The teachers unions’ activist allies: You won’t believe the outside organizations that drive educational dysfunction

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) recently released a report making serious accusations against the nation’s two largest teachers unions.Specifically, the committee accuses the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers of “promoting dangerous ideology instead of advancing our children’s learning.” The report details, among other things, using schoolchildren for overtly political causes, fanning the flames of antisemitism, partnering with hostile regimes, and fighting to “affirm” transgenderism among students. Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-LA) calls for “enhanced oversight of union political activities and increased transparency of their finances.”This problem has been building for a long time. From last year’s treatment of Jewish NEA members and the NEA sending out a map that erased Israel, to partnerships with international teachers unions that have highly problematic, terror-adjacent associations, Cassidy’s report is a deep dive into the kinds of questionable partnerships and financial arrangements and calls into serious question the direction of America’s largest teachers unions. Parents, policymakers, and reform educators inside the union should take a careful look at all of the report’s troubling findings and consider serious reforms to laws involving education unions. However, one aspect of the report that has not gotten sufficient attention is the role of certain outside activist organizations in the union’s misbehavior, and their toxic effect on public education more broadly. These organizations command far less attention than unions or school districts, partly for the very reason that they are much more difficult to oversee and much less accountable to the public. This issue deserves more scrutiny.(Dean MacAdam for the Washington Examiner) The most important groups cited by the report are the Zinn Education Project, Rethinking Schools, and Teaching for Change. The report states that the NEA has “gone to great lengths to endorse and embed” resources from these groups. The report explains that the trio of organizations is closely linked, works toward a common purpose, is well-funded, and provides deeply problematic material. They are also a major source of significant problems all across the country, as demonstrated by numerous other policymaking bodies.According to Zinn’s own website, it is “coordinated by two non-profit organizations, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change,” which have “spent decades developing and providing social justice resources for teachers,” and claims to have over 175,000 teachers registered for their materials. The Zinn Education Project is named after Howard Zinn, the famous Marxist professor and activist who was later revealed by declassified FBI documents to be an agent for the Communist Party USA, which worked closely with the Soviet Union.In practice, Zinn acts as a foundation for activism and distributes resources that Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change create, as well as the project’s own materials. This consortium promotes materials such as “Rethinking Mathematics,” which, among other things, reframes math lessons toward demonizing the concept of mortgages. “Rethinking Mathematics,” celebrates students coming to the conclusion that “the banks were really stealing money from (mortgage holders),” because of “this thief called Interest.”This isn’t a math lesson. It’s social indoctrination masquerading as one. Seeing interest as theft not only ignores the very positive role mortgages play in allowing relatively less well-off people to buy homes and to build generational wealth, but it is an idea closely related to antisemitism.Howard Zinn, Marxist historian and author of the leftist A People’s History of the United States, in New York in 2006. Declassified FBI documents show Zinn to have been an agent for the Communist Party USA, which worked closely with the Soviet Union. (Dima Gavrysh/AP) But negative impressions of basic forms of interest are hardly the only material that flirts with antisemitism. Other materials from this consortium include “Teaching Palestine,” a curriculum specifically aimed not at teaching the Israel/Palestinian conflict, but at preaching a specific pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel point of view. These lessons are highly propagandistic. As noted by Congressional testimony from last year, this curriculum includes highly simplistic cartoons of a “Cowboy” stepping on a dead Native American next to a cartoon of an Israeli soldier stepping on a dead Palestinian.You don’t have to be uncritical of Israel to realize that this is not conveying difficult facts and allowing people to make informed decisions, but crude stereotypes aimed at achieving a predetermined conclusion. And this is just the most striking example. The North American Values Institute has produced a dossier that details a myriad of ways “Teaching Palestine,” repeatedly engages in similarly propagandistic lessons.The dossier notes that one article in the wider “Teaching Palestine” curriculum is by Nora Lester Murad, a leader in the “Drop the ADL from Schools” movement, on why the Anti-Defamation League should not be partnered with. Ignoring that this issue is tangential, at best, to any version of the Middle East conflict, this same movement was responsible for getting the majority of the NEA delegates at their national convention to vote to break off any ties with the ADL. This resulted in inquiries from both the House and Senate for antisemitism. But the closeness of Rethinking Schools “Teaching Palestine” to “Drop the ADL in Schools,” reiterates the key importance to outside groups in causing significant problems in education with little oversight or understanding of their roles in those problems.But Israel is not the curriculum’s only target. As the aforementioned cartoons would suggest, Rethinking Schools material goes out of its way to denigrate America. Bill Bigelow, the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine and co-director of the Zinn Education Project, penned an article on the 4th of July which dubs a celebration of America’s founding “propaganda” and complains that it amounts to little but “noise pollution.”Code Pink protesters disrupt testimoney by Biden administration Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin before the House Armed Services Committee, Feb. 29, 2024. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP) Again, one need not excuse every action taken by Americans of European ancestry against the native population, or approve of every action undertaken in the name of patriotism, to realize that Bigelow might want to look in the mirror when raising concerns about “propaganda.”While it is not discussed directly in the HELP report, Bigelow also penned curriculum and supporting articles entitled “Whose Terrorism?” His articles almost entirely fail to discuss any U.S. or internationally recognized terrorist groups, but do suggest that nearly any action, military or not, taken by the U.S. is terrorism.Indeed, military strikes on an al Qaeda training camp? “Terrorism.” Economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq? Also “terrorism.” Publicly available sections of the curriculum are thinly veiled fictionalized versions of real events aimed at painting the U.S. and its allies in a negative light.