A taxpayer-funded curriculum project run by the University of California, Santa Cruz is feeding California K-12 students lesson plans that draw direct comparisons between the January 6, 2021 Capitol breach and Ku Klux Klan demonstrations, starting as early as kindergarten. An investigation by the education watchdog group Defending Education, shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation, lays out how "The History & Civics Project" at UCSC packages loaded language, racial grievance frameworks, and partisan social media posts as classroom instruction for children across the state.
The project, which describes its own mission as offering "high quality history and civics education," has partnered with at least one California school district. North Monterey County Unified School District paid UCSC $23,200 between 2024 and 2025 for the program. And with ethnic studies now a graduation requirement in California, the pipeline from university curriculum shop to classroom desk is short.
What Defending Education found inside the lesson plans tells a clear story, not of civic inquiry, but of ideological instruction dressed up as history.
One document in the UCSC project, titled "Teaching the January 6, 2021 Insurrection on Capitol Hill," was created by teachers and offers students a curated list of words to "make sense" of the Capitol breach: mob, sedition, terrorism, insurrection, or coup. Those are the choices. No option for "protest" or "riot." The lesson then links to headlines from various news outlets suggesting still more loaded terms, "assault on democracy," "siege," "invaded," and "unprecedented assault."
The framing extends down to the youngest learners. A kindergarten-level discussion prompt, paired with a lesson on "Heroes in American History," compares Capitol police officers on January 6 to a World War II naval hero. Whatever one thinks of the officers' conduct that day, packaging a contested political event as a kindergarten morality tale about heroism is not history. It is catechism.
California's public schools have become a recurring flashpoint over what parents are, and aren't, told about what happens in the classroom. The state has fought bitterly over parental notification policies, with parents repeatedly discovering that the system prefers to operate without their knowledge or consent.
The most striking element of the curriculum is its explicit instruction to teachers to compare January 6 with a Klan march on Washington, D.C. One exercise states directly that "comparing a KKK demonstration in Washington D.C. that occurred almost 100 years ago to the January 6th Insurrection should provide your students with some context for this event while also prompting them to ask some clarifying questions about both." The lesson includes a photo of Klan members near the U.S. Capitol.
Read that again. The curriculum's own language says the comparison is meant to provide "context." In practice, placing the two events side by side in a classroom setting, one involving a white-supremacist terrorist organization responsible for decades of murder, the other a chaotic breach of the Capitol by political protesters, does not invite critical thinking. It invites a conclusion. Students are being guided to see the events as part of the same continuum.
Another exercise directs students to consider January 6 "through the lens of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898," an event in North Carolina that the materials frame in racial terms. A separate lesson created by a Berkeley High School teacher asked students to "compare and contrast" how January 6 "reveal[ed] continuities and contradictions about the United States." That lesson showed two tweets comparing the day to the Reconstruction era and describing it as "extremely predictable white backlash" to Black Americans "showing the promise of a fully realized democracy."
The pattern is unmistakable. Every historical comparison offered to students connects January 6 to white racial violence. Not to other protests that turned destructive. Not to other breaches of government buildings. The curriculum's designers chose their analogies with care, and every one of them lands in the same place.
The lesson materials also incorporate social media posts from the period surrounding January 6, selected from figures on the political left. Rep. Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, is among those whose posts are included, posts that, as the materials describe them, said democracy was under attack and threatened impeachment of President Donald Trump.
Using contemporaneous social media posts in a history lesson is not inherently objectionable. But when every selected post comes from one side of the political spectrum, and when those posts are presented alongside lessons that have already defined the event as an "insurrection" comparable to the KKK, the exercise is not teaching students to evaluate sources. It is reinforcing a predetermined narrative.
This is hardly the first time California's education establishment has been caught using school resources for political purposes. A Los Angeles teachers union planned to mobilize students and school resources to resist ICE enforcement, treating classrooms as staging grounds for political activism rather than places of learning.
The January 6 materials are not an outlier within the UCSC project. A separate PDF document on "Racial Injustice" covers the project's activism, including participation in Black Lives Matter protests, and directs teachers to external readings that include the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project, Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations," and essays such as "Beyond 'White Fragility.'"
The document includes sections on "Historicizing Race & Whiteness," "structural and institutional racism," and building "anti-racist classrooms and schools." Defending Education's investigation found that the lessons focus heavily on race and racial identity, "anti-Blackness," and anti-racism frameworks throughout.
None of these readings or frameworks are presented as one perspective among several. They are presented as the curriculum. A student working through these materials would encounter a single, coherent ideological worldview, one in which American history is primarily a story of racial oppression, and in which events like January 6 are best understood as extensions of white supremacist violence stretching back centuries.
The fights over what California schools tell children, and what they hide from parents, have reached the Supreme Court more than once. The high court rebuked the Ninth Circuit for allowing secret gender transition policies in California schools, a case that exposed how far the state's education bureaucracy will go to cut parents out of decisions about their own children.
Paul Runko, Defending Education's senior director of strategic initiatives of K-12 programs, put it plainly in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation:
"UC Santa Cruz's History & Civics Project isn't teaching students how to think, it's teaching them what to think."
Runko pointed to the opportunity cost as well, noting that the ideological curriculum comes at a time when students can least afford distractions from core academics:
"High schoolers deserve real debate, not ideological hand-holding. And with national math and reading scores at historic lows, there are far better uses of elementary school classroom time."
He also issued a direct challenge to parents across the state:
"Parents need to know what their children are being exposed to during the school day and speak up when the curriculum is overtly partisan or historically revisionist."
That challenge is well-placed. The UCSC project's materials are not hidden behind a paywall or locked in a faculty lounge. They are designed to be used in classrooms where children sit. And at least one district has already written a five-figure check to bring them in. The question is how many others have done the same, and how many parents have any idea what their children are being taught.
Concerns about school systems operating beyond parental oversight are not limited to California. A federal Title IX probe targeting Fairfax County schools in Virginia exposed similar patterns of institutional secrecy and misplaced priorities in another major public school system.
The UCSC History & Civics Project reveals something important about how ideological capture works in American education. It does not arrive as a manifesto. It arrives as a lesson plan, vetted by a respected university, funded by a school district, and aimed at children too young to push back. The vocabulary is carefully chosen. The comparisons are carefully selected. The readings all point in one direction.
And the adults in charge call it civics.
California's education establishment has repeatedly sought to override parental authority and judicial checks when they get in the way of its preferred policies. The UCSC curriculum is one more example of that instinct, the belief that the state knows better than families what children should believe about their country.
When a public university spends taxpayer money to teach five-year-olds that a political protest belongs in the same moral category as the Ku Klux Klan, the problem is not a lack of civics education. It is that the people writing the curriculum have confused indoctrination with instruction, and they are betting that no one is paying close enough attention to notice.
