Ethnic studies courses offered by the San Francisco Unified School District correlated with significant academic improvements and attendance gains, according to researchers who analyzed 16 school years (2007-2023) of data that tracked about 24,200 middle- and high-school students who had higher GPAs and fewer failed courses as they took the culturally relevant curricula.
Published earlier this year in the American Educational Research Journal and compiled by researchers from the University of California system and University of Pennsylvania, the study found that students who took ethnic studies saw a GPA increase of 0.17 points, with the largest gains being in math and science.
Participating students also had a 27% lower likelihood of failing a course, and a 15% higher likelihood of meeting the required GPA threshold for admission to the University of California system. Black, Latinx, students with disabilities, boys and students with lower prior academic performance had especially strong gains.
“This course happens at a pretty pivotal time during a student’s educational career,” noted Sade Bonilla, study co-author and an assistant professor in University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. “Students are going through a rapid phase of their development in adolescence. The course is hitting at a time in that development where students are being exposed more to society and our complicated world, and trying to get a sense of what’s going on.”
In the midst of those rapid developmental changes for teens, the course puts students in contact with challenging topics, Bonilla said. “It acknowledges difficult parts of U.S. history and difficult aspects of society, and does it in a way that’s honest and critical,” she said. “That level of honesty draws students in. It increases their sense of belonging and trust, and makes them open to engaging with school in a way that they otherwise might not be.”
Indeed, the study measured not only academic gains but also increased attachment to school, along with gains in attendance and total credits earned, said Emily Penner, co-author of the study and associate professor of education at the University of California, Irvine School of Education, who added that those findings will be detailed in a subsequent paper.
“We’ve also been in a lot of ethnic studies classes and seen students building strong relationships with teachers and one another,” she said.
“Having an anchor class like this that focuses on students’ relationships and well-being gets them connected in a way that they might not have been if they were in a different class," Penner said. "A lot of students talked about how this class connects to their community in ways that they didn’t find in other classes.”
The largest gains being in math and science likely ties to the stronger attachments to school, Penner said, leading to “increased effort and positive reinforcement as they were leaving class and showing up in other classes.”
While she’s not aware of other studies that have taken a similarly deep quantitative deep dive, Bonilla said there’s a long history of qualitative ethnographic work in which researchers have embedded themselves in classrooms and tracked anecdotal impacts on students, such as descriptive accounts of the Mexican-American studies program in Tucson, Arizona, and a course in Holyoke, Massachusetts, centered around Puerto Rican students and their identities — the latter of which also showed increases in attendance and grades.
The Tucson research focused on test scores or graduation outcomes of students who took the Mexican-American studies course, which is less causal in its implications, Penner said.
“There’s not a ton of educational interventions, especially operated at a district-wide level, having a successful pilot and then expanding when they succeed,” she said, adding that she hopes to study other districts in California that are implementing ethnic studies. “That’s pretty noteworthy for this program, generally.”