“[P]resenting contested perspectives as settled fact while dismissing contrary views as the product of ‘elites’ is not history; it is political advocacy that limits students’ exposure to competing interpretations of the past,” the Senate report reads.The Senate report states that NEA has brought Rethinking Schools and Zinn Education Project employees to teach at conferences, and, since 2023, has partnered with Zinn on the inappropriately named “Teach Truth” campaign. This should concern everyone, and alone is enough to warrant scrutiny of these groups.But this is not the first time policymakers have recognized that these groups are at the center of serious problems in other educational institutions.Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) called out Adam Sanchez, the editor of Rethinking Schools magazine and a Zinn Education Project teacher leader, for a presentation to the New Jersey Education Association that was based on Rethinking Schools material that “reads less like an educational resource and more like an extremist political activist agenda,” and noted that it supported “antisemitic narratives for New Jersey’s educators and students.”Sanchez’s presentation is not the primary problem, however. While the NEA occasionally partners with these organizations, the NJEA is an official partner of Rethinking Schools. Since NJEA is the second-largest chapter of the NEA after the California Teachers Association, this is a particularly significant partnership that is poisoning the well more broadly.Additionally, the Education and Workforce Committee, chaired by Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) noticed that this same consortium seemed to have a negative impact on the School District of Philadelphia when it announced an investigation into the district due to concerns of antisemitism last November.Previously, a witness at a hearing Walberg’s committee held last year noted that Rethinking Schools is aggressively pushed by the University of California, Los Angeles, which the witness noted has a significant effect on California, and clearly has nationwide implications. Indeed, the Committee on Accuracy in Middle East Reporting has tied Rethinking Schools to well over 50 different districts around the country that we know of, so far. Last month, several Pennsylvania teachers called out Rethinking Schools as contributing to antisemitism at a hearing in the Pennsylvania State Senate, reiterating what Walberg’s committee had found.While these groups are the most prominent cited in the HELP report, and that have the most direct effect, they are others.Code Pink, a group originally founded as an anti-war activist group in the early 2000s, has not only become the vanguard of virtually every far-left cause under the sun, but has become a tool of various hostile foreign regimes, including Iran and China. This has attracted the attention of the Department of Justice, the State Department, and Congress.But it hasn’t stopped the NEA and the AFT from repeatedly partnering with Code Pink, nor has it stopped them from playing a further role in how we run our public schools.As the HELP report notes, “Marcy Winograd, a retired Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) teacher and current member of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), coordinates CODEPINK Congress and its “Drop the ADL” campaign while also chairing the California Teachers Association’s Jewish & Allied Educators 4 Palestine caucus.”The previously mentioned “Drop the ADL in Schools” campaign, spearheaded by Nora Lester Murad, is technically separate from the Code Pink effort but complementary. They’ve appeared on webinars together.Indeed, the collaboration between this loosely coordinated mob of organizations seeking to steer education in a fringe direction is commonplace. Winograd has written articles for Rethinking Schools that advocate “Reimagining Holocaust Education,” to “Includes Palestinian oppression.” It’s important to note that the majority of states mandate Holocaust education, and Winograd’s home state, California, was the first to do so. In that context, this should be seen as an attempt, not just to include additional information, but to subvert the purpose of those laws entirely.A further investigation shows that Winograd is deeply involved in coordinating with local California teachers to create “Students for Justice in Palestine” clubs, even when there is little to no student demand for them. This is unsurprising, as Code Pink also runs webinars on how to establish such clubs in schools.For its part, SJP is also being investigated by the HELP Committee, and its parent organization, American Muslims for Palestine, is being sued as an alter ego of a formerly shuttered terror finance organization.When all of these groups are at the center of numerous problems, in different states and districts around the country, one might rightly ask why these organizations themselves have not faced more direct scrutiny. Certainly, the First Amendment gives private organizations the right to hold whatever views they like, no matter how toxic, try to persuade people of those views, and so on. But libertarianism is only a good political philosophy when children aren’t involved, and this issue goes right to the issue of children — it involves influence directly on government-run schools. These organizations do not have the right to set public school curriculum or to have undue influence on unelected education officials, or to use schools as activist tools for their own political ends.Local, state, and federal governments ought to be taking a much more direct look at the influence groups like this are having, both individually and collectively, on educational processes and outcomes. They should be using methods, consistent with the Constitution and federalism, to minimize their influence.For example, Congress, the administration, and numerous state and local governments could crack down on the highly questionable practice of allowing outside organizations to hire current public school employees to write curriculum that they then promote to their fellow teachers and push in their classrooms, something that is unquestionably happening in Philadelphia.They could, perhaps, ban former teachers, such as Sanchez, from de facto lobbying their former colleagues for a period of time like we do with other branches of the government. They could demand significantly more transparency in the curriculum teachers use, something some states mandate to varying degrees, but others do not. They could demand significantly more transparency into teacher training, which is usually required by state law, but is rarely seriously supervised.At minimum, the full slate of policymakers and political actors should be conducting investigations, holding hearings, and taking administrative actions aimed at understanding the full scope of how third-party groups are influencing public education, aimed at pulling back undue influence. This should be done in a manner similar to how Congress and various federal agencies handled tobacco companies and their marketing toward children specifically in the late 1990s. Remember the political and legal fights over Joe Camel?WHY NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES IS WRONG ABOUT FAILING SCHOOLSThere is no doubt that shining the spotlight on this tactic by tobacco companies did a lot to change the conversation about what is appropriate for companies to do when it comes to marketing toward youth. When groups like Rethinking Schools and Code Pink and their friends are promoting material, specifically at government employees, aimed at influencing children, that are plainly at odds with what most Americans would think an education in America entails, they should receive similar treatment.It might be a cliche to say our children’s future depends on it, but it’s still true.Clifford Smith is a former congressional staffer and an attorney.