In January, teachers were asked to submit instructional materials and communications—including some text messages from their personal phones–for several unnecessarily-intrusive Public Records Act (PRA) requests issued by legal organizations from outside the District. While records requests like these are legal and are often well-intended, the perceived threat of legal action hampers attempts already underway to have productive discussions and generate solutions at the local level. They also waste teachers’ time and the District’s money, and make teachers too afraid to have nuanced discussions about timely, controversial topics that are important for students to learn about.
The second request came after a controversy throughout the District surrounding a lesson about the Israel-Palestine conflict presented in an Ethnic Studies class last semester, which raised concerns from parents and community members about antisemitism. While numerous concerns raised are valid and understandable given the recent nationwide increase in antisemitism, many have taken aspects of the lesson out of context. Subsequent reactions—including sending threatening messages to one of the teachers who taught the presentation, parents yelling at students at board meetings, and posting threatening posters outside the teacher’s classroom—have caused more harm than the initial presentation. The far-reaching records requests are a prime example of these disproportionate reactions.
These organizations’ requests for teachers to submit materials on a topic that has caused hundreds of people to lose their jobs come across as a threat instead of a genuine attempt to gain more information. It’s difficult not to see these requests as threatening since both organizations have a history of filing lawsuits.
Both organizations are clearly motivated by a larger political goal of combatting the field of Ethnic Studies. The Deborah Project—the organization that asked all teachers to submit materials containing the words “Zionism, Zionists, Israel, Israelis, Palestine, and/or Palestinians”—has a track record of criticizing Ethnic Studies’ employment of Critical Race Theory. The Zachor Legal Institute—the organization that asked for Ethnic Studies materials and communications, including any text messages from their personal phones about Ethnic Studies—has a history of issuing lawsuits against Ethnic Studies. They also released a legal fact sheet in 2022 which stated that Israel has become “a prominent target of Marxist groups like Black Lives Matter” and that “if there are any settler colonialists in the land of Israel, that title would have to go to the Palestinian Arab population.”
Even people who were offended by the presentation should not want these groups representing them. Instead of helping address antisemitism, these organizations only escalate tensions over the already incredibly polarized issue.
Many have argued that there’s no harm in a records request if teachers have nothing to hide. However, if teachers truly did feel that they needed to hide the materials they were teaching, they would not be teaching it to a classroom full of high school students. Parents did not need a records request to find out about the Ethnic Studies lesson taught last semester. They would, however, need a records request to pick up on minute details that have little effect on students but could be used out of context in a lawsuit.
A recent New York Times article demonstrated how easy it was to take information from the slides out of context. The article referenced a slide containing an image of a puppet master without explaining that the image was in reference to dominant narratives more generally. It also omitted the slide that said, “Some people support Israel because it is a safe home for Jewish people after they were oppressed for many years.”
Getting a more accurate picture of the lesson doesn’t justify the materials included—an image of a puppet master, even if not intended to reference a racist stereotype of Jewish people, can still understandably be upsetting to students. However, it does allow people to address these harms in a more empathetic and productive way rather than accusing someone of blatant antisemitism.
There were definitely issues with the presentation. It presented an oversimplified view of the conflict that made it seem as if everyone must side either entirely with Palestinians or with Israelis and ignored the nuances of an incredibly complex issue. It also didn’t address the fact that many Jewish people and Israelis strongly oppose the actions of the Netenyahu administration. But these issues have been de-emphasized in favor of focusing on a stock image that serves as a similarly oversimplified symbol.
Discussions between parents and teachers aren’t always civil, but they at least offer a chance for both sides to hear each other out. When an organization from the other side of the country issues a records request, they aren’t in contact with teachers and therefore aren’t able to have these important discussions which are crucial for generating actual understanding and change.
Jewish parent Neil Rothstein said it was too early to see whether the requests would be productive, but said, “I think that our students are best served when the teachers and parents and students are all working together. And that doesn’t always mean we think the same thing or agree on an approach. But, I think it’s really important to assume the best of intentions. It’s really important because when you assume the best intentions, it enables people to work together more effectively on a solution. And that’s what we’re really all working towards.”
Outside organizations should come in to help represent the voices of communities who aren’t able to effectively advocate for themselves. In our district, the Jewish community is not one of these groups. There are already many parents and other community members who are very alert to issues of antisemitism and the district, site administrators, and teachers have been very willing to hear these parents out. In the last couple years, the Jewish Student Union has met with principal Karl Losekoot and representatives have spoken at staff meetings to address concerns around antisemitism.
