Two San Francisco school board members are proposing to assign students required reading based on the race, ethnicity and national origin of authors. Their highly controversial proposal has reportedly raised the ire of the city and gained national attention.

• Each child would have to read ten books a year -- three to be chosen by students and the remaining seven from a prescribed reading list.

• Four of the books on the reading list would have to be by authors who are not Caucasians.

• Each year teachers would be required to add one book by a minority author at each grade level.

The school board has voted unanimously to cut "Romeo and Juliet," "The Canterbury Tales" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" from the mandatory reading list.

The vice president of the school board attacked "Huckleberry Finn" as biased against blacks and criticized Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" as a work that "has an economic bias" and "characterizes people based on their class."

One backer of the measure contends that black children learn differently from other students, and that people were tired of the "white, European establishment."

"A frightening number of Americans buy into this stuff that there needs to be representation," said Ward Connerly, the black University of California regent who led the effort to eliminate race and gender preferences statewide.