Teachers Union Criticized for Letting Radical Groups Shape Curriculum

By: Robert Schmad | Washington Examiner

Teaching resources authored by Hamas sympathizers, praise for violent left-wing activists, and activities where students roleplay as “queer liberation” activists fighting against the “Religious Right” represent just a small sample of the material produced by the Zinn Education Project and its parent organization, Rethinking Schools. The nearly three-million-strong National Education Association has gone to great lengths to endorse and embed such materials in the public education system through a series of partnerships with the duo of left-wing organizations. 

The NEA, the nation’s largest teachers union, has granted the Zinn Education Project and Rethinking Schools prime space and opportunities to present at its conferences, partnered with them to design curriculums, united with the organizations to hold national teaching events, praised and promoted lessons developed by the groups in press releases, cited them in multiple teachers handbooks, and facilitated the dissemination of lesson plans they developed.

Materials published by Rethinking Schools and the Zinn Education Project are replete with praise of violent organizations, riots, and other illegal activity oriented toward left-wing political goals.

One classroom roleplay activity developed by the Zinn Education Project, for example, intends to push back against assertions that the Black Panther Party was a violent organization by tasking students with pretending to be various individuals linked to the party — including some who were implicated in violent attacks on law enforcement. Among these were communist activist Angela Davis, who purchased firearms used by a fellow activist to murder a judge; Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who organized an armed ambush of Oakland police officers and fled to Cuba to avoid prosecution on attempted murder charges; and Assata Shakur, a left-wing activist who was convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper in 1977.

The descriptions of these individuals in the classroom materials often downplay or even justify their violent actions. In the case of Shakur, for instance, the lesson described her trial as a “legal lynching” and stated that her jury could not have been impartial because it was made up of white people. Davis, meanwhile, is described as a “freedom fighter against racism, sexism, homophobia, and capitalism,” and Cleaver, who ran for president in 1968, as an “anti-war, anti-racist alternative to the Democratic Party.”

Rethinking Schools’ text justifies much of the Black Panther Party’s mission, despite its members’ open calls for violent revolution against the United States and their many armed, and occasionally deadly, confrontations with law enforcement and rival activists. 

The NEA has published a number of press releases and blog posts praising or promoting the Zinn Education Project’s classroom materials, stating that the organization “promotes and supports teaching history accurately.”

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