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< Back Previous Next BVH experiences hate speech, SUHSD responds with resolution The anti-Semitic post created by students and directed towards IB Environmental Systems and Societies, and AP Environmental Science teacher Jennifer Ekstein is currently under investigation by BVH administrators. In Principal Roman Del Rosario’s statement addressing the hate speech at BVH, he made clear that, with support from SUHSD, BVH would not stand for hate speech. This photo was one of the two attachments in Del Rosario’s statement. Carina Muniz Dec 18, 2021 In light of the recent series of hate acts against Jewish and Black communities at Bonita Vista High (BVH), the Sweetwater Union High School District’s (SUHSD) adoption of Resolution No. 4761 aims to address anti-Semitic and other hate acts at a district-level. On Dec. 14—the day after SUHSD adopted the resolution—BVH Principal Roman Del Rosario officially issued a statement to the BVH community addressing the hateful acts committed on campus. “Bonita Vista High stands with our board of trustees in affirming the rights of Jewish students, staff, and families and will continue to work with the community and other organizations dedicated to addressing anti-Semitism,” Del Rosario’s statement read. “We will continue to investigate all issues related to hateful language, rhetoric and/or actions.” Since the hate-vandalism that took place on Oct. 31, a series of independent hateful acts have ensued in the following months. BVH staff and students alike have become victims of hate speech in and out of campus. As a result of these actions, Del Rosario held a faculty meeting on Dec. 8 addressing the hate speech occurring on campus and allowing teachers to share their own experiences and thoughts regarding these situations. “I thought it was important that I raise the level of consciousness of staff, students and parents. I had these teachers that were impacted share their first hand account of the incidents, and read an article by Dr. [Mica] Pollack from UCSD regarding hate speech in classrooms and our duty to confront it when it happens,” Del Rosario said. “I thought it was very good timing for us to bring more attention to that resolution and to also give out a statement that we do not tolerate any manifestation of hate, and [show] the respect we have towards our Jewish community.”

From pre-K lessons on ‘ethnic noses’ to lectures on Israel as an apartheid state, students are learning that Jews are the enemy. < Back How U.S. Public Schools Teach Antisemitism From pre-K lessons on ‘ethnic noses’ to lectures on Israel as an apartheid state, students are learning that Jews are the enemy. Last fall, Siriana Abboud put a new poster on the wall outside her pre-K classroom at a public school in Midtown Manhattan that, she claimed, would teach her four- and five-year-old students about the human body. The poster showed four sketches of differently shaped noses—two small, one hooked, and another with a nose ring. “Why do people have different noses?” a headline above the drawings asked. Underneath, kids posted their answers: “I think it’s because of your ancestors,” one wrote. “Where you are from,” scribbled another, with a smiley face and a heart. Next to these replies Abboud penned her own answer: “I think it’s based on your ethnic identity. In art, we can often tell ethnicity from the bridge of your nose.” One senior educator in the district, who is Jewish, told The Free Press she was “appalled” by the poster. “It’s clearly connected to the ethnic tropes of Jews having big noses. Quite frankly, it reminded me of Nazi comics. I had a visceral reaction to it. It was antisemitic.” But Abboud, a twentysomething who teaches pre-K at PS 59, Beekman Hill International School, wasn’t punished or disciplined by the Department of Education for the poster, a source who knows Abboud told The Free Press. In fact, last December, she won the Big Apple Award, the highest distinction for a city teacher, for being a “liberation-inspired educator” who “raises societal expectations of the critical work of young children.” Abboud, who did not respond to The Free Press for comment, posts regularly on her Instagram account, which has nearly 7,000 followers and includes a Lebanese flag in her bio, about her education mission statement: “Centering Arab narratives the way my schooling never did.” In it, she shares “collective action guides” on how to “Speak with your child about Palestine” and how to “Decolonize your teaching.” Many of her posts use cheery pastel infographics while declaring her support for Palestine, including one message she posted two days after the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel that left 1,200 dead. On October 9, Abboud wrote: “we stand with those still tearing down border walls,” and “we show solidarity with those still fighting to free their stolen land.” Earlier, she had made her philosophy for educating kids clear: “Our work of decolonizing education begins in preschool. It is very much already a political practice.” Ever since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, pro-Palestinian protests have swept U.S. colleges, leading to charges of Jew-hatred and a disastrous congressional hearing where three college presidents failed to offer a clear moral condemnation of rising antisemitism. But the ideology fueling these demonstrations isn’t limited to the college campus. It now begins in public high schools and even elementary schools as early as pre-K, according to more than 30 public school teachers, administrators, and parents across four states who spoke to The Free Press. American youths aren’t just encountering the views on TikTok; they’re learning them from teachers and, in some cases, from the mandatory public school curriculum itself. Take California, where a 10th grade history course, approved by the Santa Ana Unified School District, includes readings that call Israel an “extremist illegal Jewish settler population” and accuses the country of “ethnic cleansing.” Or the Jefferson Union High School District near San Francisco, which teaches about the “Palestinian dispossession of lands/identity/culture through Zionist settler colonialism.” The root of these lessons stems from California’s new “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” (ESMC), which passed in 2021 and mandates lessons on the marginalization of black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian American peoples, emphasizing how they are oppressed by a white oppressor, says Brandy Shufutinsky, the director of education and community engagement for the Jewish Institute of Liberal Values. “It’s a Trojan horse to institutionalize antisemitism in California schools,” Shufutinsky said. Meanwhile, more than one million secondary school students in all 50 states are learning about history and the Middle East from the Brown University Choices Program. A strong pro-Palestinian bias shines through in the Brown teaching materials that are publicly available online. Israel, according to multiple lessons, is a “Zionist enterprise in Palestine,” an “apartheid state,” a “settler colony,” and “a military occupier.” (A Brown spokesperson told The Free Press, “Choices curriculum materials address the topic of antisemitism both historically and in terms of the contemporary threats and growing violence against Jewish people.”) The Qatari Foundation International, an organization funded by Qatar’s ruling class, has purchased some of Brown’s materials and distributed them to 75 American teachers as well as sponsored a teacher training program in Wyoming, the spokesperson confirmed. These ideas have profound consequences. A Harvard Harris poll from this month found that 67 percent of people aged 18 to 24 believe that “Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors ,” compared to 44 percent of people aged 25 to 34; 24 percent of those aged 45 to 54; 15 percent of those 55 to 64; and 9 percent over 65 years who say the same. In the New York City public school system, which educates more than one million students, the indoctrination began as far back as 2018, when it was codified in a new curriculum called the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework (CRSE), sources said. The CRSE seeks to mold students into citizens who “have a critical lens through which they challenge inequitable systems of access, power, and privilege.” While New York City’s CRSE does not explicitly refer to Jews or antisemitism, its teachings have led to a belief that “Jews have to be categorized as white and oppressors,” said Shufutinsky. According to the oppressor vs. oppressed narrative, “the only reason Jews as a minority could be overrepresented in positions of prestige is because they must have oppressed somebody,” Shufutinsky said. “And if you accept that people who’ve achieved success only got it through ill gain, then of course, it’s going to fuel Jew-hatred.” That hatred was on full display in the hallways of Hillcrest High School in Queens on the morning of November 20. Hillcrest pupils, who discovered that a Jewish teacher at the school had supported Israel on her personal Facebook page, started spreading calls for a “raid” on their social media accounts. One student even commented that the teacher “is getting executed in the town square.” Suddenly, around 11 a.m., hundreds of students flooded the hallways chanting “Free Palestine” as the teacher barricaded herself in an office. Later, she released a statement to the media that she was “shaken to my core by the calls to violence against me”—and refused to comment further. But another Jewish teacher, who has worked at Hillcrest for nearly 20 years, and who asked not to be named out of fear of losing his job, told The Free Press: “I’ve never seen anything like it. Because the teacher was Jewish, it feels like society doesn’t care. If there was a black teacher and students tried to corner her and beat her up because she’s black, you know very well how different the situation would be. There’d be riots. People would be fired. There’d be all sorts of sensitivity trainings.” Almost to prove this point, when Chancellor David Banks, the man chosen by Mayor Eric Adams to lead the NYC Department of Education, held a press conference a week after the riot, he said the teacher was “never in direct danger” and the accusation of antisemitic violence in the hallways was “an example of misinformation being spread online.” On December 3, Banks added that Hillcrest had suspended “the ringleaders” of the riot. But three days later, a swastika and the message “Fuck Palestine,” scrawled in red marker, appeared on the wall of the lunch room at Hillcrest. A 15-year-old pupil was arrested and charged with aggravated harassment for the crime. Adults have been actively encouraging some of the recent student protests at NYC schools. On October 25, a public school teacher from Brooklyn’s Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women skipped class with a group of about 20 high school girls to attend a pro-Palestine protest in Washington Square Park. One student at the demonstration, who had a Palestinian flag painted on her face, held up a sign with two hands that read “Please Keep the WORLD Clean” and showed the image of a blue Jewish star in a trash bin . On November 9, both teachers and parents helped organize more than 700 students from 100 public schools from across New York City to join in a mass walkout in Bryant Park. One teacher identified only as Brittany talked to CBS News as she marched alongside her pupils. “We teach our students about social justice,” Brittany said. “If we can’t act on what we are teaching our students, then what are we doing?” Before that protest, a Brooklyn school board, staffed with elected parents, distributed an 11-page “Day of Action Toolkit ” to students, telling them how to plan their walkout and even providing slogans to chant, including lines like “We don’t want no Zionists here! ” and “From the river to the sea. ” The guide for protest chants put together with help from Brooklyn school board CEC 14 ahead of New York City public school students’ planned walkout on November 9. Sagit Shir, an Israeli-born mother of two daughters in the Brooklyn school district, said the latter slogan is a “statement in the Hamas charter. This is not exactly a peaceful message.” Shir said she’s critical of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, even though both she and her husband were injured in a Hamas suicide bomb attack in Tel Aviv in 2003. But she doesn’t understand why the school board is “promoting a strong one-sided stance.” “Why is this divisive message being pursued instead of one of unity and coming together in these tough times?” she asked. Despite warnings from Chancellor Banks that “School leaders, teachers, and other school staff should not express their personal views about political matters during the school day, while on school grounds, or while working at school events”—as stipulated in their code of conduct—none of the teachers who’ve walked out with their students have been punished, sources told The Free Press. A spokesperson for the Department of Education said the department “addressed” the October 25 incident but stated they were unaware of any other reports of teachers joining students in protests. Karen Feldman, who has taught middle school in New York City for 25 years and specializes in Holocaust education, said these hateful displays have led to a “poisoning of our education system” that is beyond repair. “How do you really promote diversity, equity, and inclusion when you have the leaders of equity trained on propaganda that promotes antisemitism and ultimately, they bring it into the classrooms?” Donalda Chumney, a former superintendent of District 2 who is not Jewish, told me that within the Department of Education, Jews “fade into whiteness, in a way that makes whiteness a monolith.” “It’s almost as though they don’t exist.” While principles of New York City’s “culturally responsive” curriculum are now being taught in public schools across the country—from New Jersey to Illinois and soon Minnesota—some public school students are getting unauthorized lessons about the Middle East. On December 6, in Oakland, California, for example, at least 70 teachers held a “teach-in” to students in the district, using materials recommended by National Students for Justice in Palestine. One presentation, entitled “Palestine 101,” states that the first Intifada, which killed 1,000 Palestinians and over 100 Israelis, was “mostly non-violent resistance.” Lessons like these are particularly insidious when they’re taught to very young, impressionable students, said Andrew Goldberg, the parent of a middle schooler and a filmmaker who produced Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations. “Middle school is an age where kids start experimenting with racism, bigotry, and bad language,” Goldberg said. “And schools are not equipped to handle it and they don’t address it, particularly antisemitism, because they don’t understand it.” One Jewish mother told The Free Press how her middle school–aged son was subjected to antisemitic bullying two years ago at the public Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy in the Bronx. It started, she said, with his peers giving him the Nazi salute when they passed him in the halls. Then, in the months leading up to his bar mitzvah last November, classmates created a Snapchat group where they bombarded her son with antisemitic memes, which she shared with The Free Press, including swastikas and a picture of Hitler next to the message “when you see your gas bill.” Another showed her son with a Hitler mustache scribbled over his face and a red swastika drawn in the top left corner. One of the messages sent via Snapchat to a Jewish middle school student at Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy in the Bronx last fall. The abuse went on for over a month before the mom found out and reported it to the school’s principal, she said. But she was scared of the repercussions for speaking up. “I didn’t want to be the poster child in Riverdale of standing up to antisemitism,” she said. “I just really wanted this to stop.” She asked the school to instruct the students on antisemitism and why their actions were wrong. “That, as far as I’m aware, was not done,” she said. The principal of Riverdale Kingsbridge Academy did not respond to a Free Press request for comment. At the end of the school year, she pulled her son out of the public school in the Bronx and enrolled him in a different high school in Westchester, closer to her work. “I didn’t want him to have to stay there any longer than he needed to,” she said. Andrew Goldberg, the filmmaker, described how his 11-year-old was also targeted with antisemitic taunts. This past fall, he said, a fellow sixth-grade student at a public school in Westport, Connecticut, leaned toward his son as they were leaving class and said, “Hey, I have a fun camp for you. It has great showers. Camp Auschwitz.” He then added that another Jewish classmate “has already joined.” Months later, the same student jeered at Goldberg’s son in the hallways, yelling and laughing, “We must exterminate the Jews!” But after Goldberg and his wife complained to the principal and superintendent of the school, the officials responded with a “support plan,” reviewed by The Free Press, which mainly recommended his son “try a new table at lunch.” Nothing in the plan referenced antisemitism. Goldberg said he and his wife felt they had no option but to take their son out of public school and enroll him in a private Jewish day school. Through a lawyer, they asked Westport Public Schools to help pay their child’s tuition, and the district agreed—but only if the Goldbergs would sign a nondisclosure agreement swearing them to secrecy, he said. The Goldbergs refused. “We viewed this as hush money,” Goldberg said. Westport Public Schools did not return calls from The Free Press for comment. Almost two dozen Jewish parents of public school students ranging from elementary school to high school told me they’re scared for their kids due to a rise in antisemitism after October 7. One mother told me through tears how she instructed her daughter to hide her Jewish star necklace—which she received as a present for her bat mitzvah in Israel this summer—and not to tell people that she’s Jewish if someone asks her on the street. “I’ve said things to her that someone would have told my family in the 1940s,” she said. “This is lunacy. This is New York City in 2023.” Another mother told me she is now thinking about pulling her two sons out of Townsend Harris High School in Queens—one of the best in the country—and enrolling them in private school because of antisemitic bullying. Last year, she said, one of her eldest son’s peers told him during gym class to “go die in the Holocaust.” And then she said her youngest son, a freshman at the school, was targeted by a teammate on his varsity badminton team. On November 26, the teammate posted a photo of the badminton squad on Instagram that showed everyone’s face except her son’s, the sole Jewish member of the team, whose face was covered by a Palestinian flag. The image of a Jewish freshman, face covered by a Palestinian flag, which was circulated by one of his badminton teammates at Townsend Harris High School in Queens via Instagram. (The Free Press has blurred out the other youths’ faces.) The mother said she emailed the principal twice and waited an entire week before he replied and said he would report it as a “possible bias incident” to the Department of Education. When The Free Press reached out to the principal, he declined to comment further. “Social media has made them feel like they can say and do whatever they want, and we have a culture where there are no consequences,” the mother told The Free Press. Another mom called Sarah said her children go to two separate public schools where antisemitic graffiti has appeared since October 7. Swastikas were found in the bathroom of West End Secondary on the Upper West Side, and messages like “Free Palestine” and “Long Live Hamas” were scrawled on the bathroom walls of Hudson Cliffs, a K–8 school in Washington Heights. She said the schools don’t know how to deal with the problem. Neither school’s officials replied to Free Press requests for comment. “I just want them to look me in the eye and have them tell me my baby is safe at school,” she said. Jewish public school teachers in NYC who talked to The Free Press said that they, too, had been the victims of antisemitic treatment from students and fellow educators well before October 7, but also after 2018 when the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework was first established. Karen Feldman, the 25-year teaching veteran who works at an Upper East Side middle school she doesn’t want to name, recalls having to take part in a newly programmed equity training five years ago that literally split up the faculty by “White” and “non-White” groups and segregated them into different rooms. As a Jew, she said she didn’t feel she fit into either. “It just felt weird,” she told me. “It felt like my voice as a Jewish woman, as a Holocaust survivor’s grandchild, was not included.” These sessions used to happen once a month, she said. Now, they happen weekly. Since 2018, Feldman said she has dealt with multiple acts of graffiti at her school, including one instance where a student scribbled “Gews [sic] suck dick” in the boys’ bathroom. She also said she has overheard students use antisemitic slurs—including one who claimed Jews “killed Palestinian babies.” Last spring, during a group work session in her class, Feldman said one of her students asked another: “What should we do with these dirty Jews?” in front of two Jewish classmates. According to Feldman, the other student responded: “I know, we should put them in the oven.” Graffiti found in the bathroom of Karen Feldman’s middle school on the Upper East Side from the 2021–2022 school year. Feldman said one of the Jewish student’s mothers was so upset she pulled her son out of the school. In one instance last May, Feldman said a group of around 10 students surrounded her in the schoolyard, almost like they were driven by a “mob mentality,” pushing and throwing candy at her, chanting that she was a “Trump supporter.” She said she later found out the kids did it on a “dare” because they believed Jews supported Trump. But Feldman told me her school administration didn’t respond to these incidents with outcries or condemnations of antisemitism—just bureaucratic box-checking to shield themselves from legal liability. The school brought in a “restorative justice coordinator” who, according to Feldman, engaged the students “in a discussion on why they didn’t like me.” Also last spring, when a student drew a swastika on a Snapchat picture that he shared with members of the class, the school’s dean asked Feldman whether or not he should report it. “I told him, ‘Of course you need to report it. It’s one of the worst hate symbols in the world,’ ” Feldman said. “It’s just as bad as seeing a noose.” In the wake of the riot at Hillcrest High School, the federal department of education has launched a probe into the NYC Department of Education for possible violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which protects students from discrimination, due to accusations of “antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and other forms of discrimination and harassment.” But later, Chancellor Banks admitted to CBS News New York, “They’re not launching an investigation into our entire system, they’re just following up on a complaint that someone made that perhaps there was an act of antisemitism.” The Department of Education refused to give further comment to The Free Press. Earlier this month, Banks and his team of administrators ignored invites from the Israeli consulate and the NYC Parent Alliance to watch a screening of the Hamas attack, to better understand “where our pain is coming from,” said Victoria Averbukh, a member of the alliance. She said the chancellor’s lack of response made her feel like “Jews are again being ignored,” Averbukh told The Free Press. “They say great things when it comes to press conferences,” she said of the Department of Education, “but when it comes to action it’s complete apathy. And apathy fits into antisemitism and anti-Jewish hate.” Moshe Spern, a special education department leader in the Department of Education, who is Jewish, added that until any actual changes are made, he doubts Jewish students will feel protected. “Until we know for sure these things will be acted upon properly, I would not recommend someone send Jewish students to public school today,” he said. Meanwhile, schools that allow students to be treated differently because of their ethnic group could face legal action, said Devon Westhill, a civil rights lawyer and the president of the Center for Equal Opportunity. “You are going to be subjected to serious liability if you are treating students differently based on their race, based on their color or their national origin,” he said. This even applies to how kids are taught. “Trying to train students that because of race or because of color, or because of national origin, some of the students in the class are better than others or are oppressors or bad or good” could all be grounds for a suit, Westhill said. But Karen Feldman, the veteran educator, is worried about the damage already done. In 2022, she notes, the National Education Association—the largest labor union in the United States, made up of over three million educators—passed a resolution to “support members who educate students and other members about the history, geography, and current affairs of the Palestinian people.” When that happened, she remembers thinking, “This is going to give teachers the green light to teach that terrorism is a form of freedom fighting.” Now, she says, “I definitely feel our future is at stake. I know it sounds a little radical but I see the brainwashing.” She compared it to the Nazis’ “propaganda education, which played a major role in brainwashing the public, especially the youth.” “It became embedded in every facet of society, from children’s games to books to stories on the news. I believe if we keep going on this trajectory, we could potentially be at a level where you have the youth doing everything that they are directed to based on this propaganda. And that’s a scary thought.” Previous Next

