Parents shouldnt need the help of Congress to see their childrens school curriculum

Philadelphia parents noticed troubling signs in their childrens social studies curriculum and asked to see all the materials. They couldnt get them.

Now those materials have been brought to light in a congressional investigation. A new majority staff report from the House Education and Workforce Committee documents how a small group of school personnel turned Philadelphias social studies curriculum into a political platform for extremist causes.

When those parents approached my organization, the North American Values Institute (NAVI), asking for help, we tried to find out what the district was teaching but we also hit a wall. Eventually, a teacher shared the curriculum with us with considerable trepidation. She asked that we protect her anonymity.

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That alone should give us pause: A teacher feared sharing public school instructional materials with people seeking to understand what children were learning.

Parents should never have needed an insider, an advocacy organization and congressional investigators to get this kind of access into what their children were learning. But because some school officials know that what they brought into the classroom would be considered out of bounds by many parents, they did everything they can to hide it.

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According to the congressional report, a world history assignment asked students to honor a resistance movement. Among the options was the Great March of Return, a campaign of demonstrations along the Gaza-Israel border that the terrorist organization Hamas supported and that engaged in violent confrontation. Another exercise asked students to identify the United States and Israel as terrorist states.

Students should study various political movements, including those that use violence. They should examine competing perspectives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and hear multiple views about American foreign policy. But asking students to "honor" a particular movement crosses the line from studying it to celebrating it and, in this case, encouraging students to identify with a violent terrorist organization.

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Philadelphia superintendent Tony Watlington maintained that the curriculum did not indoctrinate students. Yet he told investigators he was unaware that it included materials from the Racial Justice Organizing Committee, a highly ideological group led by district employees.

The district told investigators it would stop having district teachers and administrators write social studies curricula and would standardize instruction with help from national experts. The school district also said that it placed its social studies curriculum director, Ismael Jimenez, who celebrated the Oct.