Defying district leaders and disciplinary threats, about 100 educators took part Wednesday in a teach-in across Oakland Unified School District, bringing a curriculum focused on the Palestinian “liberation struggle” to students ages 4 to 18.
“This is just the beginning,” said Judy Greenspan, a long-term substitute teacher at Oakland’s United for Success Academy, a middle school on 35th Avenue. “No district has a right to try to muzzle a community or to stop our students from seeing a more rounded picture of what’s going on.”
The teach-in began with a video call that teachers who participated streamed from their classrooms across the district. One speaker shared her grandmother’s experience in 1948 when she was forced from her home alongside 75% of the country’s population following the British partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews. Another spoke about how, as a Jewish person, they rejected “Zionism’s attempt to say the only place and way Jewish people can be safe is through a militarized state.”
After about 45 minutes, educators began their own instruction, drawing on resources compiled by teachers over the last few days — from a coloring book called Handala’s Return that chronicled a cartoon character’s expulsion from Palestine in 1948, to worksheets on settler colonialism occupation and its impact on the Gaza Strip.
“A group of bullies called Zionists wanted our land so they stole it by force and hurt many people,” read the coloring book, which was suggested for students from transitional kindergarten to third grade. “Zionists have never let us go back to Palestine, even though we still have the key to our home.”
The teach-in enraged some Jewish groups, parents and District Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell, who earlier this week condemned the lessons assembled by members of the Oakland Education Association as “harmful and divisive.”
“These materials are incendiary. They just lead to a spike in antisemitism and exacerbate existing tensions in the community without doing anything to help the actual cause of peace,” said Oleg Ivanov, an assistant director at the American Jewish Committee of San Francisco. “The materials that they proposed to use are rife with selective historical facts and glaring omissions.”
Despite the pushback, dozens of educators went forward with their plans, stating that the district’s set of provided materials had links to pro-Israel lobbying groups with “biased goals or erasing Palestinian perspectives.”
The teach-in is the latest action across the Bay Area to call attention to the devastation in Gaza since the Israel-Hamas war, which was sparked when Hamas terrorists on Oct. 7 killed 1,400 people in Israel and took 240 people hostage. But public sympathy for Israel has waned in the months since amid relentless airstrikes in Gaza that have killed more than 15,000 people.
Both Oakland and Richmond have passed city council resolutions calling for a ceasefire, with Richmond also adding support of Palestinians. And on Tuesday, hundreds of people packed San Francisco City Hall as the San Francisco Board of Supervisors considered a ceasefire resolution.
Earlier this fall, the Oakland Education Association, the teachers union representing 3,000 educators in the district, released a statement sharply condemning “the 75-year long illegal military occupation of Palestine” and blamed the Israeli government for creating “an apartheid state” and espousing “genocidal rhetoric.” There was no mention of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Jacqueline Mates-Muchin, a rabbi at Oakland’s Temple Sinai, said that she’d heard of many parents wanting to pull their kids from Oakland Unified due to the teach-in and expressing feelings of fear, isolation and betrayal by a city they loved.
“The curriculum seems to have been given to students in a very matter-of-fact way, and some of the terminology being used — Zionist bullies and things like that — are the kinds of terms that could have long-lasting repercussions for our community,” said Mates-Muchin, who has children in the district. “It speaks to some of the deepest fears that I think Jews have about who we are in the diaspora and whether or not we’re really part of our communities.”
Despite that, one elementary school teacher, who asked to remain anonymous due to concern of retaliation from the district, said that she didn’t believe students would walk away from her lesson being antisemitic. Students studied the map of the Middle East, the teacher said, and talked about why the Palestinians’ land had been reduced over time. They read the cartoon about the 1948 expulsion from Israel and questioned why Israelis and Palestinians couldn’t live peacefully together.
“I think there needs to be trust in teachers. We know how to hold space for hard things without making kids feel bad,” said the educator, who teaches third grade. “We can’t not talk to kids about things because it feels scary to us.”
The teach-in didn’t reach every campus in the district. As classes let out early Wednesday across several Oakland schools, a number of students said they hadn’t heard anything about it. But that didn’t mean students were unaware of the politics of the Israel-Hamas war and the way it was affecting their community.
Nailah, a 10th-grader at Skyline High School who declined to provide her last name, said the phrase “Free Palestine!” is commonly heard among students, while her teachers often offer pro-Palestinian asides during class.
“I feel like the bare minimum you can do before you talk about it to a bunch of students that are impressionable is to do your research,” said Nailah, 15. “It got irritating because a lot of people don’t know the basic stuff about Hamas or what’s going on in Israel.”
Fiona, another 10th-grader, said the large number of Israeli students at Skyline makes the politics more fraught.
“I feel like a lot of students want to tell the administration when teachers talk about it, instead of telling the teachers themselves or wanting to discuss it in class,” Fiona said.
Greenspan, an educator who helped organize the teach-in, said the union had assured teachers that retaliation by the district “would not be tolerated” and that more activities, demonstrations and student-led activities were likely to follow Wednesday’s teach-in.
Despite that, school board president Mike Hutchinson told The Bay Area News Group on Monday that those who went through with the teach-in might face discipline from the board, including termination.
“I don’t want to draw this direct line of, ‘If you engage with this on Wednesday you’re losing (your) job,’ but it’s just like any other job. You can’t show up and do whatever you want and not face any consequences (for) that,” Hutchinson said.