At UCLA, faculty and departments have moved anti-Zionist activism from the margins into university life, becoming a core engine of campus antisemitism. < Back The Elephant on Bruin Walk: UCLA Can’t Curb Campus Antisemitism While Ignoring Faculty-Led Anti-Zionism At UCLA, faculty and departments have moved anti-Zionist activism from the margins into university life, becoming a core engine of campus antisemitism. On Thursday, UCLA’s Consortium for Palestine Studies will host a lecture entitled “Revisiting Zionism as a Form of Racism and Racial Discrimination” given by Rutgers professor Noura Erakat, an outspoken anti-Zionist who compares Zionism to Nazism and white supremacy . The event is co-sponsored by a wide roster of UCLA academic units, most led by faculty who have publicly endorsed the academic boycott of Israel — a campaign that seeks to delegitimize Israel and turn the country and its supporters into pariahs within academic life. Last month, on the two-year anniversary of the October 7th attack, UCLA’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapter co-hosted an on-campus rally celebrating Hamas’ massacre as “the people of Palestine righteously engaged in decolonial struggle” and demanded that the university “END [its] academic and financial complicity,” explicitly tying protest goals to academic-boycott demands. These are not isolated incidents. At UCLA, faculty and departments have moved anti-Zionist activism from the margins into university life, becoming a core engine of campus antisemitism. At least 115 faculty have publicly endorsed academic BDS, many while holding administrative roles. Dozens of departments and programs issued statements praising or defending last year’s illegal encampment and endorsing protester demands — including academic boycott and divestment — under official banners that signal institutional approval. From late 2023 through spring 2025, more than 20 Israel/Palestine events co-sponsored by numerous academic departments featured only BDS-supporting speakers; none offered a balancing view. Making matters worse, UCLA’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine, formed shortly after the October 2023 Hamas massacre for the express purpose of advancing academic BDS’s anti-normalization goals on campus, has organized teach-ins and events like the recent rally celebrating the Hamas massacre, and pursued legal efforts that marginalize Zionist students and deny Jewish identity. Even more troubling, FJP’s anti-Zionist mobilization is now being formalized through the faculty-initiated Consortium for Palestine Studies, founded in fall 2024 by five FJP-affiliated supporters of academic BDS. Branded as “at UCLA” but not approved by the Academic Senate, the Consortium uses UCLA’s name and infrastructure to legitimize anti-Zionist research and teaching and to co-sponsor events, including the upcoming “Zionism is Racism” lecture, effectively institutionalizing anti-Zionism without academic oversight. As these faculty- and department-led anti-normalization campaigns rapidly expanded, antisemitism surged: from July 2023 through June 2025, incidents at UCLA targeting Jewish members of the campus community for harm — including assaults, vandalism, and bullying – rose by nearly 3,000% compared with the prior two years. In the same period, rhetoric glorifying violence against Israel or Jews, and calling for or justifying the elimination of the Jewish state, increased by nearly 1,000%. This surge in antisemitic incidents is what triggered federal scrutiny. Earlier this year, the Department of Justice pursued a civil‑rights probe of UCLA, found the university in violation of federal law and transmitted to the UC Regents a proposed Resolution Agreement that was publicly released last week. While that proposal carries sweeping requirements and major financial exposure, it does not address the real institutional driver of the problem: faculty and academic units using official university channels to delegitimize Zionism and advance academic‑boycott anti‑normalization campaigns that incite antisemitic harassment and curtail Jewish and Zionist students’ participation in campus life. This is not a question of academic freedom; it is about institutional conduct and professional standards. When departments and faculty initiatives use UCLA’s name and platforms to label Zionism as racism or to praise Hamas’s October 7 attack as “righteous,” they weaponize academic authority, delegitimize a core part of many Jewish students’ identity, and incite hostility and harm towards them on campus. The message to Jewish and Zionist students is unmistakable: you are unwelcome and unsafe. If UCLA is serious about addressing campus antisemitism, it must bar faculty from using official titles and university resources for political advocacy and activism. It must end departmental partnerships with faculty advocacy groups that promote discriminatory boycotts and bar those groups from receiving university funds or using university facilities. And it must restructure or discipline departments that have materially contributed to a hostile environment for students. Even under DOJ’s sweeping proposal, UCLA can satisfy new requirements and still miss the heart of the problem if it refuses to acknowledge and address how faculty and departments use the university’s name and platforms for political ends. Jewish and Zionist students deserve to learn without fear. If UCLA declines to act, campus antisemitism will continue, and no fines or compliance plans will fix it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tammi Rossman-Benjamin serves as executive director of AMCHA Initiative, a non-profit antisemitism watchdog, and was a University of California faculty member for twenty years. Previous Next

The Department of Justice says one of the largest public university systems in the country may be discriminating ‘against employees who are or are perceived to be Jewish or Israeli.’ < Back EXCLUSIVE: DOJ Opens Antisemitism Investigation Into the University of California System The Department of Justice says one of the largest public university systems in the country may be discriminating ‘against employees who are or are perceived to be Jewish or Israeli.’ The Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into the sprawling University of California system over concerns about antisemitism, The Free Press has learned. In a letter sent Monday evening to the UC system and seen by The Free Press , the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division informed UC president Michael Drake of its investigation. “Our investigation is based on information suggesting that since at least October 7, 2023, the University of California may be engaged in certain employment practices that discriminate against employees who are or are perceived to be Jewish or Israeli,” wrote DOJ officials Mac Warner and Michael E. Gates in the letter. “Accordingly, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division has authorized a full investigation to determine whether the University of California is engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination as set forth above.” “We were recently notified of the Department of Justice’s decision to initiate a civil rights investigation in the University of California system,” a spokesperson for the UC system told The Free Press . “We want to be clear: the University of California is unwavering in its commitment to combating antisemitism and protecting everyone’s civil rights. We continue to take specific steps to foster an environment free of harassment and discrimination for everyone in the university community.” The investigation comes on the heels of the DOJ forming a task force in February made up of representatives from the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services to combat antisemitism. That follows the executive order President Donald Trump signed in his first days in office allocating federal resources to address “the explosion of antisemitism” on college campuses. The order, moreover, directed the DOJ to take immediate action to “quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.” The antisemitism task force is being led by Leo Terrell, a civil rights attorney and recent Fox News contributor. It is under the auspices of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, an office that Trump tapped attorney Harmeet Dhillon, who has not yet been confirmed by the Senate, to lead. This UC investigation comes less than 48 hours after the Trump administration announced a review of federal funding to Columbia University, which had been a hotbed for anti-Israel activism since October 7, 2023, and where dozens of students were arrested last spring for participating in encampments and taking over a campus building. As The Free Press reported yesterday , Trump’s antisemitism task force is looking into more than $5 billion in federal grant commitments to Columbia as part of the review—led by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration. The investigation follows a “Dear Colleague” letter sent by the Department of Education’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights two weeks ago which warned universities that the department “will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions.” The letter states the department will “vigorously enforce the law on equal terms” to any K-12 or higher education institution which receives federal funding. -------------------------------------- Gabe Kaminsky is a reporter at The Free Press. Send him tips: gabe@thefp.com . Additional reporting by Frannie Block. Previous Next

