From The ABCs To Jihad? Probe Blows Lid Off What Schools Are Teaching Your Kids

Reading, writing, arithmetic, and resistance? 

Students across the country have been taught to join the “resistance” against “settler colonialism” while being taught a sanitized view of Islamic jihad, a damning probe into major school districts revealed Wednesday. House Republicans released the findings of their investigation into multiple school districts after complaints of teachers pushing anti-Israel activism in the classroom. 

“Parents send their children to school to learn reading, writing, and math — not to be taught to hate Israel or embrace radical political causes. Yet that’s exactly the kind of material our investigation uncovered,” Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg (R-MI) told The Daily Wire. 

The report from the lawmakers focused on curriculum used at school districts in Philadelphia and Berkeley, where parents have complained about activist teachers. It found that the districts use materials that “promote ideology justifying violent resistance,” train students to be leftist activists, whitewash terrorism, and foment anti-Israel sentiment. 

Despite School District of Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington’s assurances to lawmakers that the district “does not indoctrinate students,” the report found a litany of politicized materials engrained in its social studies curriculum pushing a leftist view of the world. 

In a unit on “Islamic Conquests and Jihad,” students are assigned to read an article from an Islamic think tank called the Yaqeen Institute. In the district’s own words, the article argues that “jihad is fundamentally about striving for justice and self-defense rather than unprovoked aggression,” according to lawmakers.

World history teachers are told to help students “take a deep dive” into the work of Frantz Fanon, a leftist anti-colonial author and philosopher active in the 1950s. The district described Fanon’s work as showing that “decolonization is in its very nature a violent process,” the report found. 

The unit including Fanon teaches students that colonialism “has left a legacy of violence, inequality, and underdevelopment” and students are expected to know how colonialism impacts “contemporary struggles for liberation and justice.”

This anti-colonial perspective is applied to discussions of Western nations, including the United States and Israel. Students in a world history class are taught to create art that “embodies the concept of cultural resistance.” 

The district’s curriculum is filled with other ideological content, including materials from the Racial Justice Organization Committee. The Racial Justice Organization Committee describes itself as “a group of activists and advocates, working towards the abolition of white supremacy and racism in all of the ways it presents in our communities and schools.”

The committee found that Philadelphia students were pushed using materials from the Racial Justice Organization Committee to color code their identities into the categories of “dominant” and “oppressed.” The district labeled “dominant” identities as males, white people, and Christians while labeling black people, gay people, immigrants, and non-Christians as “oppressed” people. 

Another lesson using materials from the Racial Justice Organization Committee included students being shown a video called “The White Supremacy of Being Asked Where I’m From” and another video introducing kids to the use of “zi/zir/zim” and “xi/xir/xim” pronouns. 

The district later informed the committee that it did not intend for the units involving material from the Racial Justice Organization Committee to be used during the 2025-2026 school year. The committee said that Watlington told them he “was not aware” of the use of the group’s materials in classes and that the use did not constitute “an endorsement of the group.” 

Other groups that have partnered with the district include the Council on American-Islamic Relations Philadelphia, a radical pro-Muslim group. One representative from the group suggested that the district’s materials be “reviewed for bias by qualified Muslim educators,” according to lawmakers.  

Elsewhere in the social studies curriculum, students are pushed to “write letters supporting the teaching of critical race theory,” according to the committee. 

Additionally, materials obtained by the committee show that one unit involves asking high school seniors, “How will we use antiracism & intersectionality as lenses during our study of Social Science this year?” and “How can we create a brave space that embraces antiracism and affirms the intersectional identities of everyone in the classroom community?”

The district claimed it did not plan to teach this lesson plan. 

Watlington told lawmakers that the district planned to shift away from allowing district teachers to create social studies plans in favor of “national experts.” The district told investigators that its “social studies curriculum director is undergoing a termination proceeding,” according to the report. 

On the other side of the country, lawmakers found that Berkeley Unified School District in California pushed a politicized curriculum that fueled anti-Israel activism. Starting in fourth grade, students are pushed to define “covert resistance” and “overt resistance” while understanding “decolonizing historical narratives.”

The report found that students in the district’s 9th grade Arab American Studies class were taught that resistance is a form of “cultural wealth” and the curriculum included a poem urging them to “keep your eye on the colonizer’s maps, geography’s twisted strands, the many colors of struggle.”

The district’s Arab American Heritage Month resource guide recommends using a book called “P is for Palestine” which includes the line “I is for Intifada.” 

In messages reviewed by lawmakers, ethnic studies teachers told school employees that they were “not at liberty to share” information about the “Israel/Palestine” lesson plan being used in classrooms “directly with families.”

Lawmakers found that the district’s class on “Defining Democracy,” students are taught to critique “empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”

In the same class, teachers were dissuaded from using the term “Founding Fathers” over claims it was “harmful because it does not acknowledge the Indigenous communities who lived here before colonization.”

Outside of the classroom, lawmakers found ties between district employees and groups like the Middle East Children’s Alliance. For example, students at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley put on a bake sale and sold Palestinian bracelets to raise money for the organization. The committee additionally found that one teacher used school email to urge her colleagues to donate to the group. 

A third district being probed is Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia. The committee has not yet released its findings on that district’s materials, but a report earlier this year showed how its guidance for teachers surrounding 9/11 focused on “Islamophobia” and downplayed the violence of Islam. 

The guidance directed teachers not to “associate” the devastating 9/11 attacks “with Islam or Muslims” and were told to “intentionally include Muslim Americans among the heroes, helpers, and victims represented in your teaching about 9/11.”

Districts across the country have worked with radical groups to adopt ideological lesson plans and push activism in the classroom. Past reports revealed that groups like the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies and the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium have pointed educators to anti-American, pro-Palestinian, and anti-colonialist resources from a plethora of leftist organizations for use in the classroom.