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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

How to spot the next anti-Israel political star before it’s too late. < Back The Mamdani Index How to spot the next anti-Israel political star before it’s too late. The victory of New York state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral primary surprised many observers. He was outspent and lacked the traditional power brokers. He still won. A well-organized and politically extreme movement is beginning to reshape national politics, fostering anti-Israel positions early in the careers of state and local officials. For the pro-Israel community, the mission is urgent and clear: Build nimble and effective state and local pro-Israel networks. And do it now. That work is beginning through a collaboration that pairs Israeli-American Civic Action Network’s (ICAN) state and local monitoring and research with the Jewish Leadership Project’s network of activists. Guided by ICAN’s analysis, this network can focus on emerging threats and begin responding in key communities, laying the groundwork for coordinated and effective action before anti-Israel figures get too entrenched. Mamdani’s record did not appear overnight. We at ICAN first took notice of Mamdani in July 2023, when he introduced the “Not on Our Dime ” Act as a state legislator, targeting pro-Israel nonprofits while promoting rhetoric and alliances that signaled extreme radicalism. Unfortunately, in that pre-Oct. 7 summer, our warnings never had the chance to be acted upon. For several years, our organization has been building a framework for state and local political research to monitor and report on the public affairs activities of elected officials. Mamdani’s candidacy underscores the need for such a system. It operates as a political threat index—focusing on state and local officials - and identifies, tracks and scores anti-Israel positions before they mature into national influence. State and local politics are often a game of musical chairs, where political careers are made. Today’s city council member becomes a state legislator. Today’s state legislator becomes a member of Congress or the mayor of a major city. We can now track these officials, assessing the direction, pace and substance of their political trajectory in real time. The scale is significant, but quantifiable. At the state level, there are 7,383 legislators, and at the local level, a little more than 19,000 city councils, 16,000 school boards and 3,000 county governments. Anti-Israel coalitions understand this math and have targeted these offices for years. Our index distills years of research and analysis into five areas: First, substance: what officials say about Israel, Gaza, the BDS movement and antisemitism in speeches, interviews and written statements. Second, volume: how often anti-Israel messaging appears and whether it spikes around crises. Third, policy: votes, sponsorships and amendments that target Israel or Israeli-American civil society. Fourth, coalitions: links to groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SPJ), as well as participation in related events. Fifth, patterns: how positions escalate over time and how networks reinforce those shifts. This index goes beyond a scorecard. We examine the whole official, including social-media activity and engagement patterns; constituent newsletters and press releases; event attendance; and endorsements, given and received. The aim is to identify leading indicators that voting records alone will hide. Just two weeks after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, in Richmond, Calif., after hours of public testimony, Mayor Eduardo Martinez advanced a resolution accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing and collective punishment and urging a ceasefire. Richmond became the first city in the United States to adopt a ceasefire resolution - a symbolic yet influential move that was repeated by dozens of municipalities in the weeks that followed. Earlier this year in Massachusetts, State Representative Erika Uyterhoeven filed H.2984 to direct the state pension fund to divest from companies supplying military equipment to Israel unless those firms pledge to stop. The measure singles out Israel in statute and gives advocates a nationwide test case in a mainstream legislature. In Maryland, State Delegate Gabriel Acevero introduced the “Not on Our Dime ” Act. The bills would expose Maryland-registered nonprofits that support Israel to civil suits and penalties, including loss of charitable status. These are names you’ve likely never heard before, and these three officials are just the beginning. There are many more like them around the country. Officials build an Israel-centered brand, align with national advocacy networks and replicate a familiar package of policies and phrases. By the time the wider public notices, the infrastructure is in place. These are the proof points used to tune the model. Early detection allows engagement where education is still possible and organized opposition where it is not. Previous Next