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Course has not been formally approved by the school board < Back Ethnic studies course is a disaster in the making in SFUSD Course has not been formally approved by the school board Should a controversial ethnic studies curriculum be mandated in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) without approval by the board of education? This is not a theoretical question. SFUSD is doing that right now. This is the second year the school district is forcing ninth graders to take the course without formal curriculum approval by the school board. And to add insult to injury, last year it was a required SFUSD ninth-grade course but it was not approved by the University of California as meeting the A–G requirements. A course that is not approved does not get credit toward the University of California/California State University entrance requirements. A course that is not approved does not get credit toward the University of California/California State University entrance requirements. Board responsibility One of the most important responsibilities of a school board is to approve what is taught. California Education Code § 60000(c) (2022) : Instructional Materials; Legislative Intent (c) The Legislature further recognizes that the governing boards of school districts have the responsibility to establish courses of study and that they must have the ability to select instructional materials appropriate to their courses of study.[2] For several years, the board and superintendent have been treating formal board approval of this curriculum like a hot potato. The inside scoop It’s not like they have not been asked to step up. I served on the district’s Public Education Enrichment Fund board, which has funded the course to the tune of millions of dollars. And I reminded staff and the superintendent more than once that the board should formally approve the curriculum. Spending millions on a course that is not required Below is a table showing SFUSD spending on this non-board-approved course. Ethnic Studies Support FY 23-24 Budget $1,505,958 FY 24-25 Projected Budget $1,748,890 Source: SFUSD Yup, that million dollar number popped right out at me. Why is a district in a financial crisis spending millions of dollars on a course that is not required for graduation by the state and is not required for entrance into California’s higher education system? Code Red concern of parents in the district To say that the ethnic studies curriculum is controversial is an understatement. There are lawsuits throughout the state calling out discriminatory content. It is so bad that Governor Newsom has refused to put funding in the budget to pay for a mandated state course. And a bill is pending in the legislature that prohibits the use of any curriculum or instructional materials if it would subject a pupil to unlawful discrimination. Better alternatives for teaching ethnic studies – Give high school studies more time for electives. The SFUSD one-year ethnic studies course does not give students enough time to take electives that interest them. Cut the course down to one semester and consider making it an elective. – Do not require the course in ninth grade. Most students do not have the background in United States or world history to put the course into perspective. – Revise the focus of the course. Ensure the ethnic studies course encourages students to appreciate and understand the many ethnicities in SFUSD. All of them have had challenges. All of them have many proud moments of success. A course that emphasizes a political philosophy of “us against them” loses the nuance of learning to work together and learning to value the strengths of each other. – Board review and approval. With so much controversy over what is taught, allow a thoughtful process with public input on the curriculum to ensure it is not discriminatory. Yes, it is a hot potato But it is our hot potato. With community input, the school board and the district should approve a curriculum that meets the test of not subjecting any student to unlawful discrimination. Previous Next

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The new policy aligns with the superintendent's directive, "no flags will be displayed on our campuses other than the flag of the United States of America and the flag of the State of California." < Back Beverly Hills Unified to adopt new flag policy after superintendent overrules Israeli flag display The new policy aligns with the superintendent's directive, "no flags will be displayed on our campuses other than the flag of the United States of America and the flag of the State of California." After the Beverly Hills Unified school board reversed its decision to display Israeli flags on campuses during Jewish American Heritage Month. It adopted a permanent district-wide policy to display only U.S. and California flags. The new policy aligns with the superintendent's directive, "no flags will be displayed on our campuses other than the flag of the United States of America and the flag of the State of California." "Given the volume of public attention, international media coverage, and ongoing threats against district staff and students, it is both urgent and prudent for the Board to adopt a clear, permanent policy defining what flags may be flown or displayed on district property," as written in the BHUSD special board meeting agenda. In a written Aug. 28 message to the BHUSD community, Superintendent Dr. Alex Cherniss cited Board Policy 2210 to reverse the board's vote, doing so out of "heightened safety concerns around the displaying of flags on our campuses." He said he decided to take immediate action for the safety and security of the students. At Tuesday's board meeting, the resolution to showcase the Israeli flag passed 3-2, with supporters saying it's needed in a time of rising antisemitism. "This should be a no-brainer for a school district that represents one of the only Jewish-majority communities outside of Israel," said Beverly Hills Vice Mayor John Mirisch during the Aug. 26 meeting. BHUSD Board Member Russell Stewart said at Tuesday's meeting that the resolution was in support of the district's Jewish students and the Jewish community. There was opposition at the board meeting, with some people speaking out against flying the flag of any foreign nation, while others pointed out that other groups of people face hate as well. "Jewish communities have suffered sharp increases in hate crimes, but other groups are not immune to these attacks either," said Gay Abrams, in opposition to the proposal. Previous Next

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According to PeerK12, the 10th-grade student flying overhead thought he was going to be taking a picture of students making a formation of a smiley face, but instead saw the swastika. “Administrators were notified immediately by the family – but declined to report the incident, saying it would be ‘handled next year.’ And then for nearly three months, nothing happened,” PeerK12 said. < Back SDA family says antisemitism incident handled improperly According to PeerK12, the 10th-grade student flying overhead thought he was going to be taking a picture of students making a formation of a smiley face, but instead saw the swastika. “Administrators were notified immediately by the family – but declined to report the incident, saying it would be ‘handled next year.’ And then for nearly three months, nothing happened,” PeerK12 said. ENCINITAS — The San Dieguito Union High School District is addressing an incident from the end of the previous school year in which students allegedly made the shape of a swastika on a field at San Dieguito Academy, with reports that the school’s principal has been placed on administrative leave. In a Sept. 18 statement, SDUHSD Superintendent Anne Staffieri said that in May, a group of students used their bodies to create the formation of a swastika. The image was seen and captured by a Jewish student while flying a plane overhead at the time. While the student’s family reported the incident to school administrators that same day, district leaders said it was not brought to their attention until months later. “Unfortunately, the incident was not brought to the attention of the San Dieguito Union High School District administrators until late last month. I share this point not to deflect responsibility but to clarify that there was a clear and unacceptable breakdown in communication between the school and the District,” Staffieri said. Larry Gordon, the father of the student who captured the image, spoke about the incident at the district board of trustees’ Sept. 11 meeting. He stated that the district’s overall delay in addressing the situation was a breach of duty and urged the district to take responsibility. “On May 30, my son was the direct target of an antisemitic hate crime,” Gordon said. “But the greater hate crime is what followed — silence and delay. No timely report to law enforcement, no prompt investigation, no discipline, no safety plan. By failing to act, this district turned a student act of hate into an institutional act of racism.” Gordon also said the district asked his son to “sit on a panel about how to be nice to each other” before they had publicly acknowledged the incident. The district sent a message to San Dieguito Academy families about the situation last week, followed by a public statement to the community on Thursday. The boy’s family enlisted the help of PeerK12 , an advocacy group for Jewish civil rights in education run by the Israeli-American Civic Education Institute. The organization issued a statement regarding the incident, stating that as of Thursday, San Dieguito Academy Principal Cara Dolnik has been placed on leave pending the outcome of an investigation. District spokesperson Edwin Mendoza said Dolnik remains the principal of the school, but declined to comment on whether she had been placed on administrative leave. The incident allegedly took place on the last day of the school year. According to PeerK12 , the 10th-grade student flying overhead thought he was going to be taking a picture of students making a formation of a smiley face, but instead saw the swastika. “Administrators were notified immediately by the family – but declined to report the incident, saying it would be ‘handled next year.’ And then for nearly three months, nothing happened,” PeerK12 said. The organization stated that once they were contacted by the student’s family, they immediately reached out to Trustee Michael Allman, who claimed he was not aware of the incident and escalated it to district leadership immediately. District administrators then contacted the family and initiated an internal investigation. The family has also filed a uniform complaint with the district. San Dieguito Academy, and the wider San Dieguito Union High School District, has contended with multiple hateful incidents targeting Jewish people and other marginalized groups over the years that have sparked community outrage. In 2021 and 2022, San Dieguito Academy was hit with racist and homophobic graffiti on two separate occasions just months apart. In 2019, law enforcement also investigated graffiti of swastikas and homophobic language in school bathrooms. Graffiti of swastikas was also found at La Costa Canyon High School and Torrey Pines High School in 2021. The school district adopted a resolution addressing antisemitism in 2021 to show support for families. Some families said that while the district has made progress in addressing and dealing with hate crimes, they still have a lot of work to do. “The human swastika incident at SDA is only one example. Reports of racial slurs continue, and I question what the district is doing to meaningfully address them. Covering them up only deepens the harm,” parent Janice Holowka said at the Sept. 11 board meeting. Previous Next

Look at schools’ websites, their trainings, mission statements, textbooks, curricula, and yes, even your child’s homework assignments. Corporate America is beginning to turn away from institutional DEI. It’s time schools got back to basics, too. < Back What are your children being taught? Look at schools’ websites, their trainings, mission statements, textbooks, curricula, and yes, even your child’s homework assignments. Corporate America is beginning to turn away from institutional DEI. It’s time schools got back to basics, too. In the 1984 horror film “Children of the Corn,” a mysterious entity lures children to turn against their parents to guarantee an abundant corn harvest. Fast-forward 40 years, and a mysterious entity in Montgomery County, Md., is enticing children to turn against the Western world. Nestled just north of Washington, D.C., Montgomery County is among the nation’s wealthiest. Parents tend to earn a living as lawyers and lobbyists, as doctors and defense analysts. They are think-tankers and journalists, and of course, many are bureaucrats entrenched in high places in federal agencies. It’s as “inside the beltway” as you can get. Their progeny are the Children of the Swamp. It matters what this next generation is taught. It matters what children from anywhere in America are taught, of course, but what this next potential crop of federal workers and business and industry leaders learns in school could have an outsized effect on our nation’s future. That may help explain why Montgomery County Public Schools went out of its way to caveat its promotion of the toxic ideology of critical race theory. The district — the 14th largest in the country with more than 160,000 students — put out a statement on CRT in which, as the kids would say, the words “established legal theoretical framework” are doing all the work. The statement reads in part: “While Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) does not teach students the established legal theoretical framework known as Critical Race Theory, our school system does not shy away from its longstanding commitment to providing students with the tools to explore the evolution of our nation … ” Clever. Because while the district may not offer a pre-law class on CRT or critical legal studies, the destructive ideology of CRT has made its way into core subjects in the district’s catalog. Take the honors English course at one MCPS school. While the course description reads like a standard English honors class — students read drama and epic poetry, historical literature, imaginative literature, etc. — class assignments seem to have gone off the critical theory rails. In a lesson on “Literary Theory and Criticism” we obtained, students are provided with six lenses through which to examine books they’ve read: Marxist; gender studies & queer theory; critical race theory; psychoanalytical; feminist; and historical/biographical. Other frameworks like formalism, structuralism and reader-response are deemphasized in favor of the more radical flavors of literary criticism. Why are 10th-graders being encouraged to analyze “Catcher in the Rye” through a Marxist lens? Andy why are honors English students learning Marx rather than Milton? The Montgomery County example is but one in the entrenched CRT infrastructure built into many K-12 schools today. Whether it’s CRT itself or newer vintages like California’s ethnic studies graduation requirement , critical theory has permeated the ivy walls of academia and firmly cemented itself in elementary and secondary education. Colleges of education have played a huge role in its dissemination. Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is among the most assigned texts in colleges of education. As the American Enterprise Institute’s Rick Hess and I found, up to one-third of education school faculty who study race do so through a critical theory lens . In colleges today, there are, on average, 3.4 diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) employees for every 100 tenured faculty. And K-12 districts nationwide are replicating this bureaucracy. Nearly 80% of the country’s largest K-12 school districts employ chief diversity officers, mirroring the trend in higher education, according to research by my Heritage Foundation colleague Jay Greene. Parents should feel confident voicing their opinions about the content being taught in their children’s school. When they have concerns that an honors English class, for example, is emphasizing critical theory and Marxist analysis, they should not hesitate to speak up to their school principal or at school board meetings. Public schools are taxpayer-funded entities, and as such, parents should not shy away from expressing their opinions about what these institutions are teaching the next generation of Americans. Are they teaching that America is a force for good in the world, or that it is systemically racist and must be dismantled? Are they teaching that all men are created equal, or that children are born as either an oppressor or oppressed? Are schools teaching that truth is relative or that it is knowable and worth pursuing? Look at schools’ websites, their trainings, mission statements, textbooks, curricula, and yes, even your child’s homework assignments. Corporate America is beginning to turn away from institutional DEI. It’s time schools got back to basics, too. Previous Next

