as legal consultant was the StandWithUs Saidoff Legal Department.
The 2023 lawsuit alleged that in March and April 2023 the SAUSD “knowingly circumvented the law and was misleading in its effort to pass curricula with dangerously anti-Jewish teachings that violate state rules and ethical standards, all without community awareness.”
“The Santa Ana school board has allowed ethnic studies courses with substantial antisemitic content to slide through the approval process without giving the public legally required notice or a meaningful opportunity to comment,” said L. Rachel Lerman, general counsel of the Brandeis Center.
“Community input is not just important, it is also the law, one the Santa Ana district has blatantly violated,” said Marc Stern, AJC chief legal officer.
It is not just the Brown Act that was violated but also a portion of Assembly Bill 101 which requires a course in ethnic studies for high school graduation, beginning with the class 2030.
For districts developing their own course work, the relevant portion of AB 101 states that the proposed coursework “shall first be presented at a public meeting” and “shall not be approved until a subsequent public meeting” at which “the public has had the opportunity to express its views on the proposed course.”
The coalition said the item to review ethnic studies coursework was on the March 2023 school board meeting agenda but provided insufficient and vague descriptions of what was being considered. Absent was any presentation, discussion or public comment.
The plaintiffs’ memorandum said the agenda item consisted of “merely reading the titles of the courses,” according to a Feb. 21, 2025 article in EdSource, “and the entire ‘presentation’ was over in less than 30 seconds.”
The courses were approved by the school board at its April 2023 meeting, again with no discussion, in violation of AB 101’s two-meeting notice requirement.
By the time the public learned about the controversial curriculum and spoke at the May 2023 meeting, it was too late for the school board to take public comments into consideration.
Nevertheless, several speakers addressed the board to protest the antisemitic content at the May meeting but were interrupted and harassed by some in the audience who “held up inflammatory signs about Zionists and heckled speakers … and the board didn’t [do anything] to stop it,” Lerman said, noting that school boards are by law supposed to prevent disruption at public meetings and SAUSD failed to quell hostile behavior.
One Jewish speaker, she said, was harassed by an anti-Israel activist who followed her to her car in the parking lot after the meeting.
Other public comments at that May SAUSD board meeting included speakers supporting the antisemitic ethnic studies content, some referring to Israel as a settler state and a brutal colonial occupier, and “worse than the colonial regime in South Africa.” This according to information provided by the Brandeis Center.
One speaker urged the board not to “bow to the dictates of organizations such as the ADL whose dark stains of bigotry and racism sully their every step.”
As part of the settlement, the SAUSD, the 12th largest in the state, will cease instruction of three ethnic studies courses “until the courses are redesigned with the opportunity for public input” and agreed to disband its ethnic studies steering committee which demonstrated an openly anti-Jewish bias.
In one example, the lone Jewish member of the steering committee reportedly overheard another committee member saying, “We don’t need to give both sides. We only support the oppressed, and the Jews are the oppressors.”
Other examples include committee references to the “Jewish Question” and Jewish organizations as racist.
In deciding when to present two proposed ethnic studies courses to the board, two senior district officials suggested scheduling it on a Jewish holiday, “making it difficult or impossible for Jews to attend,” according to the lawsuit.
The EdSource story included the following exchange: “We may need to use Passover to get all new courses approved,” one suggested. The other official responded, “That’s actually a good strategy.”
The lawsuit said the district and its steering committee worked with outside consultants, including the Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing (XITO) which was paid $300,663 by the district in consulting fees, according to EdSource.
XITO has posted on social media anti-Israel tropes about Zionist control and has labeled Zionism “a nationalist, colonial ideology,” according to the plaintiffs.
XITO also embraces the first-draft ethnic studies model curriculum that included virulent antisemitic content. Many groups have re-branded this version — now referred to as Liberated Ethnic Studies — as a viable alternative to the state-approved model curriculum.
With Israel playing a central role as an “oppressor state” and an example of “white settler colonialism,” the LES model curriculum was rejected by the state for its anti-Jewish bias and other discriminatory content.
Districts have been told by the state not to use the LES model, but alarmingly it has been adopted by more than two dozen school districts in California, according to EdSource.
The Brandeis Center’s Lerman said the Santa Ana violations have ramifications for other school districts throughout the state, including in San Diego County.
“The public should know that a lot of this stuff is going on behind closed doors and under the radar,” she said.
Why any discussion of Israel is even included in California’s ethnic studies curriculum is baffling, considering that the legislation asks districts to focus on the struggles and contributions of four ethnic groups: African-, Asian-, Latino- and Native-Americans.
Including Palestinians into the Asian group, which some teachings do, seems a stretch, especially because Israelis also live in the same part of the world but are excluded.
“We know that [some] consider anti-Zionism a pillar of ethnic studies,” Lerman said. “The one in Santa Ana is particularly egregious, and we would like to sound a warning about that.”
In a StandWithUs new release published after the decision was announced, Lerman said, “This dangerous and deceitful behavior is being attempted in other school districts as well. We are watching those jurisdictions and will not hesitate to address similar violations of the law.”
Marci Miller, director of legal investigations for the Brandeis Center, said in a statement that the terms of the settlement should act as a deterrent for other districts.
“We hope this is a cautionary tale to all the districts in California and anyone else who’s hoping to infuse ethnic studies with antisemitism, especially if they’re doing it in secret,” she said.
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Marsha Sutton is an education writer and opinion columnist and can be reached at suttonmarsha@gmail.com. This report appeared initially in Times of San Diego, with which San Diego Jewish World trades stories under auspices of the San Diego Online News Association.