SFUSD: it can eff up sometimes, but we are on the brink of triumph

There's a campaign in the San Francisco Unified School District for funding to start up a 9th grade Ethnic Studies course. This would be a great way to integrate social justice into the educational experience for young people, promoting for pre-collegiate discovery of the power of diversity awareness and activism, something sorely lacking from high school save for a few enlightened teachers. Teacher friends, can you corroborate? And given SF's history of having the first ethnic studies program in the U.S. at San Francisco State University, this would be a great way to acknowledge and continue that legacy.

This would be such an amazing addition to the cirriculum, and one that I wish I had as a teenager. Much more useful than AP European History, even though I still have love for Mr. Granucci and that course...

I hope that they make this happen because for all its faulty crap, one of the things that I really liked about going to public school in SF (I'll admit it, this prob has to do with the fact that my mom made sure I went to the quality ones--and there's a lot of things that need to change in the system overall) was that there has never been some creationist whackadoo junk, or abstinence only sex ed, but instead there were field trips to backstage at the opera, $5 symphony tickets, and musicals about AIDS (this was before RENT, people). Indeed, it's one of the aspects of growing up in a city that fosters such values as a unique part of its ethos. The success of this campaign would be just one more thing that makes me proud to be a native San Franciscan.

For those of you in the Bay Area, there's a meeting this Tuesday, January 12th. You can also sign the petition (which I've done), among other things that only take a minute to make this awesome thing happen.

More information via the Hyphen blog here.