A shocking revelation from a California high school student about discriminatory material he was forced to read has sparked outrage and concern over the growing mandate of race-based curricula in public education. < Back This California Family Is Fighting Back Against a Mandatory ‘White Privilege’ Curriculum A shocking revelation from a California high school student about discriminatory material he was forced to read has sparked outrage and concern over the growing mandate of race-based curricula in public education. A high school student in the San Diego Unified School District has come forward with explosive claims that the district is forcing students to take a controversial “Ethnic Studies” class that focuses heavily on lessons about “white privilege” and “whiteness” — with no option for opting out. The student, Jordan*, told IW Features that the Ethnic Studies class, which covers topics such as “unconscious white privilege” and “whiteness,” is mandatory for all students. In fact, when Jordan tried to change classes, he was informed that the course was required for graduation. “When I asked my counselor to change classes, I was told I could change, but I am required to complete the class for graduation. So, if I opted out now, I would still be required to take it later,” he said. Jordan, who comes from a mixed-race background, said he felt personally targeted by the content, which focuses heavily on race and privilege. “The whole unit focuses on ‘white privilege,’” he said, adding that the material made him feel discriminated against because it singled out white students. “I felt like I was being targeted as a person of lesser value than other people. I felt discriminated [against] and singled out.” Jordan’s mom shares her son’s concerns about the class. ”When my son came to me about concerns he was having with the material in class for the past two weeks, I thought it was a joke,” she told IW Features. “I was in disbelief that this was really being taught in school until my child showed me several examples of the lessons. How is this something my high school student is being forced into as a high school graduation requirement?” The issue raises questions about the power of school districts to impose controversial educational content on students without providing an opportunity for parents and students to opt out. As Jordan’s mom put it, “My son asked to be taken out of this class and was told it is a San Diego Unified School District requirement to graduate.” Ethnic Studies and the Controversy Behind It The district’s “white privilege” curriculum is part of a broader push for ethnic studies programs that, by 2030, all high school students in California will be required to complete in order to graduate. The requirement stems from state legislation, Assembly Bill No. 101, signed into law by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021, that says all public high schools must offer at least one ethnic studies course starting in the 2025-26 school year, and that all public high school students must complete at least one of these semester-long courses to graduate. San Diego Unified rolled out its own Ethnic Studies curriculum well before this requirement was set to go into effect. The curriculum, which is used in more than 10 Ethnic Studies courses designed to help students meet this graduation requirement, includes a wide range of topics related to race, identity, and social justice. Unsurprisingly, many of these courses promote a very one-sided view of these issues—a view that critics, including Jordan’s family, say amounts to ideological indoctrination. In response to these developments, Julie Hamill, a California attorney specializing in educational law, particularly related to civil rights violations in schools, reviewed San Diego Unified School District’s curriculum material and believes that they may violate federal law under Title VI, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin. Hamill also has offered to assist students and parents who feel their rights have been infringed upon by helping them file a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Is This the Future of Education? This situation highlights the increasing politicization of education in California, where state mandates are pushing controversial, leftist ideologies onto students. As the debate heats up, the question remains: Should students be forced to take courses that focus heavily on race and privilege as a requirement for graduation? And more importantly, do parents and students have the right to challenge these mandates when they believe they conflict with their values and beliefs? The answer, according to California families such as Jordan’s, is obvious. But it might just take a lawsuit to force state officials to agree. *A pseudonym has been assigned to protect the storyteller’s privacy. Previous Next

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The ideological lens of Ethnic Studies, with its obsession over systems of power and its binary moral structure, aligns all too easily with antisemitic conspiracism. < Back The Ethnic Studies to Antisemitism Pipeline: Pajaro Valley Edition The ideological lens of Ethnic Studies, with its obsession over systems of power and its binary moral structure, aligns all too easily with antisemitic conspiracism. On Wednesday night, often to cheers and applause, school board members of the Pajaro Valley Unified School District (PVUSD), in Santa Cruz County California, berated and accused the Jewish community of using its wealth and privilege to maintain power at the expense of black and Hispanic communities. The comments were made during a PVUSD meeting centered on whether to renew its contract with Community Responsive Education (CRE), an organization led by Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, to provide professional development for Ethnic Studies. Tintiangco-Cubales is a member of the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMCC) and an original author of the California State of Education’s model Ethnic Studies curriculum. The curriculum had to be revised after widespread concerns over antisemitic content. As a result of those changes, Tintiangco-Cubales subsequently removed her name from the finished product. PVUSD had a previous working relationship with CRE when they developed PVUSD’s Ethnic Studies framework and helped with curriculum development and teacher training. This relationship was severed after Tintiangco-Cubales’ public rejection of California’s model ethnic studies curriculum. Since then, activists have fought for PVUSD to reinstate its contract with CRE. Thanks to California’s AB 101 legislation, Ethnic Studies will soon become a graduation requirement for California’s high schoolers. As activists were quick to point out in last night’s meeting, Ethnic Studies is not Multicultural Studies; it is not the study of different communities and their contributions to the United States. As it is written and applied, Ethnic Studies is about identifying systems of power and oppression and learning how to dismantle them. Systems do not materialize out of thin air. They are built. They are designed. If our liberal society is a “system of oppression” then it must have been purposefully designed by oppressors to maintain power. Ethnic Studies teaches a Manichean worldview of good and bad, oppressor against oppressed, powerful and powerless. That kind of simplistic thinking has always been a happy hunting ground for the antisemite and the conspiracist. It is no surprise, then, that as Ethnic Studies gets adopted in K-12, there is a rise of antisemitism in schools. And this was perfectly displayed by the school board members who voted to approve the CRE contract last night. Trustee Joy Flynn, for example, assured the Jewish community that there was no hint of antisemitism in CRE’s work while simultaneously claiming that the Jewish community has economic power and white privilege that they are not using to benefit the wider community. Trustee Gabriel Medina went further, addressing Jewish community members in the audience: “You only show up to meetings when it’s beneficial for you, so you can tell brown people who they are…the lies that you spewed here tonight were insane … if you want to continue to be segregationists like you have in the past …” A teacher in PVUSD said, in regard to antisemitism in the CRE curriculum, “It would be disrespectful to me, to every teacher who has been in this training, to every student, if you were to say ‘We don’t believe you, we believe this one minority’ and maybe the fact they gave money to certain campaigns helps.” He went on to say “Turns out I’m part Ashkenazi Jew, so if that ups my favoritism, please renew CRE.” This last remark was met with jovial laughter. This wasn’t just offensive — it was revealing. Open antisemitism like this may shock, but it shouldn’t surprise. The ideological lens of Ethnic Studies, with its obsession over systems of power and its binary moral structure, aligns all too easily with antisemitic conspiracism. Tragically, it seems that PVUSD has adopted this worldview wholesale. Let’s hope other districts don’t follow their lead. Dr Mika Hackner is Senior Research Associate at the North American Values Institute. She has been published in Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, the Washington Post, Quillette and the Jewish Journal. Previous Next

< Back Previous Next In San Diego, controversy surrounds an antisemitic imam and his wife Imam Taha Hassane has justified Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack, while Lallia Allali [his wife and San Diego Unified School District consultant] posted an image of a Star of David decapitating babies. JNS Staff Dec 11, 2023 On Dec. 8, the Palestine, Arab and Muslim Caucus of the California Faculty Association hosted an event —listed with the California State University, San Bernardino logo—titled “Endangered Education: Teaching Palestine in Liberated K-12 Ethnic Studies.” Among the speakers at the event, for which the Council on American-Islamic Relations was listed as a co-sponsor, was Lallia Allali, whom the group listed as a doctoral candidate at the University of San Diego. Last month, Allali quit a University of San Diego position and the community advisory board of The San Diego Union-Tribune after the revelation that he had posted an image on her Facebook account of a Star of David decapitating five babies. A caption read: “The devil is killing.” The Union-Tribune , which referred to it as “a graphic and deplorable antisemitic image,” stated that “Once we had the opportunity to confirm that Allali had reposted it, we accepted her resignation and removed her from the list of board members and contributors on our website.” Lallia Allali Facebook Post Oct 2023 “This is a double blood libel, 40 Israeli babies were mass murdered, 30 Israeli children are being held hostage, and many others were murdered in southern Israel,” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean and global social action director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, stated at the time. “This blood libel against the Jewish people would bring tears of joy to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels,” he added. The university said in a statement that “while individuals have the right to express their views on their personal accounts, they do not reflect the views of USD’s leadership nor any official position of the university.” “In the interest of safety, Allali has decided to step away from teaching the course,” it added. “The safety of our community is the university’s top priority.” Allali is married to Imam Taha Hassane, of the Islamic Center of San Diego, “a mosque best known as the home to two 9/11 hijackers,” The Waashington Free Beacon reported. The San Diego mosque received $150,000 in federal funding on Aug. 15, the paper reported. Imam Taha Hassane October 20, 2023 Sermon at the Islamic Center of San Diego “When people are occupied, then the resistance is justified,” Hassane said in a sermon on Oct. 20, justifying Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack. “We cannot accuse somebody who is fighting for his life to be a terrorist. The terrorist is the one who started the occupation, not the one who is defending himself.”

AB 101 was ill-conceived from the start: no enforceable guidelines, no state standards, no penalties for ignoring guardrails that prohibit discrimination, not even a real definition of what ethnic studies actually means. < Back Opinion: The California ethnic studies mandate is a train wreck AB 101 was ill-conceived from the start: no enforceable guidelines, no state standards, no penalties for ignoring guardrails that prohibit discrimination, not even a real definition of what ethnic studies actually means. There’s no mincing words: the California ethnic studies mandate is a train wreck. Since the passage of Assembly Bill 101 in 2021 that requires California public school students in the class of 2029-2030 to take a course in ethnic studies to graduate high school, districts have been floundering around for four years trying to figure out what to do. AB 101 was ill-conceived from the start: no enforceable guidelines, no state standards, no penalties for ignoring guardrails that prohibit discrimination, not even a real definition of what ethnic studies actually means. What were legislators thinking? That everyone would suddenly gather together in unity, form a happy circle, hold hands and sing Kumbaya? The ethnic studies mandate has sown confusion and division, hardly the original objective of bringing students and communities together in harmony. I’ve witnessed so much waste in time, money and public resources watching local school districts try to create coursework from scratch while attempting to balance varied and heated perspectives and navigating the pitfalls without a clear roadmap for guidance. Meanwhile, with attention focused on non-academic matters, test scores and basic skills continue to decline. For background, the state produced an abominable first draft of an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum for schools to use. It was a poor substitute for actual state standards and was riddled with bias and leftist ideology that often included blatant antisemitism and anti-capitalist content. Although that first draft was rejected by the state after receiving thousands of complaints, a newer version was developed that was supposed to provide a more neutral curriculum. However, those responsible for developing that first version disavowed the revised version and began to advance their own set of materials. Now known as the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium , those authors and supporters have been providing their instructional materials to school districts, despite the state issuing notices to districts to avoid using the “liberated” version. By all accounts, this “liberated” version approaches the subject based on an oppressed/oppressor dichotomy, and students are often asked to self-identify with one group or the other. As a result, the takeaway has been a not-so-subtle message: If you are descended from a white European background, your inherited, entitled status makes you guilty of being part of a despicable class of people. Challenging, actually overthrowing, that system of oppression is a worthy objective. Besides white European descendants, Jews and Asians have also been categorized as oppressors because, in general, many members of both groups have found some degree of success in America. Because Israel has been positioned as a colonial settler entity with no ancestral right to the land, ignoring the obvious historical fact that Jews have been living on that land for centuries, anti-Zionism, which has often crossed over into outright antisemitism, has become a key component of the liberated ethnic studies model. A Los Angeles Times story published May 14, states that the “liberated” curriculum is a guide to teach students about “contemporary social movements that struggle for social justice and an equitable and democratic society, and conceptualize, imagine, and build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic-racist society.” How are educators to teach high-level principles such as these, designed initially for college-level coursework, to teenage students, many of whom are only 13 and have yet to take a class in U.S. history or social studies? It’s astounding that state legislators would support such a mandate and would leave it up to individual school districts for follow-through, with little to no guidance on how to proceed and a model curriculum ripe for abuse. Social justice pursuits The state’s official curriculum only offers a menu of options and leaves the actual development of ethnic studies up to each school district, so it’s easily hijacked and leaves open plenty of room for lessons that go well beyond the purported effort to focus on the four traditionally identified ethnic groups that have been historically overlooked in high school classes: Black-, Native-, Latine- and Asian-Americans. An important point is that a model curriculum, even this one at 700 pages, is no substitute for the creation of rigorous state standards that specify what should be taught (and maybe even more relevant in this case, what should not be taught). All other classes the state requires to earn a high school diploma have written state standards; ethnic studies is the sole exception. Districts proceeded under the assumption that the mandate was indeed a mandate, even though a clause in AB 101 clearly states that the provisions of the bill are operative only upon state funding, which was estimated at the time to be $276 million. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed budget presented earlier this year did not provide funding for ethnic studies, and state officials have indicated that no funding will be forthcoming for the 2025-2026 year. This leaves districts in a quandary. They’ve been forced by the state’s passage of AB 101 to develop what they were told would be a mandate — and now it’s technically not. In the LA Times article, Troy Flint, chief communications officer for the California School Boards Association , said the ethnic studies requirement has been problematic since its inception. And because funding might come through at some point in the future, “school districts are in a bind because there is a possibility a mandate could be implemented, but it’s uncertain.” Do districts shelve their work over the past four years, offer ethnic studies as an optional elective, or move forward with their own decision to require ethnic studies for high school graduation? Although supporters of the radical “liberated” curriculum want to maintain the requirement, a more reasonable option is to offer ethnic studies as a choice, letting students decide if this is a course worth their while. An even better option is to shelve the whole thing for some time if needed in the future, instead of expending more money to hire and train teachers to deliver the class. Legislative failure What’s currently in place is an ethnic studies mandate that’s unfunded — so theoretically inoperative — and districts are left with what? A dilemma, a betrayal by the legislature, and a lot of expended time and money after being forced to prepare for a course that’s now not legally required. Elected officials, including the governor, who supported AB 101 should be doing some soul-searching at this point. They unleashed a mess and left school districts high and dry. Compounding that headache for school boards has been having to deal with hours of often confrontational public comments over the past few years from community members and parents expressing their disparate views. Meanwhile, the amount of taxpayer money spent on this thankless pursuit and ultimate failure by our state’s elected officials to provide sensible and workable legislation is inestimable. Marsha Sutton is an education writer and opinion columnist and can be reached at suttonmarsha@gmail.com . Previous Next

