How are Massachusetts schools failing Jewish students through bias? – opinion

As Massachusetts students remain stubbornly behind their pre-pandemic levels in math and reading scores according to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Massachusetts Teachers Association’s recent focus of attention is instructive.

The teachers’ union, also known as the MTA, pushed successfully for a ballot initiative in November that torpedoed a longtime graduation requirement that students pass the state’s MCAS exam. And in December, it released an extensive list of resources it compiled for its members on “Israel and Occupied Palestine.”

Among the so-called pedagogical aids? A poster showing dollar bills folded into a Jewish star and another featuring a keffiyeh-clad, rifle-toting fighter that proclaims, “What was taken by force can only be returned by force.”

The almost 100 resources are an overwhelmingly demonic portrayal of Israel, Zionism, and Jews, even with two links containing those posters ultimately deleted. It speaks to a broken system of oversight, emblematic of similar education issues in other parts of the US. 

Jewish and non-Jewish members of the grassroots group Massachusetts Educators Against Antisemitism had tried repeatedly to have the union remove the material but were rebuffed by MTA board members’ accusations of “censorship.” For many teachers, the entire undertaking is a pernicious diversion from their core classroom struggles.

“I have 15 kids reading six years below grade level, so I don’t know why we’re talking about a country that’s 0.1% of the world population and a 10-hour plane ride away,” one told me.

It took nothing less than a Massachusetts State House hearing held by a recently formed commission on combating antisemitism for the MTA to budge after union president Max Page was grilled about the posters and other materials and after commission co-chair State Sen. John C. Velis referred to them as “a recommendation for educational malpractice.”

That a teachers’ union has the capacity to ply uninformed educators with material bereft of factual accuracy and balance is troublesome, given its powerful platform.

But it is part of a much larger problem acknowledged during that hearing and a subsequent one held last week: Curricular vetting and accountability are virtually nonexistent at the state level. It leaves schoolchildren vulnerable to ideologies subversively inserted locally, and it is not unique to Massachusetts.

Jewish students exposed to high levels of antisemitism

Jewish students “are being bullied at record levels with the positioning of Zionism as an epithet,” said Katherine Craven, chair of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, which governs the state’s education department for K-12.

And the board is hearing anecdotally that children as young as first and second grade are being exposed to antisemitic curricula. However, according to state law, its role is limited to initial teacher certification, bullying, and the state’s curriculum frameworks, which are only standards.

“If you folks at the board, [if] your job is not to provide that oversight, I view that as a really, really big problem,” Velis told her. “Am I missing something?”

“No, you are not,” Craven replied while noting its duties are not “prescriptive,” instead offering districts recommendations and guidelines.

So even as Massachusetts, with its reputation for inclusivity, ranked an astonishing fifth among states in the number of antisemitic incidents in 2023 according to the Anti-Defamation League, the state’s inability to intervene heightens the probability that kids will learn with MTA “curriculum resources,” like “Handala’s Return: A Children’s Story and Workbook.”

Antisemitic ideologies and conspiracy theories

It draws on antisemitic conspiracy theories portraying Jews as predators targeting non-Jewish children, who in this narrative are “having their homes taken by Zionist bullies… always scaring” and “arresting them,” and instructs kids to name what they will chant “at a Palestine protest.” 

Nor are there “any kind of approval rights” over professional development at the board or department level, Craven said, describing it as “very locally driven.”

It was a professional-development webinar hosted by the MTA’s Anti-Racism Task Force that raised the alarm after teachers in attendance reported that Zionism was equated with settler colonialism and presentations were replete with antisemitic tropes like the claim that Zionism is a “multi-million dollar, Israeli state-funded propaganda machine.”

Registrants were surveyed about whether they feel supported by their administration “in teaching anti-Zionist narratives about Palestine.” Notably, the MTA, as a Professional Development Provider, furnished certificates of participation for the webinar, which can be used for teacher re-licensure.

Those views on Israel reflect ideologies “deeply embedded” in other MTA initiatives, according to a report by the American Jewish Committee New England. 

It noted the union’s recent launch of Revolutionizing Education, a journal the MTA states is “dedicated to advancing education policy and practice in Massachusetts,” to advocate “for transformative practices that dismantle power hierarchies” and “envision education as a tool for liberation.” 

It is yet another worrisome development in the union’s laser-focused mission to influence teachers.

Antisemitic and antizionist narratives embedded into curriculums

BECAUSE EDUCATION in America is consigned to “very local control,” ultimately, most classroom resources are designed and developed by teachers with the autonomy to introduce problematic material into the curriculum with little to no oversight, said David Smokler, a former public school teacher and administrator and now the executive director of the K-12 Fairness Center at StandWithUs. When teachers are stretched, they often turn to educational websites that are entirely unvetted.

“It’s a minefield out there in terms of resources,” even if teachers are acting in good faith, said Smokler. The market for such classroom resources is huge, often with little scrutiny over who is funding them.

What’s more, ethnic studies and its more radical relative, liberated ethnic studies, are penetrating teachers’ lessons and professional development in many US districts with scarce oversight of material. With themes of oppression, colonialism, and resistance, ethnic studies educators describe the discipline as “not just curriculum” but a “movement” for “action” to effect “social change.”

But oftentimes, blatantly antisemitic and anti-Zionist narratives are found within these studies, particularly in the liberated model, a link to which is listed among the MTA resources.

Such issues are multiplying throughout the US.“We’re seeing many of our teachers and schools indoctrinating students with materials designed specifically to tailor to left-leaning people so that a lot of the indoctrination can be done invisibly,” Smokler told me.

“It’s designed to attract people who care about social justice. But it’s not just about antisemitism. It’s about liberal Western values in general. Some of the same teachers who are teaching that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state say the same about America. There’s illiberal indoctrination going on now that is pretty shocking.”

A course correction is necessary to protect our children. Massachusetts lawmakers should give their education arm broader mandates to enact meaningful oversight paired with accountability. Ditto for other states grappling with such challenges. Parents, teachers, and taxpayers must regain trust that public education isn’t eroding into a mere platform for indoctrination.

How this legacy is cemented will ripple through future generations of kids as they launch from classrooms to leadership positions, with global consequences.

The writer is an award-winning reporter and the recipient of a journalism fellowship that supported her graduate education at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is a former writer for The Boston Globe, reported for the Associated Press and is published in the Wall Street Journal and the National Review.