A new report accuses the social studies curriculum of the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) as being anti-Semitic and anti-American due to the curriculum’s new focus on looking at history through oppressor and oppressed categories.
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) published a report Wednesday criticizing the SDP’s social studies curriculum for allegedly attacking Western values and institutions, specifically “capitalism, racism, and settler colonialism.” The report alleges the move towards “anti-racist, decolonizing curriculum” encouraged teachers to openly attack America, Zionism, and Israel in their classrooms according to Wednesday X post by CAMERA’s account.
The report alleges the SDP curriculum for World History gives little attention to prominent historical events such as the Ancient Greeks and Romans, Christian history, the Enlightenment, both World Wars, and the Holocaust. The curriculum instead focuses on “settler colonialism, displacement, genocide, how indigenous people view concepts like land and time, and the fight to preserve their language and culture,” according to the CAMERA report.
The curriculum dedicated an entire unit critiquing capitalism and relayed an overall message to students that capitalism as an economic system is unjust, according to the report. The unit fails to criticize communism in a similar way, only mentioning the ideology in relation to capitalism or as a reaction to European colonialism, the report alleges.
A unit on terrorism presents students with “What is terrorism?” scenarios to illustrate the difficulty in defining the word according to CAMERA. The scenarios include Israelis killing children in Palestinian refugee camps, Indian farmers threatening and attacking Monsanto and a 1998 US cruise missile destroying a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant while failing to mention prominent Islamic terror attacks, according to the report.
The same unit also provides students with 10 scenarios that guide the students to a predetermined conclusion that the US sponsors terrorism and 2 of the scenarios implicated Israel as doing the same, the report found.
The report highlights the SDP Superintendent Tony Watlington’s email statement related to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack which allegedly connects the attack to liberation movements.
“We know this conflict connects to imperialism and other oppressive systems that we encourage educators to name and address with students,” said Watlington in an email the report referenced. “We know that people are dying, fighting for their lives and engaging in liberation movements to be heard and treated with dignity—and that they’ve been doing so for decades. And we know that all children deserve to be safe.”
Many SDP teachers belong to an organization called the Racial Justice Organizing Committee (RJOC), which began as a subcommittee to a caucus inside the teacher’s union, the report alleged. The RJOC worked with the SDP to make Black Lives Matter Week of Action a district event and helped create the SDP DEI office according to the report.
The SDP’s anti-racist curriculum has its roots back to 2012, when Philadelphia Democrat Councilman Jim Kenney urged SDP to make “A People’s History of America” by Howard Zinn, a prominent leftist historian, required reading for SPD high school students according to CAMERA. Kenney later served as the city’s mayor from 2016 to 2024.
SDP never distributed the book to its high school students, SDP used Zinn’s ideological approach to history and posted resources on its website from the Zinn Education Project according to the report.
The SDP acknowledged receipt of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment, but did not provide further comment.
Participation Action Research Center for Organizing and Project48, two activist organizations who receive grant money from a group linked to leftist billionaire George Soros, created academic curricula steeped in leftist ideology that have found their ways into schools. The two activist groups orchestrate programs that blame “white nationalism” for anti-Semitism and ask attendees to consider the “bad habit” of whiteness.
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