Philadelphia parents noticed troubling signs in their children’s social studies curriculum and asked to see all the materials. They couldn’t get them.
Now those materials have been brought to light in a congressional investigation. A new majority staff report from the House Education and Workforce Committee documents how a small group of school personnel turned Philadelphia’s social studies curriculum into a political platform for extremist causes.
When those parents approached my organization, the North American Values Institute (NAVI), asking for help, we tried to find out what the district was teaching but we also hit a wall. Eventually, a teacher shared the curriculum with us with considerable trepidation. She asked that we protect her anonymity.
That alone should give us pause: A teacher feared sharing public school instructional materials with people seeking to understand what children were learning.
Parents should never have needed an insider, an advocacy organization and congressional investigators to get this kind of access into what their children were learning. But because some school officials know that what they brought into the classroom would be considered out of bounds by many parents, they did everything they can to hide it.
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According to the congressional report, a world history assignment asked students to honor a resistance movement. Among the options was the Great March of Return, a campaign of demonstrations along the Gaza-Israel border that the terrorist organization Hamas supported and that engaged in violent confrontation. Another exercise asked students to identify the United States and Israel as terrorist states.
Students should study various political movements, including those that use violence. They should examine competing perspectives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and hear multiple views about American foreign policy. But asking students to “honor” a particular movement crosses the line from studying it to celebrating it and, in this case, encouraging students to identify with a violent terrorist organization.
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Philadelphia superintendent Tony Watlington maintained that the curriculum did not indoctrinate students. Yet he told investigators he was unaware that it included materials from the Racial Justice Organizing Committee, a highly ideological group led by district employees.
The district told investigators it would stop having district teachers and administrators write social studies curricula and would standardize instruction with help from national experts. The school district also said that it placed its social studies curriculum director, Ismael Jimenez, who celebrated the Oct. 7 massacres, in termination proceedings.
This is an important first step. But replacing personnel with qualified experts will accomplish little in the long run if the curriculum remains shielded from public view.
Without access, curriculum disputes become contests of credibility. Administrators assure parents that lessons are balanced. Critics share an alarming passage from a single assignment that a child brought home from school. Officials say such claims have been taken out of context.
Schools could avoid such disputes if they let parents read the assignment, the accompanying sources and the teacher’s instructions. An institution confident in its educational judgment should be able to explain its choices with the classroom materials in full view.
School districts should publish curriculum guides, reading lists, assignments and supplementary resources on searchable websites. They should identify the outside organizations providing content and the officials responsible for approving it. When materials change, the public should be able to see what changed.
The same standard should apply to professional development. Some teacher training instructs teachers to use controversial subjects to recruit students to a cause. Families deserve to know what their schools are encouraging teachers to teach their children.
Most of these materials already exist electronically. Districts can make them accessible without requiring schools to produce elaborate new reports.
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Access will, of course, produce disagreements, which is a feature of public accountability. School boards can hear objections, weigh the evidence and defend sound instructional choices. Publishing a school system’s budget does not give every taxpayer veto power over spending and neither should publishing a curriculum give every parent a say over teaching. It does, however, make informed oversight possible.
Philadelphia’s experience shows the cost of leaving families dependent on assurances they cannot verify. Congress can only investigate a few districts. Parents and school boards need the means to scrutinize their own schools every day.
A teacher should not have to take a personal risk to provide it, and parents should not have to enlist Congress to secure it.