How American students are radicalized against the West < Back The Child Soldiers of Ethnic Studies How American students are radicalized against the West Shortly after the start of the organized pro-Palestinian student riots on campuses across the country last fall, the Rutgers University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) issued a set of demands that followed a standard template now evident at multiple universities. In addition to divestment from Israel, incorporating “anti-Palestinian racism“ into all mandatory DEI training and race-based curricula for faculty and staff, and the creation of an Arab Cultural Center, the students demanded that Rutgers “hire additional professors specializing in Palestine and settler-colonial studies and institute a department of Middle East studies.” Since then, Rutgers and other universities have caved to the demands of the mob. Middle East and Islamic studies centers became avenues for foreign governments to purchase influence and prestige a long time ago. But today, these centers play a much broader role in national politics, law, scholarship, and culture. And the drivers are no longer just foreign political actors, but increasingly domestic ones, too. In this context, student activists’ apparently spontaneous demands to establish more Middle East studies departments, to hire more Palestinian and Middle East faculty, and to integrate Palestine into DEI and ethnic and race-based curricula should be viewed instead as the intentional expansion and consolidation of leftist institutional power. This has meant the creation of jobs and patronage for a new phalanx of progressive sectarian foot soldiers under the umbrella of ethnic studies. Many of these programs aim to create a reserve of activists who cover a wide array of ethnic and identity grievances and causes that extend beyond the halls of academia, with recruitment beginning in grade school. From a young age, an increasing number of American students are being fed anti-Western and anti-Israel material funded and distributed by a constellation of dark money, left-wing groups and foreign governments. Worse, their success to date can largely be attributed to backing, financial and otherwise, from our own federal government. The nuclei of Middle East education at American universities are the Middle East and Islamic studies centers. There are around 50 such centers distributed across the country, depending on how you count them. Columbia University alone hosts three: the Center for Palestine Studies, the Middle East Institute, and the Sakip Sabanci Center for Turkish Studies. These centers are no strangers to controversy. For at least two decades, scholars and policymakers alike have decried the centers’ whitewashing of Islamic extremism and anti-Israel bias. Yet the centers have remained mostly untouched, and a few new ones have even appeared. Throughout their history, these centers have taken money from both the federal government and foreign governments. For instance, archived documents retrieved by the National Association of Scholars show that Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) relied heavily on foreign countries in its early days during the 1970s. Arab countries contributed two-thirds of the funding needed to help Georgetown leaders reach their $6.1 million fundraising goal for CCAS. During this same time, the foreign governments of Oman, Libya, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) contributed more than $1 million for various professorships at CCAS. Today, the center is one of about a dozen Middle East National Resource Centers (NRC) that receive more than $3 million in funding from the federal government. Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies started in the 1950s with funding from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and then-American-owned oil company Aramco. Soon thereafter, it received funding from the federal government as an early NRC. Beginning in the 1980s, the center helped secure tens of millions of dollars in funds primarily from Turkey and Saudi Arabia both for its own faculty and for affiliated programs at Harvard. The original purpose for the centers, established in the 1950s, was to produce policy-relevant information that the government could use to develop sound Middle East foreign policy. Relatively little expertise on the region existed in the United States at the time, which made getting up to speed a national security priority. But it’s hard to see that purpose in what passes through the centers and their affiliated faculty today. Today, the old foundations have combined with new ones to push for more ideological education on the Middle East not only on college campuses, but also in K-12 education. While it’s easy to dismiss the centers as too niche or academic to have any real influence, this would be a mistake. For one, these centers have long produced area experts that populate U.S. government agencies and the foreign service. The degeneration of the education provided by these programs into its current activist form tracks with the increasing activism of government bureaucrats, such as the political appointees and staff members of several government agencies who signed a letter objecting to the administration’s Israel policy, and the various State Department officials who have resigned in protest. But the toxic influence extends beyond government bureaucracy. Federally funded Middle East centers produced more than 2,500 instructional materials between 2000 and 2020, of which over 60% were intended for use by K-12 educators. Content matter ranged from climate justice to Islamophobia to youth activism. These centers also conducted over 22,000 outreach programs throughout the same time period, of which over 20% were intended for K-12 educators. Both the instructional materials and outreach programs are part of the centers’ mandate from the federal government, so our taxpayer dollars directly fund these programs. The University of Texas at Austin’s Center for Middle East Studies, along with other NRCs at the school, used federal funds in 2021 to host a critical race literacy workshop, where K-12 teachers “(Un)learn[ed] patterns of whiteness in literacy teaching.” The university claims on its website that the event supported “instructional goals for literacy standards for the State of Texas.” Or consider a toolkit on “Women and Gender in the Middle East” produced by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies. Their set of readings directs students to a YouTube video of an overview of Edward Said’s Orientalism, produced by a channel called “Invictapalestina.” For those students who prefer a book, the toolkit points them to an anthology of Arab feminist writing, including by Columbia University professor Lila Abu-Lughod, who, ironically, in the past has criticized the “focus on gender-based violence” in Arab and Islamic countries as it “leave[s] aside the violence of states … like Israel.” Middle East faculty at top universities train the next generation of anti-Israel and anti-American activists by training K-12 teachers. For instance, New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies partners with Jordan-based nonprofit Global Nomads Group to host an annual fellowship program for grades 7-12 teachers. During the fellowship, teachers create curricula to teach students about the Middle East. New Utrecht High School teacher Nathan Floro’s curriculum, to take one example, would ensure students have a “basic understanding of orientalism and be able to critique various media through a post-colonial lens.” NYU also funded Newton Public Schools teacher David Bedar, whose fellowship at NYU focused on redeveloping college-level content for high school students on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA), throughout 2018 and 2019, acquired Bedar’s curriculum materials and found in a detailed analysis that the course favored the Palestinian over the Zionist narrative of the conflict by distorting and omitting facts. Global Nomads Group offers its own series of “youth courses” promoting similar messages. In a lesson plan within their “Human Rights” course, Global Nomads claims students will learn the difference between equity and equality and why “marginalized people are denied human rights.” They also offer courses on “Art in Action,” “Ocean Health,” and in a twist of irony, “Overcoming Bias.” On its website, Global Nomads discloses that its Student to World program “is supported by the Stevens Initiative, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, with funding provided by the U.S. Government, and is administered by the Aspen Institute. The Stevens Initiative is also supported by the Bezos Family Foundation and the governments of Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.” Other donors listed on the group’s website include Qatar Foundation International. In 2021, Yale University’s Council on Middle East Studies hosted a summer conference for New Haven Public Schools teachers where they received free access to films featuring former Women’s March co-chair and antisemitic activist Linda Sarsour, and a list of books, many of which advocate for looser immigration policies. The event primarily featured Palestinian and other Arab speakers and panelists. The one session that featured an official from the American Jewish Committee consisted of a discussion about centering the Mizrahi and Sephardic Jewish experience—in other words, challenging what the Columbia School of Social Work orientation guidebook calls “Ashkenormativity.” Foreign governments also support these programs, whether directly or indirectly by funding the Middle East centers themselves. Some centers, such as the Saudi-funded King Fahd Center at the University of Arkansas, were started with funding from foreign governments. Others have received periodic funding from foreign governments, such as the United Arab Emirate’s funding to UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies. Still others work in partnership with foreign governments to host teacher workshops. Qatar Foundation International (QFI), the American arm of the Qatar Foundation, is a common collaborator for these programs. QFI funds professional development workshops for Arabic language teachers through Arabic Teacher Councils. The councils are hosted by schools such as George Washington University, Georgia State University, and the University of Chicago. In their early days in the 1950s and 1960s, Middle East studies centers were beneficiaries of funding by large private foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Ford Foundation, which, in turn, enjoyed close relationships with the government. Today, the old foundations have combined with new ones to push for more ideological education on the Middle East not only on college campuses, but also in K-12 education. Left-wing organizations such as the Open Society Foundations and the Tides Foundation actively fund efforts to bring K-12 education in line with progressive dogma and socialize American kids into its politics. This same network of organizations funds many of the pro-Palestinian student demonstrators who have taken over elite campuses. George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Westchester People’s Action Coalition (WESPAC), and the Tides Foundation are just a handful of the organizations that have financially supported the student protests. For instance, the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights has received at least $355,000 from Rockefeller Brothers Fund and $300,000 from Open Society Foundations, according to The New York Post. U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights member Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) hosts a project called “Teach Palestine,” where educators disseminate instructional materials and teaching strategies on the Middle East. Teach Palestine is coordinated by two educators affiliated with the Liberated Ethnic Studies initiatives nationally and in California. Between 2017 and 2023, the Open Society Foundations and Rockefeller Brothers Fund cumulatively gave MECA $1.3 million. Teach Palestine includes testimonials from educators who actively teach about the region in their classrooms. Once students arrive on campus and are exposed to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in further detail, little is needed to radicalize them. One teacher goes beyond the third grade curriculum standards by fitting “lessons about the Middle East into the nooks and crannies of our day.” Her description of Israeli history is that it is a “European colony” for the Jewish people that has been continually committing ethnic cleansing since its founding. A librarian brought MECA members to teach children about the “similarities between Israeli and US settler colonialism.” A sixth grade teacher had her students write acrostic poems on settler colonialism as part of a curriculum that focused on “centering Palestinian youth voices” and connected the Palestinian youth experience to Black Lives Matter. She proudly states that “some strong activism and advocacy could come” if students were pushed to the “next level” when engaging in her lesson activities. The Proteus Fund, which connects “philanthropy with the frontlines of social justice,” is another key player. Since 2016, the Proteus Fund and its lobbying arm Proteus Action League have received $16 million from the Open Society Foundations. Aside from Open Society Foundations, Proteus lists nearly 40 funding partners, which includes the Tides Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. One of Proteus’ recent initiatives, the RISE Together Fund, claims to oppose intolerance against “Black, African, Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian (BAMEMSA) communities.” As part of this initiative, they offer organizations immediate and flexible grants through its Rapid Response Fund. Since Oct. 7, Proteus has focused on K-12 advocacy, coordinating legal support, and connecting attorneys with those who have lost educational opportunities due to protests. In the latter half of 2023, Proteus gave a cumulative $700,000 to 35 organizations for flexible spending grants. The beneficiaries of these recent grants include pro-BDS organizations such as the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, Adalah Justice Project, and the Palestinian Youth Movement. Some of these organizations have been tied to the recent wave of demonstrations among high school students. New York City’s Community Education Council for District 14 partnered with several groups, including the Palestinian Youth Movement, to encourage a 700-student protest. The Arab Resource and Organizing Center hosted walkouts for Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) students. BUSD teachers covered for protesters by marking these students as legitimately “excused,” even though school policy said otherwise. Last month, hundreds of NYC school kids staged a pro-Palestinian walkout and protested at the Department of Education in Lower Manhattan. The walkout was organized by Teachers Unite and the Palestine Youth Movement, along with NYC Educators for Palestine, Al-AWDA: The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, Movement of Rank-&-File Educators (MORE), and Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM). Similar movements in New Jersey, Oregon, and elsewhere in the country also involve mushrooming “educators for Palestine” organizations that are contracted to develop curricula and organize student action. It would be one thing if this educational infrastructure simply resulted in American school kids learning a biased set of facts about Israel and Palestine. But simply teaching even skewed history is not the goal, as evidenced by the many “Free Palestine” student protesters who apparently didn’t even know what they were protesting. The goal, rather, is to teach school students a framework of values that they can apply blindly to every social and political issue. To see how this looks in practice, consider one teacher’s comment at a March QFI-funded Arabic Teachers Council workshop. Attendees were asked how they enact social justice education in their classrooms. The teacher responded: Instead of asking them [students] “what do you think about this topic,” we talk more about principles and values and structures. Right, like I asked them last week “Do you think we have freedom of expression here at [inaudible] about any social, political, or religious topic?” So, we talk about structures versus the topic itself specifically because some of them are afraid that if they speak specifically about the topic that something might happen. Later in the workshop, teachers were presented a social justice rubric they could use in classrooms. One of the rubric components assesses how well students produce “insights from social justice theme(s).” Students who want to exceed expectations must demonstrate their understanding of social justice themes by incorporating evidence, such as observing and applying power structures. This “education” is indistinguishable from so-called protest “toolkits” that “teach Palestine” groups put together for school kids, which is made up of “talking points,” “chants,” and “demands”—that is, material designed to develop “activists” or foot soldiers to be deployed on the streets at will. Unsurprisingly, the talking points and “demands” grade school kids are taught to recite are identical to those of their college counterparts and mentors, serving the same purpose of recruitment and consolidation of institutional power. In NYC, for instance, the demands were to “Support Palestinian-led curriculum initiatives about Palestinian culture and history. Mandate education about Palestine in history curriculums that centers Palestinian perspectives and experiences. Redirect city funding away from policing and into our public schools, prioritizing low-income Black and Brown communities.” Once students arrive on campus and are exposed to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in further detail, little is needed to radicalize them. As an organizer for SJP told The New Yorker in December: “S.J.P. is oriented in a special way. The idea is to appeal to people who know nothing.” As we deal with the fallout of the anti-Israel protests over the coming months, it will be tempting to look for easy solutions. Perhaps universities can rework their policies to prevent future disruptions. Maybe even some programs can be defunded. But the process that led to this was years-long, requiring the coordination of dozens of organizations and millions of dollars in funding. Undoing it will require reversing the proliferation of sectarian fake disciplines and leftist identitarian studies programs, and replacing activist curricula with fact-based lessons that promote critical thinking—a tall order, to be sure. Middle East education at all levels needs a complete overhaul. It has gone from an attempt to help inform our geopolitics and augment our security posture against the various threats facing the United States in the region, to a factory of apologists for America’s enemies and advocates on their behalf. Now, they have brought the threat home. Previous Next

