House Republicans released the findings of a months-long investigation Wednesday into how two of the country’s most visible school districts teach the Middle East, concluding that Philadelphia and Berkeley classrooms have been stocked with material that frames jihad as a pursuit of justice, casts decolonization as inherently violent, and steers students toward activism rather than analysis.
The report from the House Education and Workforce Committee, chaired by Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI), follows complaints from parents that teachers were bringing anti-Israel politics into the classroom, according to The Daily Wire, which first reported the findings.
“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,” Walberg told The Daily Wire.
Philadelphia: Jihad, Fanon, and Identity Charts
The School District of Philadelphia came under scrutiny after Superintendent Tony Watlington assured lawmakers the district “does not indoctrinate students.” Investigators said the district’s own social studies materials told a different story.
In a unit titled “Islamic Conquests and Jihad,” students were assigned an article from the Yaqeen Institute, an Islamic research organization. As the district itself summarized the reading, it argues that “jihad is fundamentally about striving for justice and self-defense rather than unprovoked aggression,” the report states.
World history teachers were also directed to have students “take a deep dive” into Frantz Fanon, the anti-colonial philosopher whose work the district described as showing that “decolonization is in its very nature a violent process.” Lessons built around Fanon taught that colonialism “has left a legacy of violence, inequality, and underdevelopment,” and students were expected to understand how it shapes “contemporary struggles for liberation and justice” — a framework the curriculum applied to Western nations including the United States and Israel. In one assignment, students were asked to create art that “embodies the concept of cultural resistance.”
Materials from the Racial Justice Organization Committee, a group that describes its mission as working toward “the abolition of white supremacy and racism,” had students sort identities into “dominant” and “oppressed” categories. According to the committee’s findings, the district’s chart listed males, white people, and Christians as dominant, while Black people, gay people, immigrants, and non-Christians were labeled oppressed.
Other lessons tied to the group showed students a video titled “The White Supremacy of Being Asked Where I’m From” and another introducing neopronouns such as “zi/zir/zim” and “xi/xir/xim.” The district later told investigators it did not intend for the Racial Justice Organization Committee units to be used in the 2025-2026 school year. Watlington said he was not aware the group’s materials had been used in classes and that their presence did not amount to an endorsement, according to the report.
The district also partnered with the Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whose representative suggested materials be “reviewed for bias by qualified Muslim educators.” Elsewhere in the social studies curriculum, students were prompted to “write letters supporting the teaching of critical race theory,” and a high school senior unit asked, “How will we use antiracism & intersectionality as lenses during our study of Social Science this year?” The district said it did not plan to teach that lesson.
Watlington told lawmakers the district would move away from letting individual teachers write social studies plans, handing the job to “national experts.” The district also said its social studies curriculum director is “undergoing a termination proceeding.”
Berkeley: ‘Covert Resistance’ and a Book With ‘I Is for Intifada’
On the West Coast, investigators found that Berkeley Unified School District in California built a curriculum that, beginning in fourth grade, asked students to define “covert resistance” and “overt resistance” and to understand “decolonizing historical narratives.”
A ninth-grade Arab American Studies class taught that resistance is a form of “cultural wealth,” and the curriculum included a poem urging students 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 the children’s book “P is for Palestine,” which contains the line “I is for Intifada.”
In messages reviewed by lawmakers, ethnic studies teachers told school employees they were “not at liberty to share” details of the Israel/Palestine lesson plan “directly with families.”
A class called “Defining Democracy” had students 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.” Teachers in that course were discouraged from using the term “Founding Fathers” on the grounds that it is “harmful because it does not acknowledge the Indigenous communities who lived here before colonization.”
Investigators also flagged ties between district employees and outside groups, including the Middle East Children’s Alliance. Students at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School held a bake sale and sold Palestinian bracelets to benefit the organization, and one teacher used school email to urge colleagues to donate, according to the report.
A Third District Still Pending
Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia is also part of the probe, though the committee has not released findings on its materials. A report earlier this year found that the district’s 9/11 guidance for teachers centered on “Islamophobia” and directed educators not to “associate” the attacks “with Islam or Muslims,” while instructing them to “intentionally include Muslim Americans among the heroes, helpers, and victims represented in your teaching about 9/11.”
The committee framed the two completed reports as evidence of a broader pattern, pointing to prior findings that organizations such as the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies and the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium have steered educators toward anti-American, pro-Palestinian, and anti-colonial resources.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/from-the-abcs-to-jihad-probe-blows-lid-off-what-schools-are-teaching-your-kids