The war in Gaza turned school districts across California into battlegrounds over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Teachers and administrators in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Orange County seem largely aligned with the Palestinian side, believing that it has been underrepresented in schools for years.
Many Jewish parents, by contrast, believe that since the Hamas massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, their children have been indoctrinated, not educated. In response, those parents, with the help of outside groups, pushed for a state law that will further politicize classroom instruction, by limiting what teachers can say about Israel.
What is being lost in the tumult is the basic purpose of education: teaching students to think for themselves.
In Oakland, not long after the Oct. 7 attack, the teachers union put out a statement of solidarity with Palestinians, and some teachers organized a teach-in about the conflict that was clearly designed to reflect the pro-Palestinian narrative. One Oakland high school flew the Palestinian flag for weeks. In Berkeley, Calif., teachers encouraged students to participate in school walkouts to protest Israel.
“You’ve got teachers using their classroom walls, hallways, libraries, administrative offices — they’re all plastered with these political posters,” Marleen Sacks, an attorney suing the Oakland school district over antisemitic discrimination, told me.
In response, there have been formal complaints from parents, lawyers and outside groups, which have led to investigations, endless school board meetings, orders to take posters off walls, and teacher terminations. Then, in October, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law that sets up an office of civil rights to root out discrimination in the state’s public schools, and establishes an antisemitism prevention coordinator. The legislation, Assembly Bill 715, gives officials the power to investigate charges of antisemitism and order corrective action, like the banning of materials found to be antisemitic.
Andrea Prichett, a middle school U.S. history teacher in Berkeley, is the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit calling the law an infringement on free speech. “My fear is that teachers are going to avoid talking about Israel like the plague,” she told me.
Ms. Prichett found herself subject to a school district investigation two years ago after a lesson about the colonization of North America. Ms. Prichett, the investigation found, gave the class what she said were examples of present-day colonialism, including Puerto Rico, Russia in Ukraine and Israeli settlements. Parents complained Ms. Prichett was “teaching a one-sided narrative on Israel and Palestine that is biased against Israel.” The investigation also found she had a “Free Palestine” poster in class, but ultimately cleared her of the discrimination charge. (And Ms. Prichett says the students offered the example of Israeli settlements.)
A.B. 715 stipulates that a 2023 federal plan to combat antisemitism “shall be a basis to inform schools on how to identify, respond to, prevent, and counter antisemitism.” That plan embraces the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which posits, among other things, that “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards” to Israel are antisemitic acts.
But one of the most prominent voices warning against adopting speech codes is the lead drafter of the I.H.R.A. definition himself, Kenneth Stern, the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate.
“It’s being used as a way to stifle speech and stifle what teachers can teach,” he told me. Mr. Stern noted that when many supporters of A.B. 715 react to efforts by states like Florida or Texas to restrict what teachers say about gender and race, “they get it when there’s a problem there. But when it’s issues they care about, they want to give the same power to the state to go hunting for speech.”
Each side regards its narrative as dogma. Lori Lowenthal Marcus, the legal director for the Deborah Project, a group that opposes discrimination against Jews in schools, told me that it should be unlawful to teach that Israel is an apartheid state, because, she believes, it’s simply factually incorrect. Linda Khoury-Umili, a Palestinian-American mother in San Mateo County who is a plaintiff in the suit against A.B. 715, said the exact opposite: that it’s a simple, indisputable fact that Israel practices apartheid in the West Bank.
Such a proposition should be scrutinized in a classroom, with evidence brought to bear on both sides. Pro-Israel parents may be forgiven for suspecting that some teachers will present only one side of the argument. But under the new law, if anyone, even outside interest groups, complained that the apartheid comparison was antisemitic under the I.H.R.A. definition, the analogy could be banned from the classroom altogether.
More likely, though, teachers will simply avoid touching on sensitive arguments, not knowing what is and what is not regarded as discriminatory content. It’s hard to conceive of this, in effect, as anything other than censorship.
As threatening as the law is to free expression in schools, it is the failure of many California schools to foster critical thinking that led to it in the first place. As some teachers have come to regard themselves as not just educators but activists, their adversaries have turned to the blunt instrument of state authority to rein them in. Indoctrination by one side has led to speech codes from the other.
We’ve been heading toward this moment for some time. For at least the past decade, political expression has become more and more ubiquitous in public schools. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world to see a Black Lives Matter or the L.G.B.T.Q. Pride flag in a California classroom. In cities like Berkeley and Oakland, these are causes with near unanimous support among parents and teachers alike, so they rarely stir controversy. But eventually, an issue arises for which there is no consensus. By then it’s too late to suddenly invoke a principle of political neutrality. Schools effectively allowed political advocacy to become part of the curriculum when it was easy to ignore. Now it isn’t so easy. It’s time to resurrect the idea that education and activism are not just distinct, but incompatible.
Whatever you think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or any other controversy, teachers should not be telling students what they should believe. A “Free Gaza” sign has no more place in a school than a “Stand With Israel” poster would have. If a school wouldn’t allow a MAGA placard to be displayed in the library, then a Notorious R.B.G. poster should be just as verboten. It isn’t about which side is right, or whether all sides are getting equal representation. It’s just a matter of good teaching.
Mr. Stern, the antisemitism scholar who opposes speech codes, told me that when he teaches about antisemitism at Bard, he tells his students that the best way to get a bad grade is to parrot back to him what they think he believes. They will have a better chance at succeeding, he says, if they challenge his opinions.
“I don’t mind a professor saying Israel is practicing apartheid,” he said. “I mind if they’re bad teachers.”
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