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The Anti-Defamation League recently published an online toolkit on how to “decode and disrupt” problematic messages in the K-12 curriculum. It purports to teach parents how to identify and address biased curriculum in their kids’ schools. When I saw it, it felt like a gut punch.
The toolkit cites a familiar example: a 2017 Vox video titled “The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Brief, Simple History.” It’s the same biased video my friend’s daughter was required to watch in her seventh-grade class in 2018 — the one after which a classmate shouted, “F— Israel”. The video that local Jewish leadership, including the ADL, assured my friend had been handled by the district, only to reappear, two years later, in her daughter’s ninth grade social studies class. So much for it being “handled”.
Then October 7 happened and a deluge of distorted narratives flooded K-12 classrooms. As a result, antisemitism, cloaked as political rhetoric, took over the halls of our children’s schools. Parents quickly became alarmed. It was obvious — misinformation had been festering in schools for years prior, yet had been addressed quietly, episodically, and in isolation (or sometimes not at all), never systemically. And it was this inaction that laid the groundwork for the systemic Jew-hatred embedded in our K-12 systems today.
Parents nationwide quickly realized no one was coming to address the systemic problem and classrooms were becoming more hostile by the day. Many communal leaders didn’t have kids in the schools; the threat felt abstract. They didn’t understand hyper-local district dynamics, lacked relationships with school leadership, and were constrained from engaging in political advocacy. Worse, they weren’t ready to admit an ideological takeover was fueling the problem.
But, we as parents saw it instantly. We felt it viscerally. And so we dove in headfirst, and began swimming upstream against the ideological tide that told educators, administrators, and school board members that our kids weren’t entitled to the same “inclusion” as other marginalized students.
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By the time this toolkit appeared last month, we had already identified the problematic curriculum, developed a plan and got to work. We organized locally, influenced school board elections, formed nonprofits and built parent networks from scratch.
But we’re underfunded, isolated, and exhausted. Our supposed allies are sometimes pushing us aside or “pouring water back in the boats we’ve just baled water from.” The role of the established Jewish community is not to arrive late and tell parents what to do. Rather, it is to listen to the parents already doing the work with humility and use their resources to help scale what’s already working.
We don’t have exorbitant PR budgets, communications teams, paid social media strategists and in-house lawyers. We need money. We need infrastructure. We need connections. Connections to each other. Connections to the media to fight the fight in the court of public opinion. Connections to government officials at the federal, state and local levels. And connections to lawyers who can help us fight the fight in the court of law. And, when all is said and done, we need to know our leaders will have our backs when our enemies inevitably come after us.
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There are promising examples of parent empowerment, such as the Bay Area Center to Counter Antisemitism and the North American Values Institute (NAVI). At NAVI, we empower parents by listening to them and providing tools like our White Paper, When the Classroom Turns Hostile.
Parents did not choose to become advocates — we were forced into it when our children were targeted. This moment calls for humility, partnership and urgency. Parents are a crucial part of the solution that has been overlooked. What we need now is real and earnest partnership, real resources and real power.
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