How Activists Use Curriculum And ‘Training’ To Embed Leftist Ideology In K–12 Schools

Activist organizations are developing curricula instructing teachers and students to be skeptical toward claims of antisemitism and sympathetic to pro-Palestinian causes, documents show.

Two pro-Palestinian organizations, Participatory Action Research Center for Organizing (PARCEO) and Project48, orchestrate programs and disseminate materials that blame “white nationalism” for antisemitism and ask participants to consider the “bad habit” of whiteness, documents obtained by Defending Education (DE) and shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation show. The activist programs are already finding their way into schools.

PARCEO “is a research, resource and education center” that partners with groups and institutions focusing on “educational justice; racial justice; workers’ rights; gender justice; challenging Islamophobia; immigrant rights; health and food justice, and more.” Project48 “was created to center Palestinians in the telling of their own history” and works to provide “educational material, eyewitness testimonies, images, videos and artifacts” to teach about “the ongoing Palestinian struggle against colonial erasure and the return of refugees to their ancestral lands.”

Bothorganizations have benefited from large, direct grants from Soros-linked Open Society foundations.

The two groups joined forces to create the Palestinian Nakba Curriculum, using the Arabic word for “Catastrophe” to refer to “the creation of Israel in 1948” and the following territorial struggle. The curriculum is meant to be used for “individual classes, for semester-long learning, as theme-specific modules, for presentations, and for workshops and webinars” and touches on topics such as “Settler Colonialism, Zionism, Refugees and Right of Return,” according to the Project48 website.

One session of the curriculum, titled “Nakba in Practice,” directs participants to “consider the history and material consequences of the Nakba, including what’s been hidden and erased, what’s been built over, stolen, destroyed, and what remains,” materials obtained by DE show. The section also covers “indigeneity” and “settler colonialism” in relation to Palestine.

Another section decrying Zionism purports to examine the “pervasive Zionist narrative” behind the Nakba, with slideshows on “the enactment and reality of Zionist colonization in Palestine” and Israel’s “intentionality behind the process.”

“The session also addresses the pervasive Zionist narrative that continues to ‘justify’ the Nakba, despite clear and compelling facts, and experiences of Palestinians,” the description explains.

The final session covers the “ongoing social, political, economic, and cultural forms of resistance in Palestine,” teaching students about “the impact, visions, and connections among movements for justice in Palestine and globally.”

PARCEO has also created the Curriculum on Antisemitism from a Framework of Collective Liberation, which blames antisemitism on “white nationalism” and compares it to “other forms of racism and injustice.”

These curricula are already being put to use in the classroom.

In 2023, the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCORE), a “group of current and former public school educators and their allies committed to fighting for social justice in our school system and society at large,” hosted an event exploring these two programs. More recently, an Oakland Unified School District teacher and member of Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) helped organize a PARCEO event in October 2025 and invited school board members to participate, emails obtained by DE show. The event was meant to explain “the harmful disuse of ‘antisemitism’ to silence discussion of what is happening in Gaza and throughout Palestine.”

Other materials by PARCEO created in conjunction with JVP portray “white nationalist antisemitic violence” as the primary driver of anti-Jewish hate, warning readers that “white supremacists and white nationalists take advantage” of the anti-Zionism movement “to sow confusion and promote antisemitism, Islamophobia, and racism.”

“hite nationalist violence has been on the rise in the U.S., fueled by anti-immigrant and racist manifestos, sentiments, and conspiracy theories, such as the great replacement theory,” an explainer from PARCEO and JVP reads. “Jews are among the targets of white nationalist violence along with Black people, immigrants, Muslims, and trans and queer people, among others. Our safety is bound together with the safety of all people, and none of us is free if we aren’t all free.”

The groups claim opposition to Zionism is no different from criticizing the “settler colonialism, imperialism and white supremacy at the foundation of the United States.”

“Positionality” curriculum created by PARCEO and uncovered by DE seeks to help participants understand their “own identity in relation to race, class, power, gender, privilege, role and position.” Participants are asked to “Consider an experience … where you were conscious of your race, class, gender, migration status, sexual identity, or any other part of your identity(ies)” and encouraged to discuss how it made them feel.

“This is important for creating an inclusive environment,” the organization insists. “If we don’t reflect on our own identity and how we enter and influence a space, we can unknowingly perpetuate inequality and oppressive power structures.”

Some of the additional resources recommended in the curriculum include a “Phenomenology of Whiteness” paper, which “considers how whiteness functions as a habit, even a bad habit,” and a “White Awareness Handbook For Anti-Racism Training.”

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