In nearly every public school in the country, children are given curriculum materials that have no official oversight or approval. < Back How Public Schools Became Ideological Boot Camps In nearly every public school in the country, children are given curriculum materials that have no official oversight or approval. A pair of teachers at New Jersey’s Fort Lee High School recently taught students that Hamas is a peaceful “resistance movement” and Israel is committing genocide. Teachers at California’s Berkeley Unified School District are “indoctrinating students with antisemitic tropes and biased, one-sided anti-Israel propaganda disguised as education,” according to a complaint by the Anti-Defamation League. Meanwhile, students recently chanted “from the river to the sea” at college campus “tentifadas” —but when pressed could identify neither. Why does this keep happening? And how can public schools at once be hotbeds of radicalism and “woke” indoctrination, yet produce students who are so poorly informed about the radical causes they ostensibly espouse? The answer has a lot to do with one of American education’s dirty little secrets: on any given school day in nearly every public school in the country, curriculum materials are put in front of children that have no official oversight or approval. It’s true that schools might have a state- or district-adopted curriculum, but that doesn’t mean it’s getting taught. Nearly no category of public employee has the degree of autonomy of the average public school teacher—even the least experienced ones. Teachers routinely create or cobble together their own lesson plans on the widely accepted theory that they know better than textbook publishers what books kids will enjoy reading and which topics might spark lively class discussions. Not your child’s school or teacher? Wanna bet? A 2017 RAND Corporation survey found that 99 percent of elementary teachers and 96 percent of secondary schools use “materials I developed and/or selected myself” in teaching English language arts. The numbers are virtually the same in math. But putting teachers in charge of creating their own lesson plans or scouring the internet for curriculum materials creates an irresistible opportunity for every imaginable interest group that perceives—not incorrectly—that overworked teachers and a captive young audience equal a rich target for selling products and pushing ideologies. This ungoverned mess is how the majority of high-profile curriculum controversies happen. Earlier this year, The Free Press ’s Francesca Block broke news that PS 321 in Brooklyn, New York, sent kids home with an “activity book” promoting the tenets of the Black Lives Matter movement, including “queer affirming,” “transgender affirming,” and “restorative justice.” The book was not authorized for classroom use either by the NYC Department of Education or Brooklyn’s Community School District 15. It appears to have begun its journey into students’ backpacks at the massive “Share My Lesson” website run by the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union. The site claims 2.2 million members—more than half of all U.S. public school teachers—and hosts “more than 420,000 resources” that have been “downloaded more than 16 million times.” Lee & Low Books, the publisher of What We Believe, the BLM activity book, is a Share My Lesson “partner ” and includes the book in its “anti-racist reading list for grades 3–5.” Other Share My Lesson partners include Amnesty International, the ADL (the Anti-Defamation League), GLSEN , and the Southern Poverty Law Center—all producing free lesson plans and materials for classroom use. The advocacy group Parents Defending Education has documented over a thousand incidents of schools teaching lessons on race, gender, or other hot-button issues that parents deemed inappropriate or upsetting. They are seldom traceable to formally adopted school curriculum. But there are 75 different lesson plans and resources for conducting “privilege walks ” and more than 100 lessons and resources on “preferred pronouns” at Teachers Pay Teachers, another lesson sharing megasite . Prior to legislative efforts to ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, there were only three school districts in the country known to have expressly authorized teachers to use the New York Times 1619 Project in lesson plans: Chicago, Buffalo, and Newark, New Jersey. However, the Pulitzer Center, which partnered with the Times to produce 1619 Project classroom materials , claimed to have “connected curricula based on the work of [Nikole] Hannah-Jones and her collaborators to some 4,500 classrooms”—another illustration of the yawning chasm between curriculum that is officially adopted and what actually gets taught. Teachers putting controversial material in front of children, either naively or to pursue an agenda, isn’t even the worst of it. When they hunt for materials to engage students, teachers shoot low. A 2019 study published by the Fordham Institute rated most of the materials on Share My Lesson and Teachers Pay Teachers as “mediocre” or “probably not worth using.” A similar report from The New Teacher Project found that students “spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren’t appropriate for their grade and with instruction that didn’t ask enough of them—the equivalent of six months of wasted class time in each core subject.” Disadvantaged students were the hardest hit. Choose-your-own-adventure lesson planning inevitably results in gaps and repetition when there’s no coherent blueprint for what students should learn, or when those plans are disregarded by schools and teachers. Which river? Which sea? It was never covered. All of this should be sobering to parents and policymakers who think “curriculum transparency” is the solution to classroom controversies. Knowing the curriculum or programs a school district has “adopted” is a cracked lens. Absent regulations specifically requiring teachers to post all lesson plans and materials online on a daily basis, including material they create or find on the internet, it’s nearly impossible to say with any certainty what occurs inside the black box of the public school classroom. Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of How the Other Half Learns . Follow him on Twitter at @rpondiscio . Previous Next