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< Back Previous Next San Diego School District Passes Resolution to Include Antisemitism in Ethnic Studies The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) Board of Trustees passed a resolution on October 26 to include the teaching of antisemitism in the ethnic studies curriculum. Aaron Bandler Oct 28, 2021 The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) Board of Trustees passed a resolution on October 26 to include the teaching of antisemitism in the ethnic studies curriculum. The resolution stated that “reports of white supremacist, antisemitic, anti-Jewish, and anti-Israeli graffiti, bullying, harassment, and violence on SDUSD campuses has been on the rise in recent years such that administrators, teachers, and student leaders need updated and readily available training and resources to prevent and address antisemitism in all its forms” and acknowledged that “anti-Zionism and anti-Israel bias can descend into antisemitism when they promote demonization, discriminatory double standards, and/or delegitimization of Israel and its existence.” “The Board of Education denounces the rise in antisemitic rhetoric and hate-motivated crimes and incidents that denigrate Jewish students and staff in the communities served by SDUSD,” it read. Read more: https://jewishjournal.com/news/341876/san-diego-school-district-passes-resolution-to-include-antisemitism-in-ethnic-studies/

< Back Previous Next A different perspective BVH student meeting marks first steps to ensuring a safe community Destiny Avila Ramirez Dec 15, 2023 On Dec. 5, Bonita Vista High’s (BVH) student-run publication’s the Crusader ’s Editorial Board members and Opinion Editors met with three BVH Israel Club members to discuss a recent editorial cartoon that had sparked conflict within the BVH community. For the Crusader, our goal was to take the first step towards creating a safe environment for the vulnerable individuals in our community—as stated in a Staff Editorial published on Nov. 13 by the publication. An editorial cartoon depicting a student’s view on the current Israel-Palestine conflict was published on the publication’s online website on Oct. 23 and featured in the third issue print of the Crusader which was distributed on the BVH campus on Nov. 3. After reading out a prepared message regarding the editorial cartoon in a Sweetwater Union High School District meeting (SUHSD) board members addressed the unintended harm the editorial cartoon may have caused and discussed the first step to meet with the Israel Club members; in hopes to listen to their personal experiences and insights regarding the Israel-Hamas war, and its impact on them. Read more: https://bonitavistacrusader.org/15897/opinion/a-different-perspective/

< Back Previous Next Anti-Israel resolutions on docket for US teachers union The American Federation of Teachers will vote on proposals that fuel “discrimination and hatred against Jews,” critics say. Schools & High Education Jul 19, 2024 At its upcoming convention in Houston, which begins on July 22, the American Federation of Teachers plans to vote on several anti-Israel resolutions, including those that oppose “weaponization” of Jew-hatred, and advocate divestment from Israeli bonds and halting U.S. military aid to Israel. “These resolutions not only marginalize our Jewish students, families and staff but also contribute to an environment of fear and hostility in our schools,” said Tova Plaut, founder of the New York City Public School Alliance. “By targeting Zionism and falsely equating it with colonialism and racism, these resolutions promote a dangerous narrative that fuels discrimination and hatred against Jews,” added Plaut, whose organization—along with StandWithUs, Educators Caucus for Israel and Partners for Equality and Educational Responsibility in K-12—condemned the resolutions. Read more: https://www.jns.org/anti-israel-resolutions-on-docket-for-teachers-union/

