Sade Bonilla, an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education, and colleagues found that high school students in the San Francisco Unified School District experienced academic benefits from participating in an ethnic studies course.
Ethnic studies is a culturally relevant curriculum designed to address the instructional needs of an increasingly diverse student population. However, evidence regarding the effectiveness of this curriculum at scale remains limited.
Now, in a recent large-scale study, a team of researchers including Sade Bonilla, an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education, has found that high school students who take ethnic studies courses have higher academic performance, fewer course failures, and improved college readiness. The study was published in the American Educational Research Journal.
The study tracked more than 24,000 students in the San Francisco Unified School District from middle school through high school and tested the effects of enrollment in a year-long districtwide high school ethnics study course.
The team, which included researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Irvine, analyzed the performance of the district’s major racial groups—Asian, Black, Latino, and White—and found gains among all student groups, with the strongest gains in science and math.
“We also looked at students receiving special education services and English Language Learners, and then we also looked at students who were academically at risk prior to taking the course, in addition to students who had higher academic performance,” says Bonilla, who is also a senior research specialist at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. “The throughline is that all of these student groups experienced these academic benefits from participating in the ethnic studies course.”
Bonilla says the ethnic studies course centers the identities, experiences, and culture of underrepresented communities and helps students engage critically with ideas around social inequality and understanding social movements.
She adds that most of the students took the course in ninth or 10th grade, a “particularly sensitive time period” for students when they are transitioning to a larger and more rigorous environment and often struggle academically. Concurrently, students are asking themselves questions about their identities, such as who they are, where they belong, who their friends are, and what role they play in their community.
Assistant professor Sade Bonilla of the Graduate School of Education.
(Image: Graduate School of Education)
“Ethnic studies really engages deeply with some of these questions,” Bonilla says. “The course gives terminology and recognition to some of the things students might be experiencing, such as units about stereotypes, housing discrimination, and school discrimination.”
To rule out the notion that the academic gains seen in the study were simply the result of good teaching, Bonilla says they examined teachers who taught both ethnic studies and non-ethnic studies classes and compared student outcomes across the two. They found that students in the non-ethnic studies courses did not experience the same growth in GPA or reductions in course failure rates.
“That would lead us to believe that it’s not the individual teachers who are teaching these courses that led to the academic improvement, but that there’s something about the interaction between the teacher and that particular ethnic studies course,” she says. “I think that’s pretty telling.”
Educators and school districts, Bonilla says, should look at the San Francisco School District’s implementation of ethnic studies as a model, as results indicate that it’s been successful during the pilot stage and after being scaled up.
“I think there’s importance in having instructional support and professional development for ethnic studies teachers, and also the care that they took in developing the curriculum,” she says.
“They really treated ethnic studies just as you would other core courses, providing teachers with the level of curriculum and instructional support that they would need. I think that’s really important in education.”
Sade Bonilla is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a senior research specialist in the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at Penn GSE.
This research was supported by the William T. Grant Foundation (Grants 190-233 and 201-005), the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (Grant 2021-3072), and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant R01HD094007).
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