Oakland Unified School District (OUSD)

In 2024, OUSD released its sexual education curriculum for students in the fifth through ninth grades. Critics discovered that the curriculum instructed educators to use the “Genderbread person” to teach students about “gender identity” and encourage students to imagine different combinations of “bodies, gender identities, and sexual orientations.” The purpose of the lessons was to instill the notion that gender is a “spectrum” and that “gender identity” and “gender expression” are both different from “anatomical sex.” ^{3 4}

Background

Oakland Unified School District is a public school district that oversees more than 100 schools in Oakland, California. As of 2025, the district’s administration was firmly committed to overcoming “inequities,” a left-of-center concept deriving from critical race theory. ^{1 2}

Activities

In 2021, Oakland Unified School District’s board of education passed a “Reparations for Black Students Resolution” which formally recognized the alleged “structural societal racism” that affected the community’s families and students and created a task force to address these lasting effects. The task force’s steering committee was assigned four goals: collecting data, developing recommendations, monitoring progress by tracking resources, and taking notes on other initiatives for Black students throughout the United States. ⁵

Following the Reparations Resolution, OUSD incorporated “anti-racism” into its preschool curriculum in 2022. As part of its Oakland Starting Smart and Strong program, which received fiscal sponsorship from the Oakland Public Education Fund, the district adopted 10 principles to combat racial inequity by modifying educators’ “cultural values, assumptions, and beliefs” and “unconscious biases” surrounding the education of young “boys of color.” ^{6 7}

That year, OUSD hired consultant firm Fuller Freedom Consulting to create “affinity spaces,” or break-out “safe space” discussion groups, for racial minority students and faculty members. ⁸

In 2024, OUSD released its sexual education curriculum for students in the fifth through ninth grades. Critics discovered that the curriculum instructed educators to use the “Genderbread person” to teach students about “gender identity” and encourage students to imagine different combinations of “bodies, gender identities, and sexual orientations.” The purpose of the lessons was to instill the notion that gender is a “spectrum” and that “gender identity” and “gender expression” are both different from “anatomical sex.” ^{3 4}

In 2024, a public records request revealed that certain OUSD teachers, who were also members of the Oakland Education Association for Palestine caucus, hosted a “Teach-in for Gaza” featuring pro-Hamas and anti-Israel materials. One email showed a history teacher describing Gaza as experiencing an “occupation” under “apartheid laws.” Another spoke of how students must be taught to become “active voters” and shown how “self-determination for the Palestinians” is not a complex issue but rather is “no different than what we all want for ourselves and what anti-colonial movements have fought for since modern colonialism.” ^{9 10}

In 2024, Defending Education reported that OUSD’s “Restorative Justice” program featured an “implementation guide” containing instructive materials for holding “Race & Gender Equity” discussion circles. Among the suggested topics for discussion were “feelings” about “race,” “heterosexual privilege,” and “white privilege.” ¹¹

As of 2025, OUSD had an official policy on the books instructing teachers and staff to assist students with hiding their gender transitions from family members unless they chose to have them involved. In the text of its “gender support plan,” the district wrote: “If the student does not have parent/guardian support, this plan should only be used as a guide and should not be placed in the student’s file to maintain privacy.” ^{12 13}

In 2025, it came to light that OUSD had paid three consultants $45,000 since 2022 to develop race-based affinity groups. Some $40,000 of this money was spent on fellowship sessions for white educators to help them in “unlearning whiteness,” and they were rewarded with more work hours or professional development credits. ^{14 15}

Outside Funding

In 2013, the Oakland Unified School District received a grant of $400,000 for its Department for African American Male Achievement from the Open Society Institute, a grantmaking fund founded by left-of-center billionaire George Soros. ¹⁶