When California teacher Laura Pinho used a Zoom educators’ webinar to publicly proclaim that she’d married a Gazan man to give him US citizenship, she set off a national uproar.
The New York Post reported on the incident — first caught by the North American Values Institute — and Pinho is now under federal investigation for potential marriage fraud.
But Pinho’s nuptials weren’t the most scandalous part of the educators’ four-part confab.
It’s the official program of the series that should really alarm parents.
Pinho was one participant in a webinar called “Challenging Zionism in Schools,” run by the far-left CodePink.
The presentation was filled with teachers, union officials and education activists — none of whom expressed shock about what Pinho described, or concern that she’d crossed an ethical line.
Instead, they spent hours discussing how educators could bring anti-Israel activism into public school classrooms — with the way paved by vaguely worded state education standards and Social-Emotional Learning requirements.
The series featured speakers from the California Teachers Association, United Teachers Los Angeles and the Massachusetts Teachers Association, as well as Adam Sanchez of Rethinking Schools, an education nonprofit that frequently partners with the nation’s largest teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.
The advice they offered was remarkably candid about the extreme-left activism that’s drenching America’s classrooms.
Pinho explained how she uses school dance classes to teach children about Palestinian “resistance.”
She boasted about how her Students for Justice in Palestine club took over a school assembly, and shared footage of pro-Gaza demonstrations on school grounds.
She even explained why left-wing teachers are so eager to encourage and guide kids’ activism: because they have greater free-speech rights at school than teachers do, and therefore more ability to agitate.
Former Massachusetts Teachers Association president Merrie Najimy, a co-founder of NEA Educators for Palestine, explained that teachers need not confine the issue to history class — thanks to state-mandated Social-Emotional Learning standards.
SEL has been presented in non-threatening terms as a means of training children to control their emotions and make good personal decisions.
But Najimy argued that SEL requirements offer endless opportunities to teach about Palestine through concepts like resilience and empathy — while other state standards make it possible to weave the Gaza conflict into subjects as disparate as math and science.
Marcy Winograd, a CodePink leader who also heads the California Teachers Association’s pro-Palestine caucus, described California’s history standards as an “open door” for teaching about Palestine, through lesson plans that are freely available on the AFT’s Share My Lesson platform.
Winograd is absolutely right: The door has been left wide open.
For years, states have replaced clear, content-based academic standards with broader frameworks emphasizing culturally responsive teaching, inquiry-based learning and SEL.
Whatever the original intent behind those initiatives, they have given activist teachers enormous discretion to substitute ideology for academics — confident that they can justify almost any lesson as meeting a vaguely worded educational objective.
By the time parents discover what’s happening inside their child’s school, the lesson has already been taught, the assembly has already been held, the club has already met and the march has already taken place.
Parents are often told their concerns are exaggerated and that teachers are simply encouraging students to think critically or exposing them to different perspectives.
The educators participating in this webinar weren’t pondering whether political activism belongs in public schools; they were strategizing about how to inject it into their classrooms, while remaining protected by district policies, state standards and union support.
The conversation wasn’t hidden or coded, but remarkably matter-of-fact: Everyone involved seemed to understand that activism is now simply part of the job.
If states are serious about restoring public confidence in public education, they should begin by tightening academic standards so that they measure knowledge rather than ideology.
They must draw bright lines around political advocacy in classrooms and school-sponsored activities, and they must ensure that teachers who cross those lines face meaningful professional consequences — not just get quietly moved to another school or district.
Parents have every right to ask whether their children are being educated at school — or recruited into activism.
Policymakers have an obligation to ensure the right answer.
Josh Weiner is chief advocacy officer at the North American Values Institute.
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