The site seems to be intentionally trafficking in disinformation related to Jews, Israel, and Zionism < Back Wikipedia’s Jewish Problem The site seems to be intentionally trafficking in disinformation related to Jews, Israel, and Zionism In June, a group of Wikipedia editors and administrators rated the Anti-Defamation League as “generally unreliable” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “roughly reliable” on antisemitism “when Israel and Zionism are not concerned.” They also evaluated the ADL’s database of hate symbols, deeming it as “reliable for the existence of a symbol and for straightforward facts about it, but not reliable for more complex details, such as symbols’ history.” The anonymous editors, with unknown backgrounds or academic credentials, accused the ADL of “conflating” anti-Zionism with antisemitism and relying on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which, they claimed, brands all criticism of Israel as antisemitic and stifles pro-Palestinian speech. They also accused the ADL of “smearing” Students for Justice in Palestine by calling on universities to investigate whether the group provided material support to Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. All of these critiques are assertions not of fact but of leftist dogma, designed to create the impression that left-wing antisemitism does not—indeed, could not—exist. “Wikipedia’s leadership are clowns,” tweeted Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s co-founder, in response. Sanger had earlier declared Wikipedia’s neutrality—on all issues—effectively dead . But the general public has yet to catch up. With 6.6 billion visits in June, Wikipedia ranked the fifth-most-visited site worldwide, outranked only by Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. For many students and scholars, it serves as a starting point for research—a source of sources to be investigated further. Closer to home, what’s clear is that Wikipedia’s articles are now badly distorted, feeding billions of people—and large-language models that regularly train on the site, such as ChatGPT—with inaccurate research and dangerously skewed narratives about Jews, Jewish history, Israel, Zionism, and contemporary threats to Jewish lives. Wikipedia was launched on Jan. 15, 2001, as a single English-language edition at www.wikipedia.com by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Sanger announced the launch on the mailing list of Nupedia, Wikipedia’s predecessor, which he and Wales had also created. Whereas Nupedia was a peer-reviewed online encyclopedia with a seven-step approval process, Wikipedia, as stated in its name, is a wiki: a collaboratively edited site managed directly by its users through a web browser. The site is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization, but is a “self-governing project,” whose largely anonymous volunteer editors—referred to internally as Wikipedians—are subject to a set of “policies and guidelines .” Wikipedia’s key principles are codified in “five pillars,” which include writing from a neutral point of view and using reliable sources to document key arguments. Another pillar urges editors to treat each other with respect and seek consensus on contentious topics. Disputes are resolved by volunteer administrators and can be escalated all the way to the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee (aka Wikipedia’s “Supreme Court”). Punishment can include bans varying in severity and length of time. Today, Jewish people and the Jewish story are under an unprecedented global assault, and Wikipedia is being used as a weapon in this war. Wikipedia also prides itself on radical transparency: Every edit can be seen by everyone on a specially designated page. Discussions related to each article are documented on “talk” pages and publicly available. Today there are some 330 language editions of Wikipedia hosting over 60 million articles. In theory, Wikipedia’s model of self-governance sounds unimpeachable: a crowd-sourced, transparently run project democratizing knowledge and empowering every person on the planet to participate in its creation. Yet problems started to emerge from the beginning. Civility quickly went out the door. Conflict-resolution mechanisms proved increasingly byzantine, and mechanisms meant to assure neutrality proved easy to manipulate. Hierarchies formed, as old-timers acquired greater clout and wielded it to prevail in increasingly bitter edit wars. Newcomers found it difficult to break through old-timers’ “fortress mentality.” “Wikipedia is amazing, but it’s become a rancorous, sexist, elitist, stupidly bureaucratic mess,” observed one writer in 2014. Structural problems soon translated into content related ones, including on Jewish topics. In 2004, a spokesperson for the Polish branch of Wikimedia Foundation created an article in English describing an extermination camp in Warsaw, where the Nazis gassed 212,000 Poles. The story—a fiction—remained on the site for 15 years before the Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed the problem in 2019. By then, the article had been translated into multiple languages, and its claims incorporated into multiple other Wikipedia articles. An estimated half a million people got exposed to the lie. Last year two historians published a bombshell paper demonstrating how a group of ideologically driven editors spent years systematically distorting Polish Jewish history across multiple Wikipedia articles to align it with far-right Polish nationalist preferences. Working in concert, the group falsified evidence, promoted marginal self-published sources, created fake references, and advanced antisemitic stereotypes. It whitewashed “the role of Polish society in the Holocaust,” “minimize[d] Polish antisemitism, exaggerate[d] the Poles’ role in saving Jews,” blamed Jews for the Holocaust, and generally steered “Wikipedia’s narrative on Holocaust history away from sound, evidence-driven research, toward a skewed version of events,” wrote the authors, Jan Grabowski and Shira Klein. Wikipedia’s mechanisms proved entirely inadequate in the face of this motivated, organized assault. Working “as a monolith,” the group manipulated the procedures, coordinated edits, and rallied to each other’s support when challenged. Users seeking to correct the group’s edits found themselves outnumbered and outmaneuvered. “Challenging the distortionists takes a monumental amount of time, more than most people can invest in a voluntary hobby,” wrote Grabowski and Klein. The distortionists exhausted their opponents with endless debates, aggressive “battleground behavior,” rudeness, and “mass deletions,” leading some to simply give up on editing the topic. Volunteer administrators called upon to resolve conflicts were unqualified to adjudicate content issues and unwilling to invest the hours required to sort through sources. Another case involved Croatian-language Wikipedia. There, a right-wing group of “real-life friends, ideological sympathizers and political allies” captured the entire site and proceeded, among other things, to whitewash the history of World War II-era Croatian fascist organization Ustaše, its Nazi puppet Independent State of Croatia(NDH), and the Jasenovac extermination camp where tens of thousands of Serbs, Roma, and Jews were murdered. Interlinked articles created a “web of deception” whose goal was “to influence the reader’s final moral or value judgment” of events, wrote an independent consultant Wikimedia hired in 2021 to evaluate the situation. The distortionists learned how to “dynamically” adjust “their behavior in order to avoid raising too many alarms or triggering reaction by the global community.” They established sock-puppet accounts to undermine voting procedures, and obstructed discussion with the help of “well-known disinformation tactics” such as “relativization of facts, whataboutism, discreditation of other participants and outright bullying.” So complete was the capture that local press began to refer to Croatian Wikipedia as “Nazi Wikipedia” and “NDH-pedia.” The most incomprehensible part about this is that it took Wikimedia Foundation 14 years from the time the first complaints began to surface to do something about it. The report apportioned much of the blame to Wikimedia’s failure to act in a timely and forceful manner. It warned that the entire situation gave a green light to other bad actors to come in and do the same and that “a more resourced and better-organized attempt could be harder to detect and eventually reverse.” Sounding a similar alarm in their paper on the Polish Jewish Wikipedia capture, Grabowski and Klein noted, on the basis of a leaked email, that the Polish government had “picked up” on “Wikipedia’s weakness” and was making plans to hire an adviser to introduce changes to the Hebrew-language Wikipedia. “We need to be super discreet on this score,” wrote a Polish government official and noted that the adviser “will need a larger budget to cover this expense. It can be arranged if the Foreign Office allocates more money.” And that was all before Oct. 7, 2023. These days, Wikipedia ranks its “perennial ” go-to sources—The New York Times , The New Yorker , NPR, MSNBC, and BBC—as “generally reliable” and extends the ranking to the openly partisan far-left outlets like Haaretz , The Intercept, The Nation , and The Guardian . Al Jazeera and the NGO Amnesty International (both known for their anti-Israel bias) are rated as “generally reliable” as well. The far-left Israeli NGO B’Tselem isn’t included on this list, but, as Aaron Bandler notes in Jewish Journal , Wikipedia editors have staunchly defended its reliability and referenced it in articles. On the other hand, conservative sources such as Fox News, The New York Post , Washington Examiner , and Washington Free Beacon are coded various shades of unreliable, with the Beacon getting the “generally unreliable” grade—one notch above “deprecated.” The Palestinian leader’s scholarly abstract sheds light on the crude deformations of Soviet Zionology and how they are reflected in today’s universities This ranking tells us what kind of slant we can expect in Wikipedia’s articles about Israel, Zionism, and anti-Zionist antisemitism. In the wake of Oct. 7, “generally reliable” sources have trafficked in disinformation, as when The New York Times splashed the Al Ahli hospital bombing hoax over its front page, helping spark violent anti-Jewish riots across the world; or when The New Yorker legitimized Holocaust inversion—a long-running staple of anti-Zionist propaganda originating in the 1960s USSR. Conservative outlets, on the other hand, have produced reporting that tells Israel’s side of the story and have looked far more critically at the anti-Israel campus protests. The “generally unreliable” Washington Free Beacon has arguably produced the most extensive reporting on the protests. Wikipedia editors, however, are warned against using the Beacon as a source, which is why of the 353 references accompanying Wikipedia’s article on the pro-Palestinian campus protests, the overwhelming majority is to liberal and far-left sources plus Al Jazeera. One-sided sources are just one among a host of problems in Wikipedia articles related to Oct. 7 and the war that followed. In a World Jewish Congress report released in March, Dr. Shlomit Aharoni Nir documents numerous ways in which relevant Wikipedia entries have become de facto anti-Israel propaganda. From biased framing to omissions of key facts to stressing anti-Israel examples while ignoring the Israeli side of the story, to promoting fringe academic perspectives on Zionism—Wikipedia’s editors and administrators have actively worked to subvert the site’s neutrality policy on this topic. As in other instances, conflicts and bullying behavior predominate, with Israeli editors describing uniquely “hostile and disrespectful” treatment. Israeli users, who are most knowledgeable about the Oct. 7 events, often found themselves locked out of editing key articles, which were open for editing only to users who’d made over 500 edits. Several editors told Aharoni Nir that there were a number of activists who operated anonymously and were “responsible for the anti-Israel tone.” Among some of the most troubling instances Aharoni Nir documented were calls for deletions of crucial articles. These included articles describing individual massacres on Oct. 7, such as those at Netiv HaAsara, Nir Yitzhak, Yakhini, and other kibbutzim and moshavim, as well as articles describing Hamas beheadings. Some of the calls succeeded. So did the call to erase the article about Nazism in Palestinian society (a “documented historical and sociological phenomenon,” notes Aharoni Nir). By contrast, the article normalizing equations between Israel and Nazi Germany—a propagandistic concept that has been weaponized against Jews for decades––remains on the site. Meanwhile, Wikipedia’s Arabic site openly abandoned the principle of neutrality last December when it temporarily went dark in solidarity with the Palestinians, then added the Palestinian flag to its logo and posted a pro-Palestinian statement at the top. Israel’s Wikipedia community protested. Wikimedia Foundation—you guessed it—did nothing. Many, undoubtedly, will note the irony of the ADL being attacked by the Wikipedia woke, given the criticism the organization and its head Jonathan Greenblatt have faced from the Jewish community for their progressive tilt and failure to focus on left-wing antisemitism. But the ADL has long been in social justice warriors’ crosshairs. In 2020, 100 hard-left groups signed an open letter demanding that the left “ drop the ADL ” as an ally. Ten days after Oct. 7, the director of the pernicious Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism attacked the ADL for daring to stand up against anti-Israel hate. And in January, The Nation published a piece whose title, “The Anti-Defamation League: Israel’s Attack Dog in the US,” read like a Pravda headline circa 1970. The Wikipedia editors who won the battle over downgrading the ADL used this piece to back up their arguments, along with articles in the hard-left Guardian and Jewish Currents , further confirming that the action had been driven not by an honest consideration of sources but political bias. In response to a letter by 43 Jewish organizations requesting it review the decision, Wikimedia issued a press release referring to Wikipedia’s supposedly inviolable mechanisms that must be preserved to keep it “neutral and free from institutional bias.” All content decisions are made by “Wikipedia’s volunteer community” in a transparent manner, with clear processes in place, and Wikimedia dares not interfere in the magic of that process. The brush-off, however, reads like an evasion so crude, it borders on deception. It’s true that Wikipedia’s old-timers tend to resent interventions from the foundation, but the foundation isn’t as powerless as it claimed in the release. In fact, Wikimedia’s senior management says something else entirely in its other communications. See, for example, this blog Maryana Iskander, Wikimedia’s CEO, published three weeks after Oct. 7. There she extolled Wikimedia’s crucial role in fighting “mis/disinformation, censorship and other threats,” listing them among the four top things the foundation does “to make sure Wikipedia can get closer to its vision of representing the sum of all knowledge.” Whatever Wikimedia does to combat mis/disinformation and censorship, when it comes to Jewish topics it is nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, there are troubling signs that in the recent battle over the ADL, Wikipedia’s editors used some of the techniques we’ve encountered already—combativeness, manipulation, and taking advantage of administrators’ ignorance—to edge out their opponents and push through their own agendas. One Wikipedian who opposed the new ADL classification quit editing, having become “fed up ” with bias among the administrators. Editors told the Jewish Journal that Wikipedia’s existing system is “overrun by political actors who are running circles” around volunteer administrators. One editor said it would be easy for anti-Israel activists to make a case that everything the ADL does relates to Zionism and ultimately squeeze its content off the site completely. Another suggested that Wikipedia must shift from an all-volunteer oversight system to one based on “paid, vetted experts in each field that also have a strong grasp on the nuances of debate, mediation, and arbitration to ensure that Wikipedia policy and principles are actively enforced.” With Zionism, Israel, and antisemitism at the heart of the global disinformation endeavor, we may already be witnessing a concerted effort to capture these areas of Wikipedia and turn them into anti-Israel propaganda. The people doing this could be domestic zealots or state actors like Iran or China—or all of the above. What’s clear is that Wikipedia’s vaunted decision-making transparency aside, the anonymity of its editors and administrators is a major obstacle to understanding who produces content and for what purpose. Meanwhile, Wikimedia’s Croatia report notes that when it comes to ideological capture, time is of the essence. The longer Wikipedia audiences are “exposed to disinformation and bias while being assured by the Wikipedia community’s decades-long built reputation that they are reading neutral, fact-based information,” the greater and more irreversible the effects. Rewriting a subverted part of the site after 15 years does nothing to change the minds of those who had previously fed off of the propaganda. Today, Jewish people and the Jewish story are under an unprecedented global assault, and Wikipedia is being used as a weapon in this war. Yet there are no signs that Wikimedia—which washes its hands of any decision-making responsibility with regard to Wikipedia’s content yet raises millions off its back—recognizes its role and responsibility at this moment. Would it like to wait 10-15 years, the way it did with the Polish Jewish and Croatian projects, to see how bad things get before it intervenes? Or is it brushing off the Jewish community’s concerns because, like its editors, it, too, conflates left-wing bias with neutrality? Whatever the answer, it’s a terrible look for an organization that seeks to provide free access to “the sum of all human knowledge.” It’s crucial that we understand that the attack on the ADL in this case is actually an attack on any source of unbiased information about Jews or Israel. Zooming out, ideological capture of critical information resources is a threat to American society as a whole. If one of the world’s most influential conduits of knowledge decides it wants to turn itself into the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, that’s its prerogative. The rest of us need to get informed, warn the world about it, and demand accountability. ----------------------- Izabella Tabarovsky is a scholar of Soviet antizionism and contemporary left antisemitism. She is a Senior Fellow with the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities and a Research Fellow with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and ISGAP. Follow her on Twitter @IzaTabaro . Previous Next

PeerK12 is unapologetically fighting institutionalized antisemitism in K-12 dedicated to unapologetically fighting institutionalized Jew-hate in K-12 education. Partners Equality Educational Responsibility for & Who We Are we are problem solvers PeerK12 stands unapologetically against institutionalized Jew-hatred in every form. Join us in this vital mission—whether you're a parent, educator, or concerned citizen, your support amplifies our impact. Together, we can ensure that hate finds no home in our schools. Join Us Join Our Tribe COMMUNITY EDUCATION Nothing About Us, Without Us Advocacy, Access & Policy TAKE ACTION What We Do we are collaborative Working with parents, students, & teachers - along with other grassroots organizations - we are actively engaged with administrations and school boards, in addition to lawmakers, throughout the country, to protect Jews by exposing and permanently eliminating institutional Jew-hatred in K-12. Support Us One Voice, One People STRONGER TOGETHER SURVIVE & THRIVE Our Jewish Experience Exposing, Enabling & Enforcing OVERSIGHT & ACCOUNTABILITY How We Do It we get results Whether it is passing resolutions, mobilizing the community, writing petitions, enforcing ed code, or educating Congress, we do whatever it takes to get accountability and results and permanently dismantle Jew-hatred indoctrination in the K-12 ecosystem. Work with Us parent & community lay leader A huge thank you for your leadership, strength, and community organizing. The uncountable hours you have devoted to learning, strategizing, and then teaching our community leaves me feeling a debt of gratitude that I can only repay by doing what I am able in my relationships to continue the stand against anti-Semitism. What amazing role models you are to people of all ages, but especially for our children.