In 2022, students and parents took issue with a prompt for the novel Night, asking students to analyze how Jewish people were forced to compromise their integrity in the concentration camps. Teachers had conversations with parents about it, changed the prompt, and some even had classwide discussions about how the prompt might have been misinterpreted in problematic ways. They were more than willing to address the issues with the prompt. It wasn’t necessary to make them stop teaching Night altogether out of fear that they would lose their jobs or end up in the New York Times.
Similarly, before teachers were asked to submit materials, local parents had already been working with administrators to address the lesson. Jewish parent Karen Orzechowksi, who was involved in these discussions, said, “A small group of parent volunteers in the district reached out to Principal Losekoot to explain the historical inaccuracies in the slide deck and to request that the lesson be retaught.”
Orzechowski said that she had been told that one of the teachers was planning on reteaching a revised lesson. Losekoot also sent out an email a few weeks after the lesson was initially presented asking teachers to present a balanced perspective, to be thoughtful about their presentations, and not to share any of their personal opinions regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict. He sent another email this past Monday detailing M-A’s policy for addressing antisemitic behavior on campus. At least one of the teachers who presented the lesson was not rehired for next year.
If teachers and administrators hadn’t been addressing the lesson already, getting outside organizations involved might have been justified, but they were clearly already working to try to correct any harm caused by the lesson and to avoid similar lessons in the future. Instead of helping teachers improve or create a lesson that more accurately depicts the conflict, the records requests discourage them from talking about it at all.
This omission of the topic altogether is much more harmful to students—especially high school students who are old enough to be able to think for themselves and disagree with the information that’s presented to them. Removing discussions of what is happening in Israel and in Palestine from classrooms would not prevent teenagers from encountering any sort of false narrative when almost every single one of them is on social media.
It is not worth the cost of one flawed lesson to prevent students from discussing incredibly complex topics in a classroom environment, which may be their only chance to actually engage in critical, thoughtful discussions instead of absorbing what a ten-second video tells them to think.
This doesn’t mean that teachers should just be able to teach whatever they want to, but there are other ways to address problematic lessons without making teachers afraid of being sued over an unintentional error or something that was misinterpreted. Teachers are already being held accountable for what they teach through discussions with parents, so their lessons offer sometimes flawed, but almost always much more balanced perspectives than platforms whose only incentive is to capture users’ attention—prioritizing entertainment value and eliciting an emotional response over providing factual information.
The records requests don’t just scare teachers away from teaching lessons about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but any controversial topics at all.
Rothstein said, “When I was in high school, the teachers who had the most long-lasting impact on me often went above and beyond what was written in a syllabus or what’s part of the curriculum. I think all of us—students, teachers, and parents—want what’s best for our students. I hope this request and the events over the last few months don’t stand in the way of that.”
Both groups have claimed that so much focus on Israel’s actions in the conflict is holding it to a double standard. Deborah Project Legal Director Lori Lowenthal Marcus said, “If someone is complaining about a genocide now in Gaza, but never complained about something like what Assad did in Syria to his own people, then that becomes antisemitism because that is targeting the Jewish state because it is the Jewish state; you’re full of crap if you say it’s anything else.”
But this simply isn’t true; while it is obviously important to learn about all of the horrific things that are happening in the world today, this doesn’t mean that the Israel-Palestine conflict shouldn’t be prioritized. Israel is a modern liberal democratic government similar to the United States, so learning about the conflict helps students better reflect on similar flaws in our own government, which has similarly initiated and funded the deaths of many innocent civilians, something that is very relevant to Ethnic Studies. Israel’s military is also funded by a large portion of the United States’ tax dollars, which makes its actions important for any voting member of our society.
In previous articles, both organizations have said that they would rather have Israel not be mentioned at all in Ethnic Studies classes than be portrayed as “the bad guy.” However, sometimes governments do awful things and they should be subject to criticism for the mass casualties they have caused. Any criticism of the actions of the state of Israel is not a criticism of its existence. Just as the United States should be subject to criticism for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Israeli government should be subject to criticism for its human rights abuses and the taking of civilian life in Palestine. It’s our responsibility to know about these harsh truths and bullying teachers out of confronting them through legal intimidation is not a noble cause to fight antisemitism, it is a means of censoring necessary education.