There is a well-coordinated, national effort between teachers, activist organizations, and administrators to indoctrinate American children against Israel. A Free Press investigation. < Back The Kindergarten Intifada There is a well-coordinated, national effort between teachers, activist organizations, and administrators to indoctrinate American children against Israel. A Free Press investigation. In August, the second largest teachers union chapter in the country—there are more than 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles —met at the Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. to discuss, among other things, how to turn their K-12 students against Israel. In front of a PowerPoint that read, “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired,” history teacher Ron Gochez elaborated on stealth methods for indoctrinating students. But how to transport busloads of kids to an anti-Israel rally, during the school day, without arousing suspicion? “A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.” Gochez was just getting warmed up. “It’s like tomorrow I go to church and some of my students are at the church. ‘Oh, wow! Hey, how you doing?’ We just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and look! We just happen to be at a pro-Palestine action, same place, same time.” The crowd burst into approving laughter. Seated at a keffiyeh-draped table, Gochez said, “Some of the things that we can do as teachers is to organize. We just have to be really intelligent on how we do that. We have to know that we’re under the microscope. We have to know that Zionists and others are going to try to catch us in any way that they can to get us into trouble.” He continued: “If you organize students, it’s at your own risk, but I think it’s something that’s necessary we have to do.” He told the audience of educators that he once caught a “Zionist teacher” looking through his files. Gochez warned the crowd to be wary of “admin trying to be all chummy with you. You got to be very careful with that, even sometimes our own students.” John Adams Middle School teacher and panelist William Shattuc agreed, a keffiyeh around his neck. “We know that good history education is political education. And when we are coming up against political movements, like the movement for Zionism, that we disagree with, that we’re in conflict with—they [Zionists] have their own form of political education and they employ their own tools of censorship.” What are the “tools of censorship” employed by Zionists? Apparently, they include accusing teachers who rail against Israel in the classroom of antisemitism. "They try to say antisemitism, which is really ridiculous, right ?” said Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona, ethnic studies teacher at Edward R. Roybal Learning Center in Los Angeles. Cardona recently received a National Education Association Foundation Award for excellence in teaching . “What they do is they conflate. Part of that is by putting the star on their flag ,” Cardona said, referring to the Jewish Star of David. “Religion has nothing to do with it.” But, she insists, that the course she teaches, and whose curriculum she helped develop—ethnic studies—is fundamentally incompatible with supporting Israel. “ ‘Are you pro-Israel—are you for genocide? ’ And if anybody were to say, ‘Okay, sure ,’ that’s really not ethnic studies.” (Gochez, Shattuc, and Cardona did not return requests for comment.) It’s tempting to dismiss this as one more bull session among radical teachers leading a far-left public-sector union. If only. Four years ago, I was among the first journalists to expose the widespread incursion of gender ideology into our schools. Once-fringe beliefs about gender swiftly took over large swaths of society partly thanks to their inclusion in school curricula and lessons. Today, extensive interviews with parents, teachers, and non-profit organizations that monitor the radicalism and indoctrination in schools convinced me that demonization of Israel in American primary and secondary schools is no passing fad. Nor is it confined to elite private schools serving hyper-progressive families. As one Catholic parent who exposes radicalism in schools nationwide on the Substack Undercover Mother said to me: “They’ve moved on from BLM to gender unicorn to the new thing: anti-Israel activism. Anti-Israel activism is the new gender ideology in the schools.” Parents who watched in alarm as gender theory swept through schools will recognize the sudden, almost religious conversion to this newest ideology. And very few educators are standing against it. Much of the anti-Israel vituperation slides into classrooms through a subject called ethnic studies. In 2021, California became the first state to adopt it as a requirement for receiving a high school diploma. Legislatures of more than a dozen states have already followed suit, incorporating ethnic studies into K–12 curricula. In principle, these laws require schools to teach the histories and cultures of African Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Latinos, and Native Americans. In practice, they grant teachers license to incorporate lessons that often divide civilization into “oppressed” and “oppressor.” A primary fixation of ethnic studies is demonizing Israel . Activist-led organizations readily supply instructional materials. Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC ), Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA ; creators of the Teach Palestine Project ), Teaching While Muslim , Jewish Voice for Peace , Unión del Barrio , and the Zinn Education Project regularly furnish distorted histories with eliminationist rhetoric against Israel. Especially in the year since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7, 2023, the anti-Israel materials have become pervasive. It’s not surprising that they are found in world history and current events lessons. But demonization of Israel is now taught in art, English, math, physics, and social-emotional learning classes. Anti-Israel activism spreads through online curricula that are password protected, eluding parental oversight. It is pushed by teachers unions, furnished by activist organizations, and communicated to children through deception. (“We just happen to be at the same place at the same time.”) Anti-Israel radicals willingly stake their jobs for their cause. “So how do we do all this without getting fired?” Gochez asked his assembled audience of public school teachers. “That’s the million-dollar question. And I don’t know how in the hell we have not been fired yet because I know for sure they have tried, but we have to organize. That’s the bottom line. If they come after one of us, the district has to know that it will be a bigger headache for them to try to touch one of us than it would be to just leave us alone.” All for the sake of indoctrinating other people’s children. Jewish Students Fend for Themselves Last year, Ella Hassner was a senior at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, California. In the weeks and months after October 7, she says, her school erupted with anti-Israel propaganda. To combat the anti-Israel posters that appeared in classrooms and hallways, the school’s Jewish club received approval from the principal to put up posters of the hostages. Within thirty minutes, the posters were torn down, Ella, who has U.S.-Israeli citizenship and is now 18 years old, told me. Another Jewish student I spoke to, “Benny,” confirmed this, adding that he and his friends had witnessed one teacher tearing the posters down. Teachers regularly pushed the idea to students—in class and on social media, where they were followed by their students—that “Zionists” were committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. A large majority of American Jews, 85 percent , support the State of Israel. Zionism refers to the movement that established a modern Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland. Given the quantity of anti-Israel propaganda flooding American K–12 schools, it’s perhaps unsurprising that children would turn against their Jewish classmates. This past year saw a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents in K–12 schools. Students verbally attacked Jewish classmates in terms that echoed the very charges laid by their teachers against the State of Israel. “Baby killer” and “Violent Zionist” became popular epithets. Two girls in Ella’s class began to harass her, she told me. A subsequent school district investigation report, obtained by The Free Press , confirms her account. The girls said to her: “Your people are terrorists.” The girls created posts on social media that claimed “Israeli babies are not real humans,” and attacked Ella’s family, tagging Ella’s younger brother. Ella filed a “bullying report” with the school in February. Although the principal had personally witnessed some of the behavior, he and the associate superintendent consulted the school district’s legal counsel and decided “that the complaint would not be investigated by the district,” according to the investigation report. In February, the school hosted the annual district-wide vocal talent show. Several students sang songs celebrating their ethnic heritage. Ella and a female friend sang their approved song, “Someone Like You” by Adele, and then added another: a Hebrew pop anthem, “Yesh Bi Ahava,” which translates to “There’s Love Inside Me.” They announced the song was “dedicated to their families in Israel.” Ella says the associate superintendent pulled the duo aside after the performance and said the staff and other students were greatly upset and offended by the Hebrew song and the dedication. According to the district investigation report, the associate superintendent also informed the girls that “she would be following up with the principal the following week to discuss the matter.” The investigation found that the district did not take disciplinary action against Ella. (In response to request for comment, a spokeswoman from the district stated that the district could not discuss specific cases. She also wrote that staff was “made aware of several allegations of antisemitism. We took each complaint seriously and responded with great care to make sure our community of students, staff and families felt safe.”) In March of 2024, Ella stood at a town hall with U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna and recounted many of these incidents to get them on record. (Khanna said there should be “zero tolerance” for what Ella described and offered to help if the district did not respond to her complaints.) Ella ended her town hall speech with the advice that she gives her younger siblings: If anyone mistreats them for being Jewish, “they should come to me, not to the school.” Conversations with seventeen Jewish parents whose children attend public school in Northern California suggest that that is an understandable reaction. Since October 7 of last year, hundreds of incidents involving the harassment of Jewish K–12 students have been reported to Act Now K12, a grassroots effort to catalog and combat antisemitism in Northern California schools. Ilana Pearlman of Berkeley, Viviane Safrin of San Francisco, and Maya Bronicki of Santa Clara County—all mothers of Jewish children in public schools—helped spearhead the effort to track the escalating antisemitism tearing through school districts in Northern California. Bronicki says two hundred incidents were reported last school year in Santa Clara County alone. Jewish families reported incidents like this one: An Israeli American girl walked into her first period French class at Cupertino High School to find that many of the other students and the teacher were wearing a Palestinian flag or keffiyeh in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance, on the occasion of the Middle Eastern club’s pro-Palestine day. The club handed out a map of Israel labeled only as “Palestine.” In another incident, a 12-year-old middle school student at a charter school in San Jose arrived visibly upset on the first school day following the October 7 Hamas massacre. According to a complaint against the school district later filed by her parents in federal district court, the girl had close family members in Israel whose whereabouts were unknown. The girl asked her world history teacher if she could go to the bathroom to collect herself. The history classroom “was decorated with maps of the modern Middle East in which Israel was erased.” The history teacher knew the girl was Israeli American because she had identified herself as such at the start of the year during an icebreaker exercise. He told her she could not go “until she read aloud to the entire class a passage he had selected to the effect that in the past, Palestinians and Jews had gotten along,” according to the complaint. “The requirement to publicly espouse a position that was at odds with present reality was overwhelmingly oppressive and humiliating.” She read the passage aloud, as directed. The next day at lunch, two female classmates wearing hijabs approached her, according to the complaint, “and demanded ‘What do your people think about the conflict?’ ” When the girl tried to answer, they screamed, “You’re lying—Jews are terrorists.” One demanded: “Do you know that your family in Israel is living on stolen land?” A few days later, two boys chased her around the school yelling, “We want you to die.” Kids began to refer to her as “Jew.” They would say, “Hi, Jew” or “Hey Jew.” If she protested, they said they thought it was funny. The rest of the kids isolated and ignored her when they weren’t whispering about her, the complaint alleges. She lost all but one friend. Her parents met several times with school faculty; according to the complaint, they did nothing to ensure her safety or improve the girl’s situation. A Jewish ninth grader, “Sam,” attends a Bay Area high school where, after October 7 of last year, posters declaring, “Ceasefire Now!” and “Free Palestine” began appearing on the walls. Because Sam’s family considers itself very progressive, Sam was not bothered by the posters. Then one of Sam’s friends sent him a long diatribe that read in part (spelling from the original), “I would just like to say that u are an ignorant ass white ass privileged boy u are so privileged to not b one of those children being killed rn in Gaza…solidarity and indigenous solidarity is something you could never understand as you have grown up your whole life with no culture and money and you been brainwashed by isreali and western media the world stands with Palestine and frankly it’s embarrassing to be anything different, when mostly all people of color stand with Palestine and you stand with ISREAL, that’s how yk ur in the wrong bud oppressed people stand with oppressed people in solidarity SOMETHING YOU COULDD NEVER UNDERSTAND.” T he text concluded: “FREE PALESTINE TILL ITS BACKWARDS BITCH !!!!” I spoke to Sam’s mother, and her perception was that the message didn’t sound like her son’s friend. The jargon and gist appeared to come from adults. Only the self-righteous fury and the message’s abusive conclusion belonged to the boy. I also spoke to the mother of “Dana,” a sixth-grade girl at a Bay Area elementary school. In a social studies unit on ancient civilizations last year, the teacher encouraged students to share their “feelings” about “Israel and Palestine.” Students shouted: “Fuck Israel !” and “Israel sucks! ” Dana was the only Jewish child in the class . When Dana told her mother what had happened, her mother drove back to the school and asked the teacher, who admitted that the classroom exchange had occurred. Dana’s mother asked the teacher what “Israel and Palestine” had to do with the sixth-grade curriculum. The teacher claimed she couldn’t teach ancient civilizations without talking about the Palestinians. Dana’s mother knew the lesson offered neither historical nor archaeological evidence to tie the modern Palestinian national identity back to antiquity. But teachers today often consume and regurgitate anachronistic propaganda uncritically. I spoke to a San Francisco middle schooler, “Zoe,” who told me her ethnic studies teacher so relentlessly preached anti-Israel sentiment, and the school was so engulfed in anti-Israel propaganda, that it changed how students treated her. Zoe told me one classmate came up to her and said: “A Zionist is someone who wants Palestinians dead .” Zoe replied, “That is actually not what it means at all. ” Ilana Pearlman of Berkeley is a midwife who has three Jewish children. Her son “Danny,” who was a student at Berkeley High School, told her that after October 7, a teacher used the school’s printing press to make “Free Palestine” T-shirts that were then distributed to students. One of Danny’s teachers posted a running tally, in the front of the classroom, of the number of Palestinians allegedly killed by the IDF. She says, “So every day, when my son came into class, it would say how many people Israel has killed today.” (The Free Press has confirmed this with photographic evidence.) Danny, who is black, said to her, “If there was an image of a noose, we would not hear the end of it. There would be protests, people would be going crazy. But it’s always okay if it’s anything anti-Jewish.” One mother reported to grassroots organizers that her seven-year-old daughter came home from elementary school in Marin County last year and asked: “Mommy, if someone asks me if I’m Jewish, do I have to tell them?” Learning to Hate Israel Los Angeles Unified School District is failing its students . In the 2023–24 school year, fewer than half the students met reading proficiency standards, and less than 33 percent were proficient in math. But instead of a laser focus on how to educate kids, teachers are coming up with ever more ways to attack the existence of Israel. It’s hard to imagine what U.S. arms sales to Israel has to do with the district’s core educational goals, but recently, the L.A. teachers union voted in opposition to it. They spend considerable union time and resources on organizing opposition to Israel. In the union’s recent Motions Report from October 10 of this year, half the measures put to a vote related to Israel. One motion, which passed unanimously, endorsed a discussion about “how to organize your workplace to support the Palestine Liberation Movement” and against “the ongoing genocide in Palestine.” The First Amendment protects teachers’ political advocacy in union meetings. But public school teachers have no First Amendment right to express their political viewpoints in the classroom. “When it comes to K–12 education, the precedents are pretty clear that the school district or legislature or the principal or whoever the political process leaves in charge can set the curriculum and can require the teachers to go along with it,” Eugene Volokh, First Amendment scholar and distinguished professor of law at UCLA, told me. But while the school board or legislature sets the agenda for what must be taught in schools, it can also choose not to police teachers who skirt those rules or even brazenly violate them. Curriculum decisions, Volokh said, are “subject to the political process and not the legal process ,” generally speaking. If the school district doesn’t object to teacher speech—or in fact encourages it—parents’ only recourse is through the political process: voting out state legislators or school board members. Dillon Hosier, Chief Executive Officer of the Israeli-American Civic Action Network, explained that for generations, the Jewish community has poured its resources into nonprofits, which are not legally permitted to lobby. “Our opponents,” he said, referring to organizations like Council on American-Islamic Relations, “are putting people in public office and getting bills passed.” That strategy has paid off. School boards and state legislators are reluctant to confront the growing problem in their schools. In Brooklyn, teachers led third graders at PS 705 in Prospect Heights in a chorus of “The Wheels on the Tank,” which encouraged them to despise Israel and the Israel Defense Forces, according to the New York Post : “The wheels on the tanks go round and round, all through the town. The people in the town they hold their ground, and never back down .” The rhyme continued: “Free Palestine till the wheels on the tanks fall off .” The book was illustrated with Palestinian kids hurling rocks at Israeli tanks. In Portland, pre-K lesson plans included the story of Handala, a fictional Palestinian cartoon character who symbolizes the resistance. “When I was only ten years old, I had to flee my home in Palestine,” the boy tells readers. “A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people, ” it continues, according to a piece in City Journal . At a Fort Lee, New Jersey, high school, world history teachers confiscated students’ cell phones before giving a lesson that presented Hamas as a “resistance movement” rather than an internationally designated terrorist organization. Teachers also showed a map of Israel that falsely presented Palestinians as the sole indigenous natives of Israel. (The Free Press has obtained a copy of the presentation. Click here to see it .) The Black Lives Matter Week of Action is a standard program at thousands of schools across the country. It now routinely shifts from a focus on white racism against black Americans to the “other brown people” allegedly subjected to apartheid in the West Bank at the hands of the “white” settler colonialist Israelis, according to several grassroots organizers I spoke to who track radicalism in America’s public schools. (A majority of Israeli Jews are from non-white, non-European heritage.) Three years ago, Nicole Neily founded Parents Defending Education , a nonprofit that exposes radicalism in schools, largely in response to the race and gender ideologies she saw coursing through public schools. This year, when her organization reached out to school districts to inquire whether they planned to include the war in Gaza in their BLM Week of Action instruction, the president of a school board in Rochester, New York, wrote back to confirm that they did. The school board president added, “I would ask that you study the history of the Jewish nation and their involvement in slavery–financing the slave ships to bring Africans into the Americas and the Carribbeans,” referring to a spurious canard associated with Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan. Last spring, millions of Americans watched in disbelief as university students, particularly at our most elite schools, vandalized buildings, set up illegal encampments, and cheered for Hamas. But there was far less attention paid to the parallel dramas unfolding at K–12 schools across the country. Aware of their ability to shape young minds, teachers encouraged schoolchildren to join “Walkouts” for Palestine, don keffiyehs, chant the eliminationist slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” and tell their Jewish classmates, “It is excellent what Hamas did to Israel,” according to a complaint filed to the U.S. Department of Education by the Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League on behalf of Jewish students. “We had been tracking a lot of antisemitic incidents in school even prior to October 7. Obviously, in the wake of October 7, we saw things explode,” Neily told me. “This had sort of been simmering below the surface for a long time. You look at everything that happened on college campuses, and it’s not that kids turn 18, go to college campus, and think, ‘I’m going to underage drink and hate the Jews.’ So much of this was baked into the curriculum before.” Neily, who is Catholic, has now become a national leader in the grassroots effort to expose antisemitism in schools. Her team regularly submits hundreds of FOIA requests, wrangling with schools that hide behind copyright law to avoid disclosing materials taught to American school children. And what she has found is that radical anti-Israel NGOs are training teachers and supplying materials used in thousands of American classrooms.“This stuff is really going viral, coast to coast,” Neily said. Federal law gives parents the right to inspect their children’s educational materials. But schools routinely decline to turn over lessons on the grounds of copyright law. “So long as a parent isn’t asking for the material to duplicate it and sell it, there is no copyright violation in providing that material to parents,” Lori Lowenthal Marcus told me. Marcus is the legal director at The Deborah Project , which protects the civil rights of Jews in education. She added, “It is a bullshit excuse that takes advantage of parents who aren’t lawyers.” Online textbooks are easily supplemented with material from Al Jazeera or other radical sources. Smartboards allow teachers to display fraudulent histories of Israel and outright propaganda. This video , shown to tenth to twelfth graders in the Sequoia Union school district in Northern California as part of the mandatory ethnic studies curriculum, was produced by the virulently anti-Israel Turkish News site, TRT World . It ignores 3,000 years of Jewish history in Israel and instead frames Jewish connection to Israel as illegitimate or what is often called “settler colonialism.” The video omits mention of Jews’ historic connection to the West Bank—called Judea and Samaria in the Hebrew Bible—and ignores the fact that the State of Israel accepted several peace proposals throughout its 76-year history that would have created a Palestinian state. It also omits that the Second Intifada and its 138 Palestinian suicide bombings of primarily civilian Israeli targets was the impetus for Israel erecting a security barrier. An Undercover, Front-Row Seat Dr. Brandy Shufutinsky, director of education and community engagement at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values , first noticed an uptick in antisemitic K–12 materials in 2018, when she was getting her PhD in education. “What I saw was what seemed to be a very well-coordinated effort between activist teachers, activist organizations, and administrators that were trying to do a lot of kowtowing to progressive social ideology through programming and bringing that programming into their schools ,” she said. “There is just this insidious idea that it is okay to hate Jews or attack Jews if they feel any connection to the Jewish homeland—to Israel; if there’s any expression of Jewish pride, especially when that pride is Zionism ,” she said. “I think that antisemitism, like the Jew hatred, isn’t the end goal. I think it’s the symptom of a bigger anti-Western illiberalism that has taken over a lot of our institutions ,” Shufutinsky told me. Curious to learn more about the goals of these anti-Israel educators, Shufutinsky began hanging out in their virtual meetings. As a grad student at the University of San Francisco, she spent almost two years, she says, “undercover” in chat rooms where educators were developing a new curriculum: “Liberated Ethnic Studies.” This would eventually become the mandatory California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. In discussions about the need for ethnic studies, educators were uniquely fixated on promoting an anti-Israel agenda. “The whole goal for pushing ethnic studies, making it a requirement, was so that they could teach Palestine, ” she said. When in 2021, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a requirement that schools make completion of ethnic studies a condition of graduation, he effectively made antisemitism a formal feature of California schooling. The original curriculum, “Liberated Ethnic Studies,” was so outrageously antisemitic , it was officially abandoned. In The Free Press , Shufutinsky called it “a Trojan horse to institutionalize antisemitism in California schools.” But even the successor course—implemented by many of the same educators who had proposed the Liberated Ethnic Studies curriculum in California—has provided a vehicle for anti-Israel indoctrination of American schoolchildren. Shufutinsky told me that the reformed curriculum teaches that “Israel is something that it isn’t. That it’s the ultimate evil. That it is apartheid. That it is a settler colonial state that deserves to be dismantled. That Zionism is racism .” Elina Kaplan, a former manager in Northern California’s tech sector and self-described “lifelong Democrat,” was quick to recognize the problems posed by ethnic studies in the classroom. A childhood spent as a Jew in the former Soviet Union taught her to recognize state-sponsored antisemitic propaganda. She formed a nonprofit to organize against the inclusion of politicized ethnic studies in California schools and maintains an archive of the antisemitic materials promulgated in American classrooms. While her organization helped defeat the worst excesses of the original curriculum, the broader effort to keep antisemitism out of the schools failed. Since 2021, she has seen the antisemitism once confined to ethnic studies sprout in virtually every subject. Kaplan says, “In math class, they can be studying charts and are told, ‘Look at this pie chart of the number of Palestinians murdered. This slice shows the number of Israelis that were killed .’ ” That example was actually presented to elementary school students in New Haven Unified School District, California. The chart is labeled “People Killed Since September 29, 2000” divided into Palestinians and Israelis and asks: “What information is this pie graph showing us? ” The obvious answer: Far more Palestinians have been killed than Israelis. Another mother sent me an example of an assignment used in a physics class at Cupertino High School, which asked students to consider the “Effect of Israel’s Bombing of Gaza” on climate change. At schools where anti-Israel propaganda is promulgated, schoolchildren are turning against their Jewish classmates. Dozens of interviews with parents, teachers, and people at nonprofits revealed that discussions of Israel quickly become personal, and American Jews—even children—are the inevitable targets. “Tammy” is a Jewish substitute teacher in Oakland who asked not to be identified. She said in the past year, she’s been astonished by the sheer volume of anti-Israel messaging to school kids across Oakland. She says only the Jewish families object. Where there are no Jewish students, the material goes entirely unopposed. “We’re raising a generation of antisemites,” she told me. “I have a necklace that says my name in Hebrew. And I wear it every day and I don’t take it off. It’s pretty small,” Tammy told me. One day last year, when she was substitute teaching in middle school, a boy saw her necklace and said, “Oh, I’m Jewish too.” The boy went and got his backpack and pulled from it a necklace with a Star of David pendant. She remembers thinking, “Why is it in your backpack? Why aren’t you wearing it?” Previous Next