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As President Trump renews his pledge to combat unpatriotic education, survey evidence suggests that controversial teachings are alive and well. < Back Poll of High Schoolers Shows Many Are Taught That America Is ‘Inherently Racist’ As President Trump renews his pledge to combat unpatriotic education, survey evidence suggests that controversial teachings are alive and well. As Donald Trump’s return to the White House threatens to reignite public debates about how schools teach subjects like civics and American history, newly released polling shows that many students are exposed to critical messages about the country and its government on a near-daily basis. Published on Wednesday by the journal Education Next , the survey of 850 high schoolers reports that 36 percent say their teachers either “often” or “almost daily” argue that America is a fundamentally racist nation. No less striking, roughly the same proportion of respondents said they frequently heard claims that African Americans are victims of discrimination by racist police officers and an unjust economic system, while whites contribute the most to racism in society. At the same time, large numbers of adolescents also absorb comparatively positive views about the United States, with 56 percent saying their teachers regularly discussed the progress made toward racial equality since the 1970s. The data offer a somewhat rare student perspective on a question that has roiled education politics for much of the last five years: whether the tenets of critical race theory, a contentious and little-understood academic field that scrutinizes the relationships between race and power, have trickled from university campuses down to K–12 classrooms. In both his 2020 and 2024 campaigns, President Trump warned that students were subjected to ubiquitous anti-American bias in their lessons and pledged to root out CRT from public school curricula. University of Missouri professor Brian Kisida, the lead author of the polling analysis, said that the student responses made clear that teachings opposed by Trump and his allies had taken root in many schools as “the function of a certain progressive politics.” “I’m sure there are schools where it’s not happening at all,” Kisida said. “I’m also sure that there are schools where it’s happening quite a bit, and it’s really ingrained in the approach that those schools take.” While they burned especially hot between the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms, controversies over instruction on race, gender, and sexuality have quieted in recent months, subsumed by the larger disputes that helped power Trump’s reelection. But in his inauguration address Monday, the president signalled that he has not given up his aim of cleansing education of unpatriotic themes, announcing that he would take aim at “an education system that teaches our children to be ashamed of themselves.” The commitment echoed his earlier promises to defund schools that teach CRT. Whether Washington has the authority to meaningfully alter K–12 teaching remains in doubt; curricular choices ultimately rest at the local level, though experts have observed that a GOP-led Department of Education could penalize school districts for teaching material deemed racially discriminatory. Further uncertainty clouds the true prevalence of indoctrination in American school systems. Even if significant minorities of students say they encounter progressive concepts throughout their time in high school, the authors of the report note that they are far from universal. Gary Ritter, Kisida’s co-author and dean of the Saint Louis University School of Education, said he was surprised by the occurrence of apparently ideological programming in high schools, but that he also believed teacher bias was not overwhelming or uniformly left-coded. “I expected there to be roughly zero of this, and there’s obviously more than zero of it going on,” Ritter said. “Still, I don’t think it’s a problem.” ‘It doesn’t feel one-sided’ In an interview alongside Kisida, Ritter said he had been relieved by high schoolers’ responses to explicit questions about partisan animus and self-censorship. Specifically, 77 percent of survey respondents said that they were either never or rarely made to feel uncomfortable about disagreeing with their teachers’ stated views. Over half of students, by contrast, said their teachers typically encouraged them to share different opinions. While 18 percent said their teachers had spoken negatively about Republicans, slightly more said that they’d heard Democrats disparaged. What’s more, he added, educators appear to deliver affirming statements about race in America with some frequency. Forty-two percent of students said their teachers cited the United States as “a global leader” in securing equal rights for its citizens, exactly the same proportion as said they’d heard their teachers express support for the Black Lives Matter movement. “I wanted to know if these statements were made as much as people said, and if they were one-sided,” said Ritter. “We’re hearing various claims, and it doesn’t feel one-sided.” Some of the messaging tested in the poll veers more toward advocacy than simple observation. Along with the sizable number of teachers who praised Black Lives Matter, considerable numbers argued “often” or “almost daily” that African Americans should receive an advantage in the hiring process (22 percent) or college admissions (21 percent), students reported. Nearly one-in-five respondents said their teachers made frequent calls for reparations to be made for slavery. But it is a challenge to interpret the exact nature of classroom references to concepts such as institutional racism or white privilege. Majorities of students said they had heard teachers voice two phrases often held in tension with one another: “Black lives matter” (64 percent) and “All lives matter” (53 percent). Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and history at the University of Pennsylvania, said it was necessary to understand whether teachers were inviting open-minded discussion of such ideas or delivering an unsubtle form of propaganda. The wording of one poll question simply asked participants if their teachers had used one of a list of phrases — including “anti-racist ,” “systemic oppression ,” “decolonization ,” and “the 1619 Project ” — without specifying whether they were described approvingly, or even properly defined. “Some of the kids saying that they heard the phrase ‘inherently racist country’ will have heard it in the context of a discussion, and some heard it as part of something resembling indoctrination,” Zimmerman said. “The question is the relative proportion of those.” Thaw in the culture war? Though the second Trump administration is only getting underway — the president’s nominee for U.S. Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, has yet to undergo a confirmation hearing — Republicans have loudly announced that they plan to attack what they view as unchecked political interference in K–12 learning. When preparing his third run for the presidency, Trump himself vowed to strip federal funding from any school teaching critical race theory or “gender ideology,” a promise renewed in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” policy document. Meanwhile, during Trump’s four years out of office, GOP lawmakers across 18 states passed laws restricting the teaching of what they often call “divisive concepts.” Similar bills have been filed and debated in 25 other legislatures. Still, the uproar over equity efforts and identity politics in schools had appeared to be settling over the last year. The prominent parent advocacy group Moms for Liberty, which has energetically challenged library books and curricular materials it considers divisive, faltered in its efforts to win school board seats throughout 2023, and the pace of new anti-CRT legislation slowed considerably compared with the early days of the Biden administration. More evidence for the apparent thaw came in an analysis released last week by the libertarian Cato Institute. According to policy researcher Neal McCluskey’s ongoing tracker of culture war disputes in school districts, 2024 saw the fewest such conflicts since 2020, when COVID-related school closures set off a wave of parental dissatisfaction. The gradual end of online learning, along with the spectacle of the 2024 campaign, may have diverted outrage away from local clashes, McCluskey argued. Trump’s second term will likely bring a resumption of hostilities. Earlier polling has indicated a broad acceptance of instruction on the facts of slavery and discrimination throughout American history, but also widespread skepticism of teaching strategies such as separating students into different identity groups to talk about racial matters. In Education Next‘s poll, 14 percent of students — more than one in eight — said they had been separated along racial lines for discussions of racism. Kisida noted that good instruction must “walk a tightrope” between candor about the shortcomings of American society and an equally comprehensive accounting of the strides that have been made to overcome them. “There’s a general idea that parents want their kids to learn a sense of pride and patriotism about the United States,” he said. “So there has to be a good balance where we’re able to talk about all of the struggles, but also talk about the successes.” Dealt a harrowing blow by their loss of Congress and the presidency last November, Democrats may opt to formulate a new line of argument on cultural dust-ups in schools. At the urging of progressives and academics, the party spent much of the Biden administration attempting to counter GOP claims of political influence over schools. Zimmerman said schools should encourage discussion of thorny issues among older students, while cautioning that educators needed to recognize the line between teaching and preaching. “It’s false to say that all teachers are telling kids to hate America and that America is racist. But it’s also false to say that none of those ideas have penetrated our schools.” Previous Next

