‘Systemic ideological capture’ of K-12 schools, report says

Rising Jew-hatred and extremism in K-12 schools in the United States is the result of a “systemic ideological capture” that has made classrooms hostile to Jews, Israel and Western values, according to a North American Values Institute white paper.

The report, released on Monday, suggests that activist ideologies are rooted in a worldview that sees oppressors and oppressed.

“The threat is accelerating,” it states. “A loosely coordinated anti-American and anti-Western ‘red-green alliance’ of radical progressive and Islamist activists is rapidly expanding its influence through aggressive political operations that influence local elections, school boards and district policy.”

Josh Weiner, chief strategy officer at the institute, told JNS that the problem is institutional.

“There’s an operating system that’s put in place throughout many aspects of K-12 institutions that really drives this extremism, which leads to antisemitism,” he said.

Academic theories—including those rooted in Marxism and Arab nationalism—see Jews as oppressors and treat Western civilization and American civic values as inherently illegitimate.

“Not only does it frame Jews and Israel as oppressors, but they are the canary in the coal mine for framing all Western civilization, America and the values that underwrite those civilizations as oppressors,” Weiner told JNS.

The white paper states that antisemitic ideas enter classrooms via schools of education that train teachers to see themselves as activists, accreditation systems that reinforce ideological requirements and teacher unions.

The National Education Association “promoted resources that removed Israel from maps, amplified groups with extremist ties and circulated narratives that defended the Oct. 7 attacks,” according to the report.

“We need to be playing the same game that the most extreme organizations of the unions are,” Weiner told JNS.

“They don’t have to create a curriculum,” he said. “They actually have organizations that are foreign-funded that come in with a whole bunch of resources that they can use, and then they just have to organize.”

“There’s foreign actors that look to influence these people to create circumstances where they get more power throughout the institutions,” he said. “I’m specifically talking about China, Qatar and other Islamist actors.”

Qatar Foundation International and China’s Confucius Institutes are examples of foreign actors that have funded curricula, teacher training and travel programs that embed anti-American and anti-Israel narratives in U.S. schools, according to the report.

Ethnic studies programs are also rooted in an anti-Western political movement, it says.

“There are 27 states and Washington, D.C., that include ethnic studies concepts in their social studies standards,” it states.

“It’s not just ethnic studies,” Weiner told JNS. “It’s jumped the shark to other parts of the education space. We even have an example in Montgomery County, Md., where they just straight out say, ‘We teach white supremacy culture framework,’ which is to say that the constructs that made Western society good—timeliness, agendas, objectivity—those are white supremacist values.”

“Many in the Jewish world understandably see today’s crisis primarily as rising antisemitism, rather than growing ideological capture,” the report states. “That view has driven much of the Jewish community’s response to the problem.”

“Major investments of funding and professional influence have been directed toward combating the symptoms of antisemitism in schools and public life,” it says.

Investments in Holocaust education, while well-intentioned, are insufficient, per the report.

“I don’t want to say that Jewish education, Holocaust education, is a mistake, but we’ve over-indexed on it,” Weiner told JNS. “Resting our laurels on ‘we got the education in place’ is just not going to work anymore.”

The report calls for reforming teacher accreditation, challenging politicized union activity, increasing oversight, enforcing curricula transparency and curbing foreign influence.

“Without confronting the political drivers, even the strongest responses to antisemitism will fall short,” it says.

“We don’t need our classrooms to be political,” Weiner told JNS. “We want our kids to come to their political point of views by reason, by knowledge, by understanding and by getting there themselves, by discussing, by having open discourse. That’s an American value.”

Weiner told JNS that parents should “log into their student portals and look and see what is going on there.”

“I have seen specific examples of those student portals going to highly politicized websites, literally PAC websites, that are promoting specific politicized views,” he said.

“Are they saying the Pledge of Allegiance in class? Is everybody standing?” he said. “Those are little symptoms and indications that some larger things might be going on.”

© JNS