And in so doing, has helped demonstrate why California’s schools, once among the best in the nation, are now among its worst. < Back California Teachers’ Union Ruins an Earnest Effort to Confront Antisemitism And in so doing, has helped demonstrate why California’s schools, once among the best in the nation, are now among its worst. California has a problem with antisemitism in its public schools, but the proposed remedy — a massive new regulatory agency outlined in a bill on the governor’s desk — will do approximately nothing to end the madness. But not exactly nothing: If you’re a leader of the state’s powerful teachers’ union, debating “settler colonialism” in Israel, the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, genocide, the virtues of Hamas, and whether American Jews are “white” or “white-adjacent” (and in either case equally “privileged”) is far better than confronting the union’s role in the 40-year decline of public education in California. In February, months before it arrived on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk, Assembly Bill 715 started life as a laser-focused response to the problem of antisemitism in the state’s schools. Approved unanimously in the state assembly, it seemed certain to move through the state senate with a standing ovation, ticker tape falling from the gallery, and a college drumline. Instead, the bill ran into the state’s powerful California Teachers Association (CTA). Lengthy negotiations followed. By the time the state senate approved the bill and moved it to the office of Governor Newsom, AB 715 had become something different and even malign : a blueprint for the creation of a massive new office of civil rights attached loosely to California’s education department — an office charged with policing “violations” of the civil rights of all of the familiar racial, ethnic, and gender-fluid identities favored by the far left . . . plus antisemitism. It’s small comfort that, among its new employees, AB 715 “would also require the Office of Civil Rights to employ the Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator to be appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Senate” — all of whom benefit magnificently from CTA political campaign activities. The legislation even helpfully provides a job description for that employee: “to, among other things, develop, consult, and provide antisemitism education to school personnel to identify and proactively prevent antisemitism and to make recommendations, in coordination with the executive director of the state board, to the Legislature on legislation necessary for the prevention of antisemitism in educational settings.” That’s a lot of developing, consulting, and recommending in the proposed law. But there’s little — if any — obvious authority. And that’s one reason to bet that Gavin Newsom will sign the bill: In this fight between his allies in the state legislature’s Jewish Caucus and the California Teachers Association — itself a kind of fourth branch of government — AB 715 is the perfect political solution: a do-nothing law that promises to do everything. But there is a silver lining. In blocking real reform, AB 715, the California Teachers Association has revealed why California’s schools, once among the best in the nation, are now among its worst. * * * In its July letter opposing the assembly measure, the CTA makes it clear that its highest priority isn’t the education of students. It’s about progressive politics. The letter opens with a prefabricated declaration that the union is (of course) “firmly committed to schools that are free of racism, sexism, religious and gender discrimination.” The implied “but” arrives promptly: “We are also concerned with academic freedom and the ability of educators to ensure that instruction include perspectives and materials that reflect the cultural and ethnic diversity of all of California’s students.” The union tips its hand immediately, and all of its cards are political. Supporting the assembly version of AB 715, the union says, would offer comfort to the real enemy — “a regime [a regime! ] in Washington D.C. that sows division at all levels of academia and seeks to drive a wedge between communities that should be working together to address hate and discrimination.” To make matters worse, the CTA says, the assembly version “would unfortunately arm some others” — “ill-intentioned people” — with the tools they “seek to weaponize public education.” The CTA knows this will happen because, it says, these “extremists” have already filed “meritless” complaints “meant to disrupt or challenge policies that support LGBTQ+ inclusivity or to target LGBTQ+ students and staff.” But the CTA’s biggest concern about the antisemitism bill is that it might “privilege” Jews over other groups, and that would undo the union’s primary political objective of advancing the rights of some groups above others — not of eliminating “privilege,” in other words, but of granting privilege to the people CTA believes deserve it. The letter allows us to watch as the CTA performs a magic trick in reverse, stuffing a rabbit back into a top hat, turning the problem of antisemitism into merely one problem among many. As approved in the assembly, the CTA asserts, AB 715 would “impose limits and define standards for course instruction regarding Israel, Palestine, Zionism, or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, something that we don’t do for any other active conflict in the world, e.g., conflicts in Ukraine, Rwanda, Congo.” Union “members have expressed concerns about lifting these experiences of inequity above those of other groups,” the letter claims. “Focusing on antisemitism alone might be seen as prioritizing one form of discrimination over others, potentially alienating groups facing other forms of systemic discrimination, such as racism, Islamophobia, or anti-LGBTQ+ bias.” The bill’s key provision, the creation of a state Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, would “not address any other forms of hate or discrimination, something that is equally needed.” “Equally needed”? Equating the very real problem of antisemitism in public education with other “forms of hate or discrimination” ignores reality. There is, thank God, no pedagogical effort in California schools — no curriculum, no program, no courses, no teacher, no third-party vendors or nonprofits — working to resuscitate the Ku Klux Klan, marginalizing Muslim children, forcing young women into a handmaid’s tale of barefoot early motherhood, or campaigning to vilify gay kids. None of that exists. On the other hand, the CTA and its hundreds of local affiliates — and the thousands of state and local officials, from the governor to every local school board member, whose political campaigns those unions fund — have indeed run a very well-organized campaign to bash Jews. * * * The strange fruit of the teachers’ unions’ formalized antisemitism is evident everywhere in the state’s public schools. Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israelis, the Oakland Unified school board backed Hamas. “We want to make sure Palestinians have the liberation they so rightfully deserve in their own land,” said board member Valarie Bachelor, switching seamlessly between singular and plural first-person pronouns . “I want to make sure we stand on our progressive organizing history and we don’t just sit on it. We stand on it and we say we need to do more and we need to do this now.” Leaders of the city’s teachers’ union, the Oakland Educators Association , amplified the board’s declaration with their own statement calling for the elimination of Israel. More than 30 Jewish families left the district. “I just felt that there wasn’t a path forward for Jewish families because I had reached out to OUSD and asked them to have a conversation about how they were going to keep Jewish families feeling safe and included,” one parent explained . “When there were lesson plans that were being taught that said, ‘Draw the Zionist bully,’ or ‘I for Intifada, J is for Jesus,’ to me, it felt like – honestly – we were being targeted and singled out and alienated.” In February 2024 , the Louis D. Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League filed a federal complaint against nearby Berkeley Unified, alleging “severe and persistent” antisemitic harassment of Jewish and Israeli students. The complaint cited students being taunted with such slurs as “You have a big nose because you are a stupid Jew,” asking what their “number is” (an apparent reference to Holocaust tattoos), a teacher posting “messages of anti-hate” targeting the district’s only Jewish teacher, and antisemitic imagery in art classes. Some students have departed the district. Anti-Israel teachers marched students in Berkeley’s middle school and high school out of classes in 2024 protests — in one case to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack. Across the Bay, immediately following the October 7, 2023, attack, the San Francisco Unified School District hired the Arab Resource and Organizing Center to run student and teacher trainings “related to leadership development and cultural empowerment.” AROC describes itself as a group of “abolitionists, feminists, and internationalists who believe that the liberation of SWANA (South West Asian and North African) people is inextricably tied to the liberation of all oppressed people.” Meanwhile, the district’s antisemitism training for teachers ran into organized resistance from teachers’ union activists. By contract, the district could require teachers to attend the training — but not to listen. Members of the American Jewish Committee asked to run that training say that as soon as their training began, a leader of United Educators–San Francisco stood up and described “at great length” his own take on the problem of antisemitism: it’s an exclusively right-wing phenomenon, the union leader asserted. He then led most of the teachers out of the room for a separate conversation. By then, the clock on the formal training had nearly run down. We could go on and never exhaust the catalog of formalized antisemitism. In July 2024, federal officials concluded that Jewish students in the central coast town of Carmel were “subjected to pervasive, antisemitic harassment over a three-year period, exposed to repeated swastika graffiti in bathrooms and on desks, a Hitler reference and a verbal threat targeting Jewish people.” California officials say two ethnic studies teachers in the nearby city of Campbell violated state law by presenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a “one-sided anti-Zionism” lesson. In Los Angeles, teachers at an August 2024 United Teachers of Los Angeles Leadership Conference were caught on video training their colleagues to “advocate and leverage your positionality” in the classroom in order to “globalize the intifada” — that is, to help Los Angeles students understand the putative link between the war in Gaza and their own struggles in California. In April, officials at a meeting of the Pajaro Valley Unified School District upbraided Jewish parents for their objections to an ethnic studies curriculum that singled out Jews for their white privilege. “I’ve been a little bit taken aback by the lack of acknowledgement of the economic power historically held by the Jewish community,” said board member Joy Flynn. “I don’t see you people at protests against immigration,” said board member Gabriel Medina. “I don’t see you at protests when people are being taken away right now. I don’t see you advocating to bring back Abrego Garcia or Mahmoud Khalil. I don’t see you guys doing that. You only show up to meetings when it’s beneficial for you, so you can tell brown people who they are.” Days later, the district’s superintendent offered the usual anodyne explanation that, their Jew-bashing notwithstanding, Pajaro Valley “stands firmly against all forms of racism, antisemitism, and hate.” The most prominent case erupted in Southern California’s Santa Ana Unified, where that district, the eighth largest in the state, settled a lawsuit in February 2025 over its ethnic studies courses. The highlight in that showdown came when district officials offered the defense that they were merely relying on guidance from the California Department of Education. The department’s 2019 draft Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum condemned Israel and otherwise omitted mention of Jewish Americans. The compromise version released a year later still allowed districts to include materials linked to the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement. * * * It’s much easier to opine on the plight of the Palestinian people and to assert what’s simply not true about Israel than to defend the 40-year decline of public education in California. And what a trajectory: Data emerging from the most recent national student testing shows that all U.S. students continue to fall behind their global counterparts in math, writing, and science . The decline has been especially steep in California. Despite spending more per student than any other state in the union, California consistently ranks among the nation’s worst states for public education . Some California teachers’ union leaders deny they’re running a political campaign with children as their targets. Others admit that’s the plan — and accept any learning loss as a necessary trade-off. Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of United Teachers of Los Angeles, famously told a reporter , “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables...They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup .” It was Myart-Cruz who, confronted with a parent rebellion over lousy teacher performance, launched a UTLA “research project” to track the ethnic identity of the union’s public critics. Like most teachers’ union websites in California, the United Teachers of LA website looks like an advertisement for the Democratic Socialists of America: it’s a visual cacophony of demonstrations, bullhorns, protest signs, and clenched fists. To paraphrase the old joke, those who can’t do, teach — and those like Myart-Cruz who can’t teach fall back instead on controversial political ideologies they half-learned as college sophomores in order to lecture California K–12 students about the evils of Israel. It’s time to end that sort of pedagogical sleight-of-hand — to stop bashing Jews. Terminate teachers who, misunderstanding the actual job for which they’ve been hired, prefer to use their classrooms as indoctrination camps. California could follow that with a classic California practice: the burning of sage in every school and government building in the state, after which, having banished all bad spirits, it could return to the teaching of math, English, and science along with the classroom practices that once made a California education the envy of the world. Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center and co-host with David Bahnsen of National Review’s “Radio Free California” podcast. Previous Next