Lucia Gordon, the mother of the student victim of the antisemitism incident, was critical of the district’s response. Gordon said when the incident was brought to light last month, no one ever reached out to her son or family. < Back San Dieguito District sets plan for healing in motion following antisemitic act on SDA campus Lucia Gordon, the mother of the student victim of the antisemitism incident, was critical of the district’s response. Gordon said when the incident was brought to light last month, no one ever reached out to her son or family. San Dieguito Academy High School has undergone numerous changes since the district learned about an incident this spring in which eight students formed a human swastika on the school field for a Jewish student to see while flying in a plane overhead. As outlined in the San Dieguito Union High School District board’s Oct. 16 meeting, the district has developed a community supportive plan to strengthen respect and belonging in the wake of the antisemitic act. The plan included partnering with the National Conflict Resolution Center and American Jewish Committee to host staff listening circles, a guest speaker, a parent engagement night and ongoing professional development for staff and students. At the meeting, SDA student board representative Jonah Lupien addressed some of the “growing pains” on campus, which have included an administrative staff shakeup, letting go of a principal and two assistant principals and new interim leadership, a student walkout, and a forum on hate speech. Jonah also organized an event in which 600 students formed a giant heart on the school field, an image in direct contrast to the swastika, sending a message that hate will not be tolerated. Board President Jodie Williams said it was an uplifting act in a moment of darkness. “We are in the midst of a lot of difficult issues,” remarked Superintendent Anne Staffieri. “2025 has been and continues to be a challenging year for so many. I am truly very, very sorry for what is happening and for any students or families who are feeling that they are harmed. We hear you and we want to hear you more fully to understand where that harm is coming from so that we can best adjust, educate and improve our culture. I think this is a continuous improvement that we cannot ignore and we really cannot choose to do anything but place it as a top priority.” As an example of some of her recent advocacy, she referenced San Dieguito students being impacted by immigration and the uptick of ICE activity. Staffieri was one of 24 San Diego school districts and the County Office of Education to send a letter to the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Education to ask for extended safe spaces on or around campuses. “We fully recognize the important role of the Department of Homeland Security in enforcing immigration laws and securing our borders,” stated the letter, also signed by local superintendents in Cardiff, Encinitas, Del Mar and Solana Beach. “However, we believe that these responsibilities can and must be carried out in ways that do not compromise the safety or learning of children. Ensuring that every child has the opportunity to learn in an environment where they can dream big, learn fully, and know that they are safe, is a responsibility we all share.” During public comment, the board heard about a lot of hurt being felt in their school community, including concerns that the plan doesn’t adequately address every group facing hate and marginalization, which includes Hispanic, Arab, Muslim, Black and LGBTQ students. One parent shared how the incident at SDA was not an isolated one - when her daughter was called the n-word on campus in January, she said her complaints were dismissed by SDA staff and the students who inflicted the harm were never held accountable. Other parents expressed concerns about the district’s guest speaker, who has publicly questioned the International Association of Genocide Scholars’ declaration that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. As part of the community supportive plan, Sara Brown, the regional director of the American Jewish Committee’s San Diego office, led four staff training sessions about the historical significance of the swastika and the recent usage of it as a symbol for neo-Nazis, white supremacists and Hamas terrorists. “The incident that precipitated this training was completely unacceptable and it is always my preference to work proactively with educators and administrators ahead of an incident rather than in response to one,” said Brown, who only agreed to do the training as she believed it was not a “one and done” performative effort but an ongoing commitment to create change. “The delay in reporting has had a lasting, negative impact. Mistakes were made but I do appreciate the response of the district leadership once they were made aware of this incident. They have modeled accountability, taking immediate action to address the situation and investigate where necessary.” Two years ago, the district entered a multi-year partnership with the National Conflict Resolution Center in hopes of building a more supportive and inclusive learning environment and improving district communication and culture. The One San Dieguito initiative was formed in response to a heightened level of hate-based incidents at the time, including a swastika graffitied in a Torrey Pines High School bathroom, and leadership changes precipitated by the former superintendent’s controversial comments about Asian students. Staffieri said the district is being vulnerable and is having a lot of tough conversations. She said the community plan is about creating safer campuses for every student, not just Jewish students. Lucia Gordon, the mother of the student victim of the antisemitism incident, was critical of the district’s response. Gordon said when the incident was brought to light last month, no one ever reached out to her son or family and the only people who took action were the children, like Jonah. “We trusted this school, this district, to help us teach the same lessons we try to live by: to be kind, to be brave, to speak up when something is wrong, to protect others even when it’s hard. But the wrong came from the very place that should’ve modeled what’s right,” Gordon said. “We watched our child, who once felt proud of who he is, begin to doubt himself, to wonder if being Jewish made him the very problem the school would rather not have to deal with. We watched him ask us to let it go, to stop seeking justice because he no longer believed in the adults to do what’s right.” She asked for a public apology not only for the district’s procedural failure but for its failure of “failure of empathy, courage and integrity.” While the presentation to the board that day was centered on an antisemitic act, board President Williams said the district’s intolerance for hate goes across the board. Trustee Michael Allman said that the worst thing they can do is sweep incidents like this under the rug. He had hoped that protocols were in place to investigate and respond to any incident with expertise and empathy when the district hired a community outreach director last year to serve as an ombudsperson, “an impartial dispute resolution practitioner.” Trustee Rimga Viskanta said she has heard for years that when incidents occur, there isn’t a quick response and when hurt or harm happens, it’s left to the victims to report: “We are trying to shift this culture rapidly.” In her comments, Viskanta said she was deeply sorry for what happened at SDA and acknowledged that the district still has a lot of work to do. Previous Next

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< Back Previous Next AFT to vote on controversial proposals Proposals including ending US military aid to Israel, protecting pro-Palestinian protesters Carl Campanile Jul 16, 2024 America’s second-largest teacher’s union has drafted a group of resolutions calling for the end of US military aid to Israel — and defending the anti-Israel protests that have rocked campuses across the country. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — which is affiliated with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) that represents most teachers in New York City public schools — will vote on the controversial proposals at its national convention starting in Houston next Monday . One of the resolutions, which calls for a cease-fire between the Jewish State and the terror group Hamas, demands a halt to US military assistance that enables the “violent dispossession” of Palestinians. “American military cannot be used in ways that facilitate the seizure of Palestinian land, the violent dispossession of Palestinian communities and the annexation of occupied Palestinian territory,” the resolution reads. A related eyebrow-raising proposal even goes so far as suggesting the US is “enabling genocide” in Gaza. “[A]s long as Israel continues to block substantive and meaningful aid to Gaza, the AFT calls for the US to halt military aid to Israel,” it says. Another resolution calls for anti-Israel protesters to be protected — even after violent demonstrations have swept college and school campuses since Hamas’ bloody Oct. 7 attack on the Jewish State. “[T]he AFT expresses solidarity with those students, faculty and other academic workers across the United States who have faced repressive and violent crackdown of their protests in the war in Gaza,” the resolution reads. “[T]he AFT demands that campus administrators cease their campaign of threats, suspensions and expulsions against peaceful protesters and cease using law enforcement agencies to disrupt and attack them,” it continues. The proposal also defends the demonstrations as “academic freedom” and “free speech.” A coalition of pro-Israel educators swiftly condemned the resolutions as antisemitic. “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 , an instructional coordinator and 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.” Amy Leserman, chairwoman of the Los Angeles-based Educators Caucus for Israel also denounced the proposals as “blatantly bigoted.” “It is astounding that AFT leadership has allowed this, and so many other, blatantly bigoted resolutions to move forward, when they are clearly motivated by values contrary to the purpose of the AFT,” she said. Even AFT’s maligned president, Randi Weingarten — a Jew who self-identifies herself as a “progressive zionist” and whose spouse is a rabbi — has opposed resolutions supporting the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel. She co-wrote an op-ed column in April for USA Today with Karen Marder, the pro-Israel New York teacher who was forced to hide in a locked office as an angry mob tried to push its way into her classroom at Hillside High School in Jamaica in November. Many students became enraged to learn she was photographed at a vigil for the victims killed two days after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attac k on Israel. In a statement on Tuesday, Weingarten singled out only one resolution for support — calling for “an end to the war in Gaza and lasting peace, security and self-determination for Israel and Palestine.” Her silence on the anti-Israel resolutions signals that they will likely be defeated. “As we head into our annual convention, here’s a reminder that the AFT is a democracy where locals can submit resolutions. And they do. Plenty of them. Proposals are simply proposals unless they are considered and passed at our delegated, democratic convention,” Weingarten said in a statement on X. One of the resolutions, which calls for a cease-fire between the Jewish State and the terror group Hamas, demands a halt to US military assistance that enables the “violent dispossession” of Palestinians. “I support Resolution #30 that opposes anti-Semitism and hate of any kind, and that reflects our Executive Council resolution unanimously passed in January,” she continued. “I have been clear throughout this difficult time — hate of all kinds is antithetical to the values we promote as a union and as professionals in our schools. We are a movement driven by love, not fear.” Still, pro-Israel educators slammed that resolution as well, for trying to prevent Israel from defending itself after being attacked by Hamas in a declaration of war. Resolution 30 declares that there is “no military solution to this conflict” and blames “far-right” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “prolonging” the war. “Netanyahu has an interest in prolonging the war to escape the public scrutiny of his colossal failure to protest Israel’s citizens and his own pending criminal prosecution,” the resolution reads. “While Israel’s initial case of war — self-defense against the criminal acts of Oct. 7 — was just, the ways in which the Netanyahu government has prosecuted it — its sanctioning of indiscriminate and disproportionate violence, resulting in a massive civilian death toll — has made it unjust.” The coalition of pro-Israel educators labeled the resolution as “offensive.” “It is offensive for a union based in the United States to tell a sovereign nation how to conduct its defense and equate a democratically elected government with Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization designated as such by the US Department of State,” the group said. Read more: https://nypost.com/2024/07/16/us-news/aft-to-vote-on-controversial-proposals-including-ending-us-military-aid-to-israel-protecting-pro-palestinian-protesters/

< Back Previous Next San Dieguito board talks next steps in addressing Hitler photo at Carmel Valley school District will hold community forums, staff training around antisemitism and create a new superintendent committee Karen Billing Oct 18, 2022 The Jewish community in the San Dieguito Union High School District is speaking up after a picture of Hitler was posted in a seventh-grade social studies classroom at Carmel Valley Middle School, alongside world leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill. Members of Partners for Equality and Educational Responsibility (PEER K12) rallied outside of the board’s meeting on Oct. 13 demanding meaningful action against antisemitism: “We want action, not words,” said parent Tamar Caspi, echoing the message on many of their protest signs. Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2022/10/17/san-dieguito-board-talks-next-steps-in-addressing-hitler-photo-at-carmel-valley-school/

