WhatsappProgressive groups are channeling anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda into educational materials.
Across the country, teachers are gearing up for the fall semester. Watching my husband and daughter—both working public-school teachers—prepare for the new academic year, I can see firsthand the hours dedicated professionals spend hunting for quality resources. They trust union-backed educational portals to provide safe, vetted materials for their students.
Activist organizations are exploiting that trust. Bypassing local oversight, they are pushing biased, oppressor-versus-oppressed frameworks straight into the classroom. The planning phase of this campaign ended in mid-June, and the distribution phase is now operating nationwide.
From June 15 to June 18, the progressive activist group CODEPINK hosted a four-day summer workshop series titled “Challenging Zionism in Schools.” Organizers gathered educators to train them on injecting anti-Israel and anti-Western talking points into history and social-studies classes. Deeply entrenched activists, including a retired teacher who organizes for CODEPINK’s “Drop the ADL” campaign, handed teachers strategies to bring anti-Zionist political advocacy into K-12 classrooms under the guise of summer professional development.
To gain mainstream acceptance and dodge administrative red flags, these organizers put union-decorated leaders front and center. The workshops prominently featured a Region 3 leader from United Teachers Los Angeles and the National Education Association (UTLA/NEA) who holds major industry honors, including the 2023 NEA Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence. Highlighting educators who receive top honors from the nation’s largest teacher unions gives the organizers’ political agenda immediate institutional backing. Principals and peers are far less likely to question content delivered by an award-winning union leader.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) runs a massive digital clearinghouse called Share My Lesson, a repository of free teaching materials. Framed as a “Back-to-School Toolkit,” CODEPINK uploaded self-authored lesson plans directly to this AFT platform.
The materials focus on highly polarized lessons about international relations, with titles like “School Board & Students Debate the IHRA Definition” and “South Africa vs. Israel Genocide Case.” Activists use this platform as a direct pipeline into classrooms, entirely sidestepping local school boards. Unsuspecting teachers who download these toolkits are inadvertently handling coordinated propaganda.
The dynamic driving these lesson plans has a name: critical pedagogy. By calling this framework out, parents and educators have the terminology needed to spot it when it infiltrates local professional development.
The scope of this curriculum becomes apparent in its assignments, which push teachers to make social-media creation a core piece of the coursework. Students are instructed to create infographics and videos parroting activist framing. By turning these viewpoints into graded homework, the curriculum essentially morphs the student body into a free public-relations wing for activist organizations, flooding platforms with anti-Israel propaganda amplified by young voices.
Unsuspecting teachers who download these toolkits are inadvertently handling coordinated propaganda.
The North American Values Institute (NAVI) has been leading the charge in investigating this crisis. NAVI’s K-12 Extremism Tracker documented the June CODEPINK webinar, showing presenters explicitly telling teachers that broad state history standards act as an “open door” for anti-Israel lessons. Their reporting also reveals how some teachers can even receive professional development credit for attending these workshops.
Time is pressing. Activist groups are currently manipulating “America at 250” teaching materials rolling out this fall, linking the ongoing semiquincentennial observations to international conflicts to paint the United States and Israel as global villains.
We must also examine who is footing the bill. Investigations into CODEPINK reveal ties to foreign nations. Since 2017, roughly a quarter of its funding has come from entities linked to an American businessman who has been scrutinized for bankrolling pro-China propaganda. The influence pipeline draws a straight line from foreign interests through activist groups into the AFT, and finally, down to American students.
Recognizing America’s domestic vulnerabilities in this regard is especially urgent when considering The New York Times’s investigations into the glocal web of Chinese propaganda being funneled into American institutions.
How do we fix this? NAVI’s recent white paper, “When the Classroom Turns Hostile,” lays out a clear roadmap. Because the problem is a systemic capture of educational institutions, the solution requires a system-wide push for “institutional neutrality.” Schools must uphold their core educational purpose and stay completely out of political activism.
We cannot let these one-sided narratives go unchecked. Parents, teachers and community members must hold local school boards accountable, report ideological capture to monitors like NAVI’s K-12 Extremism Tracker and demand that public-school classrooms remain neutral spaces focused on academic excellence.
For those ready to push back, further context is essential. Advocates can explore how political orthodoxy is forced on prospective teachers through insights on educator conformity, read the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ report on the transition of antisemitism “From Playground to Classroom,” or look to the NH Journal’s reminder that “The Classroom Isn’t a Political Playground.”
Indeed, it is not, and it should not become one.
