OAKLAND, Calif. – Oakland school officials are expanding ethnic studies courses to all of the district’s high schools over the next three years, and will encourage elementary and middle schools to incorporate similar coursework.

“Almost 50 years ago, a broad coalition of students from San Francisco State University walked out of classes and engaged in the longest student strike in U.S. history in order to establish the nation’s first College of Ethnic Studies,” OUSD Civic Engagement Coordinator Young Whan Choi told NBC News.

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“The passage of Oakland Unified School District’s Ethnic Studies Board Policy is an important step that builds from this legacy and will ensure that all students in Oakland have access to a curriculum that speaks to their experiences, addresses the role of race, class, and other inequities, and provides students with opportunities to take thoughtful action in their world.”

The district’s student director, Darius Aiken told board members last month he learned all about ethnic studies at University of California Berkeley and he thinks the courses could help create a new crop of activists.

“I truly believe that ethnic studies is important and gives students the ability to feel powerful and feel as though they can be the new Martin Luther Kings, the new Malcolm Xes, the new Rosa Parks, the new Caesar Chavezes,” he said.

Currently, the district offers ethnic studies courses at some schools, but the school board voted late last month to expand the offerings to all Oakland high schools starting with pilot projects in 2016-17.

“A group of teachers is currently updating the framework for ethnic studies that will be used by teachers to develop the curriculum for their schools,” according to Oakland North.

Castlemont High School teacher Leona Kwon has taught ethnic studies for the last five years from a classroom lined with posters of Malcolm X, the Dalai Lama and Che Guevara. There, students are introduced to things like the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program, terms like “institutional oppression,” and other concepts designed to “empower” them.

“Most people don’t know the real history. They know the dominant narrative,” Castlemont 10th grader Michelle Flores said of her ethnic learnings. “It made me want to prove the stereotypes wrong. It made me want to give back to my community and teach my community about all the oppression that we’re going through, especially institutional oppression.”

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“It just opened my eyes to the world,” classmate Taejin Kim said.

“And now every time we see a Disney movie, it’s like ‘Whoa, they just said something racist there!” Flores added.

The move to expand ethnic studies in Oakland comes just days after California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill that would have required the state to develop an ethnic studies curriculum for all schools.

“Creating yet another advisory body specific to ethnic studies would be duplicative and undermine our current curriculum process,” Brown wrote in his veto, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Several California school districts require ethnic studies classes for graduation – including Sacramento, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Pico Rivera – and Oakland officials are currently considering the same there.

In other places, like Tucson, Arizona, ethnic studies courses have sparked a lot of controversy, and lawmakers sought to ensure the Tucson Unified School District didn’t cross the line with its Mexican American Studies program, which reportedly spawned division among students.

Lawmakers passed legislation that prohibited courses in Arizona schools that promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, or advocate for ethnic solidarity over individual rights.

According to The Atlantic:

The focus (or some might say vendetta) on Mexican Americans started when Dolores Huerta, an influential activist with United Farm Workers (of Cesar Chavez fame), told students at a Tucson High Magnet School assembly that “Republicans hate Latinos.” The then-state superintendent of public instruction, Tom Horne, dispatched an aide to tell students at the majority-Latino school otherwise. As the aide spoke, students raised their fists and turned their backs.

The far-left news site alleges the Arizona bill was designed specifically to “eradicate” Tucson’s Mexican American studies course because it “taught Latino students to hate other races and that they’d been historically subjugated and mistreated by the government, and that it even encouraged sedition.”

“When I came into a classroom, they were portraying Ben Franklin as a racist,” former state Superintendent John Huppenthal told CNN in 2011. “Ben Franklin was the president of the Abolitionist Society in Pennsylvania. … So they are vilifying Ben Franklin in this classroom, and up on the wall, they got a poster of Che Guevara, and the historical record is that he helped direct the communist death camps in Cuba by killing many dissidents.”

The war raged between Tucson schools and state officials over the ethnic studies courses for years, and the issue still isn’t fully resolved.

A trial is now set for next year to determine whether the law enacted by Arizona lawmakers to quash the courses was motivated by discriminatory intent, as alleged by Tucson school officials. U.S. Circuit Judge A. Wallace Tashima previously dismissed allegations by Tucson officials that the law was unconstitutional, overly broad and vague, and a federal appeals court upheld his ruling, according to the Arizona Daily Star.