< Back Previous Next Union-Tribune Community Advisory Board member resigns due to repost on personal Facebook Members volunteer their time and talents, and agree to adhere to guidelines, including a prohibition on hate speech or targeting of other people or communities Staff Nov 4, 2023 Last weekend, The San Diego Union-Tribune learned that Lallia Allali, one of the emeritus members of our Community Advisory Board and a contributor to our Community Voices Project, had reposted a graphic and deplorable antisemitic image on her personal Facebook page. Several people shared it on X, formerly Twitter, tagging national organizations and calling for her removal from various posts, including those with the Union-Tribune. 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. Read more: https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2023/11/04/union-tribune-community-advisory-board-member-resigns-due-to-repost-on-personal-facebook/

< Back Previous Next Hitler 'had strong leadership qualities' says teacher, photo placed with MLK, JFK Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's photo was placed on a board next to inspirational leaders such as Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy. Michael Starr Oct 3, 2022 Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's portrait was placed alongside inspirational historical leaders in a San Diego school history class last week, and when a student complained the teacher explained that Hitler had committed bad deeds but was a great leader, NGO Partners for Equality and Educational Responsibility in Kindergarten thru 12th grade (PEER K-12) told The Jerusalem Post . At the Carmel Valley Middle School, as part of a lesson for 7th graders, Hitler was included on a board that displayed the likes of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi, US president John F Kennedy, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. According to PEER K-12, a 12-year-old student communicated to their teacher that it was inappropriate to display a photo of Hitler alongside such positive role models. Read more: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-718888

< Back Previous Next The Ethnic Studies Battlegrounds: Political Ideology, Teacher Unions, and a Divided Jewish Community Subversion and “othering” have proven to be disturbingly effective, contributing to an increasingly fractured Jewish community. This division has made it difficult for us to unite and recognize the external threats we face. Nicole Bernstein Mar 9, 2025 Education is no longer just about reading, writing, and arithmetic; ideological battles now shape classrooms across the United States. One such battle centers on ethnic studies—originally intended to highlight marginalized voices and foster historical understanding. However, ethnic studies was hijacked right from its inception by political operatives aiming to reshape our nation’s core values. The surge in antisemitism, particularly in K-12 and college settings, underscores the success of these divisive strategies. Subversion and “othering” have proven to be disturbingly effective, contributing to an increasingly fractured Jewish community. This division has made it difficult for us to unite and recognize the external threats we face. The Ethnic Studies Origin Story: Hero or Villain? Ethnic studies began in the late 1960s at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, with the goal of offering diverse perspectives and reconciling historical truths, though it quickly became a Trojan Horse for radical, anti-American ideology —eroding our nation’s Judeo-Christian, pro-democracy foundations in favor of collectivism, violent revolution, and Marxist totalitarianism. Rather than foster unity, it divides students into categories of oppressors and oppressed, fuels resentment, legitimizes Jew-hatred (including anti-Zionism) , and glorifies violent social upheaval. The Data Behind the Concerns Jewish organizations initially dismissed concerns about systemic antisemitism in education, attributing incidents to isolated cases. However, a December 2023 Harvard-Harris Poll revealed disturbing trends: a 900% increase in reported antisemitic incidents in the U.S. (ADL), with 30% of young Americans under 24 believing Jews caused the Holocaust, 60% believing Hamas was justified in its October 7 attacks on Israel, and 67% viewing Jews as oppressors. These statistics point to a broader educational shift that prioritizes political activism over academic rigor. California’s Ethnic Studies Mandate Controversy Governor Gavin Newsom’s 2025 budget excluded funding for the ethnic studies mandate (AB101), preventing its enforcement as a graduation requirement. While seemingly a victory for opponents, the battle is far from over. Ethnic studies advocates are entrenched among faculty and administrators while school board meeting confrontations confirm a determination to teach ethnic studies regardless of state funding. Moreover, external funding from activist groups and foreign entities shields these programs from financial constraints, allowing them to spread unchecked. Teachers’ Unions: America’s Most Powerful Monopoly Teachers’ unions control nearly every aspect of public education. According to Americans for Fair Treatment, unions allocate twice as much funding to political campaigns as they do to services for members. Teachers’ unions, which dominate oversight mechanisms at the local, county, state, and national levels remain deeply invested in advancing ethnic studies, strategically infiltrating school boards over the past fifty years, and redirecting their focus from teacher advocacy to political activism. At the 2019 National Educators Association (NEA) conference, for example, they rejected a proposal to prioritize “ centering student learning ” in favor of a resolution mandating Critical Race Theory (CRT) in K-12 schools . Activist educators have embedded themselves in school systems , promoting antisemitic rhetoric and radical political views. Groups like the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Coalition equate Israel with apartheid and promote figures like Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) member Leila Khaled, Huey P. Newton, and Angela Davis , while the Marxist-Leninist group Union del Barrio, which calls for the decolonization of Southwestern USA, is influencing school board elections. When Ideologies Become Reality P eerK12 has exposed many incidents which illustrate the extent of the issue locally. The San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) Equity & Belonging Department has repeatedly distributed anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda as resources to thousands of teachers; they later retracted and apologized but the damage is done. SDUSD was also forced to remove their District English Learner Advisory Committee Chair for sharing violent anti-Israel imagery. Unfortunately, she also served on the district’s Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee, and currently does teacher training for the Liberated Ethnic Studies Consortium. In San Dieguito Union High School District , a middle school teacher proudly displayed a picture of Adolf Hitler as an example of “great leadership skills.” She vehemently refused to remove the photo but was finally forced to after PeerK12’s mobilization efforts. That incident also resulted in the district creating the Superintendent’s Jewish Parent Committee. In Poway Unified School District , a PTA president and DEI VP was removed, and that DEI committee was dismantled, after we exposed her promotion of extreme antisemitic rhetoric while leading diversity efforts across the K-12 district. Another district enacted new policies for “Multicultural Day” after we exposed anti-Israel paraphernalia being distributed under the guise of a Palestinian heritage display. A history teacher at High Tech High International publicly undermined a Jewish student’s presentation on Israel’s 1948 War, replacing it with a pro-“Nakba” narrative while exempting other students from such scrutiny. After many meetings the teacher was forced to publicly apologize for the incident in front of the entire class. At Francis Parker School , a history class provided heavily anti-Israel biased materials with inflated casualty stats. PeerK12 was allowed to audit the history department curriculum, resulting in removal of biased materials and the restoration of factual lesson plans. Groups like ours are fighting back through monitoring curricula for biased content, advocating in school board meetings and parent coalitions, using legal action including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to challenge antisemitic discrimination, and engaging with school board candidates to restore educational integrity. A Fight for the Future of Education The ethnic studies battle extends beyond education—it represents a battle for the ideological future of America’s youth. It is also a crucial issue for the American Jewish community, which faces the risk of further division or, alternatively, the opportunity for unity in the fight against this radicalization. Teachers’ unions and activists have spent decades embedding their agenda in public schools. We must act to undo this damage by reclaiming school boards, holding unions accountable, and advocating for objective, non-politicized curricula. Until this is achieved, education will remain a battleground for the ideological hearts and minds of Americans.

If you’ve ever wondered why young Americans are embracing increasingly extreme views on race, power, identity, Israel, and Jews, this webinar connects the dots with clarity, historical depth, and urgency. < Back CAM REVIEW | Ethnic Studies: The Dangerous Ideology Quietly Shaping US Classrooms If you’ve ever wondered why young Americans are embracing increasingly extreme views on race, power, identity, Israel, and Jews, this webinar connects the dots with clarity, historical depth, and urgency. Why are Jewish students facing unprecedented levels of antisemitism — from grade school on up to the university level and beyond? The answer may not lie only in biased news reporting on global events or inflammatory social media discourse, but also deep within the American education system itself. A 2023 survey conducted by Harvard CAPS/Harris revealed that 79% of Americans aged 18–24 believed all white people were oppressors and all people of color oppressed. That same poll found 67% in this age group saw Jews as oppressors, 60% felt the Hamas October 7th attack was was justified, and 73% trusted Hamas to accurately report casualty figures in Gaza. These aren’t isolated beliefs — they form a coherent worldview shaped not by spontaneous cultural trends, but by a deliberate ideological framework increasingly embedded in classroom curricula. In an eye-opening webinar last week, titled “The Ethnic Studies Origin Story: Uncovering the History Behind The Most Controversial Discipline ” and hosted by the Israeli-American Civic Action Network (ICAN) , Nicole Bernstein, co-founder of PeerK12 , traced the roots of this phenomenon back to its source: the rise of Ethnic Studies. Far from being a neutral academic discipline, Ethnic Studies was born from radical activism. It emerged alongside anti-colonial uprisings, Third World Liberation fronts, and revolutionary Marxist frameworks — movements that sought not only to critique Western society, but to dismantle and rebuild it entirely. Bernstein explained how these ideas, once confined to fringe university departments, have entered the K–12 classroom through decades of institutional advocacy, policy lobbying, and grassroots organizing. Today, these same ideologies form the backbone of state-mandated Ethnic Studies curricula across the country, often under the radar of parents, school boards, and even teachers. Concepts like “intersectionality,” “decolonization,” and “dismantling systems of power” are now presented to children as academic truths — not political theories. But as Bernstein made clear, their intellectual DNA is anything but neutral. The result is an educational movement that does more than teach history — it reframes the American story itself through a rigid ideological lens, silencing alternative viewpoints and replacing inquiry with indoctrination. If you’ve ever wondered why young Americans are embracing increasingly extreme views on race, power, identity, Israel, and Jews, this webinar connects the dots with clarity, historical depth, and urgency. Bernstein doesn’t just inform — she exposes the origin story of an educational revolution that is reshaping how the next generation thinks. Whether you’re a parent, educator, policymaker, or concerned citizen, this is the key to understanding how we got here — and why we can’t afford to stay silent any longer. Watch the full recording of the webinar — and find out what’s really being taught in American schools. Previous Next

