In the News

The backlash against Palestine in education isn't just happening in universities. There have also been dozens of educators disciplined at primary and secondary schools across the United States for teaching about the Israeli attack on Gaza. “We’re seeing McCarthy-era levels of repression, not just at universities, but at the K–12 level,” Zinn Education Project co-director Deborah Menkart told Mondoweiss. “Historically we’ve seen that people in power understand the potential impact of young people thinking critically and looking through the lens of history.”

The Zinn Education Project, a website with downloadable lessons and articles about history topics, calls Jan. 6 “an attack on the United States Capitol by an armed white supremacist mob, determined to block the democratic process” and suggests teachers note examples of white mob violence against Black Americans in the Reconstruction era. Among the suggestions is a link to a lesson that guides students on how to design their own reparations bill “to help them reflect on what a path toward justice might look like today.”

While the Israel-Palestine conflict has always been a difficult subject for educators, the recent adoption of policies in some states that limit conversations on topics such as race has added to teachers’ fears about discussing such contested issues, said Deborah Menkart, co-director of the Zinn Education Project, a collaboration between progressive nonprofits Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.

Those concerns notwithstanding, her colleague Mimi Eisen, program manager at the Zinn Education Project, said teachers can seek to have substantive conversations that, for example, explain the differences between Judaism and Zionism, and between Palestinian people and groups like Hamas.

In this episode of the Into the Mix podcast, host and writer Ashley C. Ford examines ongoing book bans in Florida and governor Ron DeSantis’ attempts to silence marginalized voices in Florida classrooms. Ford talks to Andrea Phillips, an elementary school teacher, and Jesse Hagopian, Rethinking Schools editor and Zinn Education Project staff member. “This debate really isn’t about obscenity at all,” Hagopian said. “Education is such a powerful force and it can help young people understand themselves and that can help them transform society, or it can be used to create conformity and impose authority and train young people to believe that they should accept the current inequalities.”

Despite the vast majority of parents and members of the public supporting climate change education, the scrutiny has had a chilling effect on some teachers’ and schools’ willingness to address it.

It’s become “a kind of curricular hot potato,” said Bill Bigelow, a former social studies teacher and co-director at the Zinn Education Project who has helped edit and write climate education lessons. Adequate climate education, he said, necessitates coverage in not just science classes but subjects ranging from history to language arts. Yet this interdisciplinary relevance makes it especially dicey. “The standards that states and school districts and teachers adhere to lag behind the consciousness of the crisis,” he said.

“The corporate textbooks that the kids get largely ignore the crisis. They either fail to educate the kids about the climate catastrophe, or they relegate it to the last pages of the book,” says Jesse Hagopian, who has taught in Seattle public schools for over 20 years, and also works for the Zinn Education Project, which recently published a Climate Crisis Timeline showing the very strong links between slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, and climate change.

Conservatives have made headway on censorship; since the fall of 2021, PEN America has tracked more than 4,000 efforts to ban books — including several by Zinn — dealing with race, gender identity, and sexuality from libraries and schoolrooms. . . . But progressives are also mobilizing and groups including the Zinn Education Project, Red, Wine and Blue, PEN America, the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Library Association, and Honest Education Action and Leadership Together/Race Forward, are pushing back and organizing teach-ins, teacher trainings, and study groups in support of academic freedom and public education.

Make no mistake, our ancestors did fight back, from Day One, and to even hint that they didn’t plays into white supremacist-based beliefs and attitudes. Seriously, have these T-shirt makers never heard of Nat Turner? Granted, even before Florida’s most recent “anti-woke” efforts, Black history hasn’t exactly been taught well in the nation’s public schools. But at the very least, most of us learned about the 1831 slave rebellion in Southampton, Virginia, that resulted in as many as 65 white people being killed. [The] Zinn Education Project breaks down what was happening [in another example of Black resistance.]