Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min<\/p>\n
Some Philadelphia School District employees promote antisemitism, and the school system indoctrinates students with radical ideas as young as second grade, a Republican-led congressional committee concluded in a report released Wednesday and challenged by district officials.<\/p>\n
The House Education and Workforce Committee reached its determinations after poring through hundreds of pages of records, including social media belonging to individual teachers, and interviewing Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr. on Capitol Hill last month. <\/p>\n
\u201cParents send their children to school to learn reading, writing and math \u2014 not to be taught to hate Israel or embrace radical political causes,\u201d U.S. Rep. U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg (R., Mich.) said in a statement. \u201cYet that\u2019s exactly the kind of material our investigation uncovered.\u201d <\/p>\n
Monique Braxton, a district spokesperson, said the district cooperated extensively with the committee \u201cand objects to the blatantly partisan framing of the district, days before Election Day.\u201d The report, Braxton said Wednesday night, \u201cdistorts and mischaracterizes our record.<\/p>\n
\u00bb READ MORE: A House committee is investigating allegations of antisemitism in Philadelphia schools<\/a><\/p>\n Walberg ordered the investigation last fall<\/a> after receiving reports of harassment against Jewish students in Philadelphia, Berkeley Unified School District in California, and elsewhere. The committee has investigated claims against multiple districts since 2023, but Wednesday\u2019s report only dealt with Philadelphia, Berkeley and the National Education Association, a teacher\u2019s union. <\/p>\n Braxton said officials \u201ctake concerns about antisemitic harassment or discrimination very seriously, just as we do not condone or tolerate Islamophobia, racism, or discrimination against any ethnic, racial or religious group.\u201d<\/p>\n School board president Reginald Streater said in a statement the board \u201cdoes not agree with the findings in the committee\u2019s report.\u201d<\/p>\n Under Watlington, Streater said, the district has \u201ctaken significant steps to fight antisemitism and other forms of hate. We thank Dr. Watlington for his leadership and will continue to support his important work.\u201d<\/p>\n The school system in 2024 entered into a voluntary settlement with the U.S. Department of Education addressing claims of antisemitism<\/a>. It vowed better record keeping and training for staff and students on anti-discrimination policies.<\/p>\n Philadelphia is the nation\u2019s ninth largest school system, with about 200,000 students in traditional public and charter schools.<\/p>\n What did the investigation find?<\/p>\n The investigation found that \u201cdistrict curricula promote ideology justifying violent resistance and legitimize radical groups that incite antisemitism.\u201c<\/p>\n Congressional staff pointed to a Philadelphia world history curriculum unit focused on resistance movements where \u201cstudents are directed to \u2018honor\u2019 a resistance movement of their choice, with the Great March of Return \u2014 a Hamas campaign that featured deadly clashes \u2014 listed as one option.\u201d<\/p>\n The House committee also found that \u201cSDP curricula train students to be far-left activists as early as second grade,\u201d noting that second graders learn about environmental justice and \u201cthe impact of bias, injustice and privilege on a global scale.\u201d <\/p>\n Officials also cited a high school economics unit that presented the U.S. economy as having the most skewed distribution of wealth in the world, and a book deemed appropriate for third graders that introduced the pronouns \u201cey\/em\u201d and \u201cze\/zir.\u201d<\/p>\n What did Watlington tell Congress?<\/p>\n When asked by a committee staffer if he felt it was appropriate to \u201ccompare Zionists to white supremacist spectators cheering for public lynchings of Black people,\u201d Watlington said he did not. <\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t like it. I wouldn\u2019t use that language,\u201d Watlington said. \u201cI strongly disagree. As superintendent, it\u2019s not my role to make determinations about what people can or cannot say, offensive or otherwise. That would be someone else\u2019s determination to make based on whether or not it fits their First Amendment right to free speech.\u201d<\/p>\n Watlington said he believed the district\u2019s directives were very clear: \u201cteachers may not, shall not, and should not promote any political or personal perspectives in the classroom, and our job is to teach children how to think and not what to think.\u201d<\/p>\n Watlington, a former history teacher himself, said he believed the social studies curriculum does not indoctrinate Philadelphia students.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of bad stuff in human history,\u201d Watlington said. \u201cA lot of bad stuff in American history, in the history of Israel, in the history of Palestine, in the history of Europe, Asia, Africa, across the globe. And it\u2019s a matter of how we take all those complex, controversial issues \u2014 that have a place in the curriculum, all of them \u2014 and present it in a manner that\u2019s age appropriate\u201d and does not impart \u201cour own political or personal biases.\u201d<\/p>\n Changes to the social studies curriculum are coming<\/p>\n Watlington told the committee the district is in the process of standardizing its social studies curriculum and will no longer allow staff to write district social studies curricula.<\/p>\n The committee, in a statement issued Wednesday, suggested the changes were the result of public pressure.<\/p>\n But Watlington emphasized the social studies curriculum changes follow the standardization of English, math and science curricula. He also said he gave Michael Farrell, his new chief academic officer, the charge to review social studies curricula \u201ctop to bottom\u201d when Farrell started that job July 1.<\/p>\n Watlington also said he had personally ordered the district\u2019s human resources department to conduct a \u201clookback\u201d at some district staff\u2019s personal social media posts that may have violated policies around harassment and discrimination.<\/p>\n That includes posts from Hannah Gann, the district teacher who drew international scrutiny for pretending to be Black and Palestinian<\/a>. Gann, a vocal member of the group Philly Educators for Palestine, recently admitted to being white and Jewish. Gann\u2019s deception caused that group to disband, and led another group she was a member of, the Racial Justice Organizing Committee, to go on hiatus<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to article \u2022\u00a00:00 min Some Philadelphia School District employees promote antisemitism, and the school system indoctrinates students…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[127480,69,71,70],"class_list":["post-311545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-congressional-committee-education-workforce-antisemitism-report-philadelphia-schools","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}