Critics say unions taking part are undermining their members by taking an overtly partisan stance. < Back Randi Weingarten’s ‘No Kings’ push shows teachers union is prioritizing activism over education Critics say unions taking part are undermining their members by taking an overtly partisan stance. Over 1,500 rallies will be held against Donald Trump across the USA tomorrow as part of what organizers have dubbed “No Kings Day.” Critics say unions taking part are undermining their members by taking an overtly partisan stance. The American Federation of Teachers, American Postal Workers Union, and Communications Workers of America are all listed as partners of No Kings Day. AFT president Randi Weingarten is set to speak at the Philadelphia No Kings Rally. School choice activist Corey DeAngelis told The Post Weingarten’s involvement reveals “that teachers unions are more invested in political activism than in prioritizing education. Their actions expose them as little more than an arm of the Democratic Party, pushing a radical agenda that puts taxpayers on the hook for funding the K-12 education of illegal immigrants,” DeAngelis said. Weingarten spearheaded a No Kings town hall on Tuesday , declaring the event is “about strong public schools, supporting working families, and our fundamental freedoms.” The Zoom call also featured Democrat Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Al Sharpton. “The people are the most important decision makers in the country. Not a king, not a dictator,” Weingarten said during the call . She is set to speak at the Philadelphia event, and the AFT has an entire webpage of volunteer opportunities populated with No Kings Day events . Weingarten has also promoted the event to her more than 100,000 followers on X. “Where was this outrage from Randi Weingarten when her local affiliates fought to keep schools closed for years during the COVID era?” DeAngelis asked. “Imagine if Randi Weingarten fought half as hard to improve public education. Maybe then more than a quarter of American kids would be proficient in math.” The protests are billed as a counter to the Army’s 250th anniversary military parade in DC, as well as the president’s 79th birthday, which falls on the same day. The rallies are expected to disrupt hundreds of cities in all fifty states, and have been backed by activist organizations like Black Lives Matter and the ACLU. The day’s military parade will travel down the National Mall in Washington DC and will reportedly include uniforms, arms, and vehicles from every major American war, starting with the Revolutionary War, then moving on to display more recent Abrams tanks and P-51 Mustangs. No Kings Day organizers have dubbed the parade “a made-for-TV display of dominance,” while their own events on Saturday are “a national day of action and mass mobilization in response to the increasing authoritarian excesses and corruption of the Trump administration” – somehow omitting the president was overwhelmingly democratically elected just seven months ago. Jamie Bauer, a representative of No Kings, told The Post that they have indication that their crowd could exceed 75,000 in New York City alone. Other “flagship” rallies are planned in Philadelphia, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Charlotte, and Atlanta. No Kings is orchestrated by the 50501 Movement (short for 50 protests, 50 states, one movement), a grassroots anti-Trump group that reportedly formed on Reddit . They first held a No Kings rally on February 5th, then another on President’s Day, and a third in March. No Kings pledged not to hold a rally in DC, after President Trump warned that protesters at the military parade would face “very heavy force.” “Instead of allowing this birthday parade to be the center of gravity, we will make action everywhere else the story of America that day: people coming together,” the group declared on their website . But Trump, for one, doesn’t agree with the characterization of him. “I don’t feel like a king, I have to go through hell to get stuff approved,” he said on Thursday . “We’re not a king at all, thank you very much.” Previous Next

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UPCOMING EVENTS No events at the moment past events Ethnic Studies Workshop Sat, Sep 20 PARENT POWER: Depoliticizing the Curriculum Wed, Sep 10 CAJA United with Israel and Against Antisemitism Sun, Sep 07 Learn more ICAN & PeerK12 Exclusive Briefing for Parents & Educators: Israel’s Operation Against the Islamic Republic of Iran Thu, Jun 19 Past Event Details Asian American Parent Alliance of San Diego Annual Conference Sat, May 24 Past Event Details California’s First K-12 Antisemitism Hearing — Live STOP THE TAPE! Breakdown Tue, May 20 Past Event Details Ethnic Studies or Exclusion Studies? What California’s Newest K-12 Bill Gets Wrong Mon, Mar 31 Past Event Details TAPESTRY: A Day of Jewish Community, Learning & Exploration Sun, Mar 30 Past Event Details Jewish Women's Foundation "Let’s Talk About It" Luncheon: Ethnic Studies Thu, Mar 20 Details Webinar: California Forum on Ethnic Studies Tue, Feb 25 Past Event Details Ethnic Studies: The Hidden Agenda Behind San Diego's K-12 Curriculum Sun, Feb 09 Past Event Details San Dieguito High School District Board Meeting Mon, Dec 16 Past Event Details Dr. Edwin Black: Israel & International Law, The Historical Underpinnings Wed, Nov 20 Past Event Details Dr. Mordechai Kedar, Israel in a Changing World Wed, Nov 20 Past Event Details Portraits of Resilience: Surviving NOVA Festival Terror Attack Tue, Nov 19 Past Event Details Load More

NOT SURE WHERE TO START? NOT SURE WHERE TO START? NOT SURE WHERE TO START? NOT SURE WHERE TO START? take our Survey & Find the Right PeerK12 Service for You This survey will help us understand your needs and recommend the most relevant PeerK12 workshops or service packages for you. Please answer the questions as accurately as possible. HOW CAN WE HELP YOU? paid consulting services 01 Antisemitism & Bias Prevention Training for Educators Service Type: Workshop or Training Program Target Audience: Teachers, administrators, and school staff Description: This interactive training equips educators with the knowledge and tools to identify, address, and prevent antisemitism in the classroom. Tailored to specific districts, this workshop includes: Understanding the historical and contemporary implications of antisemitism. Recognizing modern antisemitism and harmful narratives in curriculum and classroom interactions. Best practices for creating inclusive classroom environments. Strategies for handling and responding to incidents of bias among students. Format Options: Half-day workshop Full-day immersive training with role-playing exercises Virtual, on-demand training modules Fee Model: $5,000–$15,000 per workshop, depending on duration and customization. Annual subscription for virtual modules: $10,000 per district, including updates and resources. 02 School Climate Evaluation & Bias Audit Service Type: Evaluation & Reporting Target Audience: School districts, city councils, and education boards Description: A comprehensive evaluation of school policies, curricula, and culture to assess the presence of bias, antisemitism, and inequities. The audit includes: Analysis of instructional materials for bias or omission. Surveys and focus groups with students, parents, and staff. Assessment of staff training gaps and response protocols for bias incidents. Detailed report with actionable recommendations for policy improvements. Deliverables: Executive summary with findings. Actionable recommendations tailored to the district’s needs. Follow-up consulting for implementation. Fee Model: $20,000–$50,000 per district evaluation, depending on the scope and size of the district. complementary coaching services for parents 01 Navigating the Political Landscape: Parents as Advocates A step-by-step guide for parents and community leaders to organize, advocate, and drive accountability in their local schools. This toolkit provides: Templates for petitions, letters to school boards, and media outreach. Strategies for effective coalition-building, including engaging diverse community groups. Talking points for public meetings and media interviews. Case studies of successful advocacy campaigns. Optional Add-Ons (fee based): Media engagement training. Interview prep. Virtual training sessions for toolkit users. Ongoing support via email or Zoom consultations. 03 Legislative Advocacy to Protect Jewish Students This module educates participants about current and upcoming legislation that can safeguard Jewish students and strengthen accountability for antisemitic incidents in schools. Key takeaways: An overview of key federal, state, and local legislation, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and proposed resolutions to protect Jewish students. Legislative advocacy techniques, including how to write letters, meet with legislators, and testify effectively at hearings. How to track legislative updates and mobilize their community to support protective measures. Real-world examples of successful legislative campaigns led by advocacy groups. 02 Ethnic Studies ORIGIN STORY: Ensuring Inclusion and Avoiding Bias As ethnic studies curricula are increasingly adopted, it’s critical to ensure that these programs are inclusive, balanced, and free of bias against Jewish students. This module examines: The historical evolution of ethnic studies in education. Common pitfalls, including the omission or distortion of Jewish history and identity. Case studies of ethnic studies programs that succeeded versus those that alienated Jewish students. Strategies for advocating for curricula that promote unity and understanding, without marginalizing any group. Deliverables: A guide for evaluating proposed or existing ethnic studies curricula. Talking points for engaging with school boards about curriculum concerns. Recommended resources for inclusive ethnic studies programs. 04 Navigating the Political Landscape: Parents as Advocates This module empowers parents to navigate the often contentious political waters of school districts and state legislatures, equipping them to advocate effectively for their children. Key takeaways: Understanding the political structure of school districts, from administrators to board trustees. Building relationships with school board members and identifying allies. Strategies for effective advocacy while avoiding political pitfalls, such as backlash or tokenization. Navigating state legislative politics: how to approach legislators, build coalitions, and craft a persuasive case. Techniques to maintain focus on outcomes while navigating political or ideological divisions.