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Forget the Pledge of Allegiance. Today’s teachers are more likely to start the school day with an ‘emotions check-in.’ Abigail Shrier on the rise of ‘trauma-informed’ education. < Back How Bad Therapy Hijacked Our Nation’s Schools Forget the Pledge of Allegiance. Today’s teachers are more likely to start the school day with an ‘emotions check-in.’ Abigail Shrier on the rise of ‘trauma-informed’ education. American kids are the freest, most privileged kids in all of history. They are also the saddest, most anxious, depressed, and medicated generation on record. Nearly a third of teen girls say they have seriously considered suicide. For boys, that number is an also alarming 14 percent. What’s even stranger is that all of these worsening mental health outcomes for kids have coincided with a generation of parents hyper-fixated on the mental health and well-being of their children. What’s going on? That mystery is the subject of Abigail Shrier’s fascinating, urgent new book: Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up. Longtime readers of The Free Press will surely know Abigail’s name from her groundbreaking reporting in our pages. She is also the author of the best-selling 2020 book Irreversible Damage, which tackled the difficult subject of the enormous rise of gender dysphoria among teenage girls. It was named by The Economist as one of the best books of the year and has been translated into ten languages. In Bad Therapy, out today, Abigail heads into the breach once more. The book makes the case that the advent of therapy culture, the rise of “gentle parenting,” and the spread of “social-emotional learning” in schools is actually causing much of the anxiety and depression faced by today’s youth. In other words, Abigail argues that in our attempt to keep kids safe, we are failing the next generation of American adults. The best journalists are fearless. And that adjective certainly applies to Abigail, whose bravery in following the evidence wherever it leads is what has made her work on some of the most important and controversial issues of the day so essential. Most American kids today are not in therapy. But the vast majority are in school, where therapists and non-therapists diagnose kids liberally, and offer in-school counseling and mental health and wellness instruction. By 2022, 96 percent of public schools offered mental health services to students. Many of these interventions constitute what I call “bad therapy”: they target the healthy, inadvertently exacerbating kids’ worry, sadness, and feelings of incapacity. Since a child’s first mental or behavioral diagnosis often comes from school, the Child Mind Institute—one of the premier nonprofits devoted to adolescent mental health—provides an online “symptom checker” specifically to help parents or teachers inform themselves about “possible diagnoses.” I began to wonder what schools were doing in the name of improving kids’ mental health. I was in luck. Each year, the state of California sponsors a three-day public school teachers’ conference to showcase its vast array of emotional and behavioral services. Immediately, I registered. That is how, in July of 2022, I came to join more than 2,000 public school teachers at the Anaheim Convention Center, right next to Disneyland. At the convention, ankle tattoos winked over fresh pedicures, Anne Taylor cardigans abounded, and the occasional mohawk sliced indoor air cool enough to crisp celery. We talked about “brain science” based on a YouTube video many of us had seen. It explained that the brain is like a hand, with the thumb folded into the palm. “Our amygdala is really important in serious situations,” said the voice-over. This sounded right. We felt like neuroscientists. We lamented the burdens placed upon school counselors, now part of an expanded psychology staff, which oversees every public school the way diversity officers dominate a university. We were leery of these new bosses, but we had to admit, they had a big job to do. Our kiddos were bonkers. (The word we were careful to use was dysregulated.) Counselors now routinely monitored the social-emotional quality of our teaching, sniffed out emotional disturbance in our students, and decided what assignments to nix or grades to adjust upward. We talked about the need to give kids “brain breaks,” the salvific power of “Mindfulness Minutes,” and the importance of ending each day with an “optimistic closure.” Our purview was the “whole child,” meaning we needed to evaluate and track kids’ “social and emotional” abilities in addition to academic ones. Our mandate: “trauma-informed education.” We pledged to treat all kids as if they had experienced some debilitating trauma. Subsequent interviews with dozens of teachers, school counselors, and parents across the country banished all doubt: therapists weren’t the only ones practicing bad therapy on kids. Often traveling under the name “social-emotional learning,” bad therapy had gone airborne. When I first heard the term social-emotional learning, I assumed a hokey but necessary call for kids to get a grip. Or maybe it was the new name for what they used to call character education: treat people kindly, disagree respectfully, don’t be a jackass. Proponents insist it arrives at those things, albeit through the somewhat circuitous route of mental health. Sometimes described by enthusiasts as “a way of life,” social-emotional learning is the curricular juggernaut that devours billions in education spending each year and more than eight percent of teacher time. (Many teachers say they try to ensure that social-emotional learning happens all day long.) Through a series of prompts and exercises, SEL pushes kids toward a series of personal reflections, aimed at teaching them “self-awareness,” “social awareness,” “relationship skills,” “self-management,” and “responsible decision-making.” Forget the Pledge of Allegiance. Today’s teachers are more likely to inaugurate the school day with an “emotions check-in.” School counselor Natalie Sedano advised our assembled conference room of teachers to ask kids: “How are you feeling today? Are you daisy-bright, happy and friendly? Or am I a ladybug? Will I fly away if we get too close?” This prompted great excitement in the audience, and teachers jumped up to share their own “emotions check-ins.” One teacher said every day, she asks her kids if they feel it’s a “bones” or “no bones” kind of a day, borrowing the verbiage from a viral TikTok video in which a pug owner shares the mood of his 13-year-old pug, Noodle. If Noodle sits upright, it’s a bones day! If he collapses, it’s a no-bones day. “That is so fun!” Sedano enthused. “Love it! Thank you!” I asked Leif Kennair, a world-renowned expert in the treatment of anxiety, and Michael Linden, a professor of psychiatry at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin, what they thought of practice. Both said this unceasing attention to feelings was likely to make kids more dysregulated. If we want to help kids with emotional regulation, what should we communicate instead? “I’d say: worry less. Ruminate less,” Kennair told me. “Try to verbalize everything you feel less. Try to self-monitor and be mindful of everything you do—less.” There’s another problem posed by emotions check-ins: they tend to induce a state orientation at school, potentially sabotaging kids’ abilities to complete the tasks in front of them. Many psychological studies back this up. An individual is more likely to meet a challenge if she focuses on the task ahead, rather than her own emotional state. If she’s thinking about herself, she’s less likely to meet any challenge. “If you want to, let’s say, climb a mountain, if you start asking yourself after two steps, ‘How do I feel?’ you’ll stay at the bottom,” Dr. Linden said. Ethical Violations In 2022, California announced a plan to hire an additional ten thousand counselors in order to address young people’s poor mental health. A new law encourages California school districts to bill federal Medicaid for mental health services allocated to kids in school. Meaning, however much in-school therapy kids have already received, they likely will soon be getting much more. California school psychologist Michael Giambona provides individual therapy sessions to his middle school students during the school day. Giambona also routinely runs interference with kids’ teachers on kids’ behalf. “My teachers have special training in working with individuals with behavior needs and mental health needs,” he told me. “And we meet weekly, and we talk about what’s going on with each student and how we can approach them and support them when they need it.” There’s a problem with in-school therapy, an ethical compromise, which arguably corrupts its very heart. In a remarkably underregulated profession, therapists still have a few ethical bright lines. And among the clearest is—or was—the prohibition on “dual relationships.” “The relationship in the therapy room needs to be its own, distinct and apart,” psychologist and author Lori Gottlieb explains in her book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. “To avoid an ethical breach known as a dual relationship, I can’t treat or receive treatment from any person in my orbit—not a parent of a kid in my son’s class, not the sister of coworkers, not a friend’s mom, not my neighbor.” This ethical guardrail exists to protect a patient from exploitation. A patient may reveal her deepest secrets and vulnerabilities to her therapist, who could then rule over her like a czarina does her kulaks. Anyone possessing this much knowledge of a patient’s private life may be tempted to exert undue power. And so the profession makes “dual relationships” off limits. Except that school counselors, school psychologists, and social workers enjoy a dual relationship with every kid who comes to see them. They know all of a kid’s best friends; they may even treat a few of them with therapy. They know a kid’s parents and their friends’ parents. They know the boy a girl has a crush on, what romantically transpired between them, and how the relationship ended. They know a kid’s teammates and coaches and the teacher who’s giving him a hard time. And they report, not to a kid’s parents, but to the school administration. It’s a wonder we allow these in-school relationships at all. The American Counseling Association appears to have noticed the obvious problem. In 2006, it revised the ACA Code of Ethics. While still prohibiting sexual relationships with current clients, it decided that “nonsexual” dual relationships were no longer prohibited—especially those that “could be beneficial to the client.” As school counselors and psychologists came to see themselves as students’ “advocates,” they slipped into a dual relationship with their students: part therapist; part academic intermediary; part parenting coach. Today, school counselors and psychologists commonly evaluate, diagnose, and treat students with individual therapy; meet with their friends; intervene with their teachers; and pass them in the lunchroom. A teen who has just spent a tear-soaked hour telling the school counselor her deepest secrets might reasonably be fearful of upsetting anyone with that much power over her life. But are school counselors and social workers exerting undue influence over kids? Over the past two years, I have been so inundated with parents’ stories of school counselors encouraging a child to try on a variant gender identity, even changing the child’s name without telling the parents, that I’ve almost wondered if there are any good school counselors. One parent I interviewed told me that her son’s high school counselor had given him the address of a local LGBTQ youth shelter where he might seek asylum and attempt to legally liberate himself from loving parents. There are good school counselors; I have interviewed several. But the power structure’s all wrong. Grant a leader the powers of a monarch, and he may gift his subjects freedom—but what’s to tether him to his promises? That’s placing a whole lot of trust in an individual counselor’s conscience. You might respond at this point: fortunately, my child has never been to see the school counselor. But more likely, you don’t know. In California, Illinois, Washington, Colorado, Florida, and Maryland, minors twelve or thirteen and up are statutorily entitled to access mental health care without parental permission. Schools are not only under no obligation to inform parents that their kids are meeting regularly with a school counselor, they may even be barred from doing so. As long as a parent has not specifically forbidden it, a school counselor may be able to conduct a therapy session with a minor child without parental consent. School counselors are encouraged to make “judgment calls” about what information, gleaned in sessions with minor children, they may keep secret from the children’s parents. School Staff Who Play Therapist Ever since her school adopted social-emotional learning in 2021, Ms. Julie routinely began the day by directing her Salt Lake City fifth graders to sit in one of the plastic chairs she’d arranged in a circle. “How is each of you feeling this morning?” she would ask, performing a more intensive version of the “emotions check-in.” One day, she cut to the chase: “What is something that is making you really sad right now?” When it was his turn to speak, one boy began mumbling about his father’s new girlfriend. Then things fell apart. “All of a sudden, he just started bawling. And he was like, ‘I think that my dad hates me. And he yells at me all the time,’ ” said Laura, a mom of one of the other students. Another girl announced that her parents had divorced and burst into tears. Another said she was worried about the man her mother was dating. Within minutes, half of the kids were sobbing. It was time for the math lesson, but no one wanted to do it. It was just so sad, thinking that the boy’s dad hated him. What if their dads hated them, too? “It just kind of set the tone for the rest of the day,” Laura said. “Everyone just was feeling really sad and down for a really long time. It was hard for them to kind of come out of that.” A second mom at the school confirmed to me that word spread throughout the school about the AA meeting–style breakdown. Except this AA meeting featured elementary school kids who then ran to tell their friends what everyone else had shared. Thanks to social-emotional learning, scenes of emotional melee have become increasingly common in American classrooms. In 2013, The New York Times reported on a near identical scene that took place after a California teacher conducted a similar social-emotional learning session with his kindergarteners. “With children especially, whatever you focus on is what will grow,” Laura said. “And I feel like with [social-emotional learning], they’re watering the weeds, instead of watering the flowers.” Advocates of social-emotional learning claim that nearly all kids today have suffered serious traumatic experiences that leave them unable to learn. They also insist that having an educator host a class-wide trauma swap before lunch will help such kids heal. Neither claim is well-founded. But the predictable result is precisely what Ms. Julie saw: otherwise happy kids are brought low and a child seriously struggling has his private pain publicly exposed by someone in no position to remedy it. Sometimes when a kid plunks himself down on the rug for morning circle, he is in no mood to exhibit a painful experience no matter how much it might expand the class’s emotional horizons. This leaves teacher-therapists with a problem: How to get kids to dish about their emotional lives when they really don’t want to? One presenter at the conference, Amelia Azzam, a regional mental health coordinator for Orange County Public Schools, told a story that seemed to answer this quandary. She knew of a teaching assistant who trailed a seventh grader to lunch. She “goes out to lunch where this young student sits, and she always says ‘hi’ to him. And she has casual interactions with him.” And one day, he told her that his dad was getting out of jail. “Nobody else knew that,” Azzam said. Good therapists know that it may be counterproductive to push a kid to share his trauma at school. Good therapists are trained specifically to avoid encouraging rumination, a thought process typified by dwelling on past pain and negative emotions. Rumination is a well-established risk factor for depression. But school staff who play therapist rarely seem aware that they might be encouraging rumination as they stalk a kid at lunch, waiting to see if he’ll open up about his father’s incarceration minutes before a history test. Injecting Anxiety into Math Class Social-emotional learning enthusiasts happily disrupt math or English or history because, to the true believers, education is merely a vehicle for their social-emotional lessons—the corn chip that carries the guac straight to a kid’s mouth. “I can’t think of a content area that needs more social-emotional learning than mathematics,” educational consultant Ricky Robertson told our assembled conference room. But how would a teacher manage to make social-emotional learning the goal of a math class? To discover the answer, I sat through a presentation titled “Embedding SEL in Math.” Our mock lesson commenced with—you guessed it—discussion of our feelings about math. “Anxiety!” more than one teacher volunteered. The presenters showed us a series of kindergarten-level “math problems” that asked us to look at a bunch of shapes and asked: “Which one doesn’t belong?” At the end, they revealed the correct answer: they all belong. No wrong answers! Everyone wins! See, that wasn’t hard. I turned to the high school math teacher next to me and asked her how she could possibly incorporate this sort of approach into Algebra II. She stared back at me, a frozen rictus pinned to the corners of her mouth. She seemed to think Big Brother was watching us. The only feeling apparently never affirmed in social-emotional learning is mistrust of emotional conversation in place of learning. A decent number of kids actually show up hoping to learn some geometry and not burn their limited instructional time on conversations about their mental health. But from every angle, such children could only be made to feel errant and alone. In the minds of social-emotional learning advocates, healthy kids are those who share their pain during geometry. That is how a teacher knows they are emotionally regulated. They are willing to cry for the benefit of the class. Excerpted from Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, by Abigail Shrier, in agreement with Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Abigail Shrier, 2024. Previous Next