Ted and Nancy Sizer, giants in educational thought and practice, famously wrote The Students Are Watching: Schools and the Moral Contract, which inextricably links what happens in our classrooms with what happens in our society. With a 2024 lens, the most compelling chapter is “Grappling,” which lays out the core educational value of wrestling with complex intellectual and moral dilemmas.
What would the Sizers say if they could hear the reductionist way schools have handled unfolding events in the Middle East? The Sizers, like educators acting on the best practices of teaching and learning, would question even the definition of it as an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Anyone who studied with them can imagine them asking: “Is that really the best way to define it? What about Iran? Other world powers? Is it actually a proxy war? Is it a global conflict or an intensely local, personal one? When did this conflict really begin, and what are the forces that fueled it?”
Yet read the headlines out of K-12 schools, and questions of this nature are absent—or worse, condemned. Increasingly, informing (or misinforming) and coercing have replaced grappling and wrestling, at least insofar as the world’s only Jewish state is concerned.
We saw the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announce a Title VI investigation of the Oakland Unified School District in January following the exodus of Jewish families as lesson plans on Gaza asked elementary-school students to “draw Zionist bullies” and other lectures that villainized Jews. The United Teachers Union of Los Angeles discussed at their August leadership conference how to teach students what and how to think about “Zionists” and how teachers can navigate around rules to send students to attend pro-Palestinian rallies. A lawsuit was filed in November on behalf of several Jewish students against Sequoia Unified High School District for alleged antisemitism on high school campuses after, among other things, the ethnic studies curriculum depicted Jews as controlling puppeteers, and students were asked to extrapolate on the ways Israel’s existence is illegal.
What happened to everything educational researchers, the Sizers amongst them, have proven over decades to be best practices in education? What happened to Piaget’s constructivist learning theory that states “children actively build understanding by exploring their environment as ‘little scientists,’ rather than passively absorbing information.” What happened to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “the danger of a single story?” To the value of dissecting multiple narratives? What about elevating divergent voices like those of educators Pedro Noguera and Rick Hess’s A Search for Common Ground: Conversations About the Toughest Questions in K–12 Education? Where, in our classrooms, can you still find respectful debate on substantial issues of principle? When did education become about the repetition of the teacher’s belief, the sorting of everything into binaries of good/evil, oppressor/oppressed and victim/aggressor? How have we allowed our classrooms to be co-opted as single-sided political platforms with a hyper-focus on “the evil of Zionism?”
The chasmic distance between Sizer, Piaget, Noguera and our current educational context was revealed this past weekend at the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) People of Color Conference (PoCC), attended by several Jewish students and faculty from the Milken Community School in Los Angeles. The keynote speaker spewed tropes of Jew-hate and normalized antisemitism in its most pernicious form. When this speaker offered her political, biased, factually inaccurate critique of Zionism, many in the room of roughly 7,000 educators from the nation’s most elite, renowned schools erupted in applause.
When the closing speaker joined in the demonization of Zionists, those same teachers and leaders in attendance gave her a standing ovation. (Except, of course, the Jewish attendees who, in the words of a student, “felt so targeted, so unsafe that we tucked our Magen Davids in our shirts and walked out as those around us glared and whispered.”)
It wasn’t only unchecked speakers; antisemitic tropes were woven into the fabric of small-group settings and individual interactions. When Jewish students reported to NAIS staff that their lead speaker, supposedly selected to discuss climate change, spent his time denouncing the powerful international oppressors, lauding pro-Palestinian encampments and encouraging attendees to “return the land to the indigenous people by any means necessary,” they were told they were overreacting and that they must have misunderstood.
Did their Iranian-born Jewish teacher also “misunderstand” when one of the facilitators of the Middle Eastern Affinity Group asked him to leave the WhatsApp group because his presence (read: his belief in Israel’s right to exist) was making others feel unsafe? Did their black Jewish teacher also “overreact” when after spending hours in advance of the conference communicating with NAIS to ensure the experience was safe and meaningful for her students—and after giving feedback about the damaging impact of the horrifying keynote—asked NAIS to vet the closing speaker’s presentation, flagging that person’s post that read, ”Jewish safety on campus should not come at the expense of Palestinian freedom,” as a cause for concern? Did a Milken Community School senior “overreact” or “misunderstand” when he was made to answer for all Jews everywhere by a student in a red keffiyeh or when the mere mention of the word “Israel” elicited hisses and threatening stares?
On what grounds does any educational conference encourage teachers and students to take sides in highly contested foreign political or religious conflicts? NAIS seeks, as it states, values “championing inclusivity: affirming the rights of every individual to belong and flourish.” This value also (ostensibly) applies to Jewish Americans, 85% of whom, according to the American Jewish Committee 2024 survey, believe it is important for the United States to support Israel in the aftermath of Oct. 7.
If you listened to the keynote speaker of the conference, you would hear remarks containing untruths frequently used by well-known antisemitic figures to simplify the conflict to persuade others to undermine the State of Israel, which is, by definition, ancient and modern-day antisemitism. For instance, her use of the term “genocide” is factually inaccurate and offensive, particularly when the Hamas Charter calls to eliminate Jews. She rationalized Hamas’s atrocities, which included intentional brutal murder, rape and assault of women and children alike, some of whom were the relatives and friends of Jewish attendees at the conference.
What you wouldn’t hear was the keynote speaker denouncing Hamas as a terrorist organization, a clear designation in national and international circles. You also would not hear anything about how Hamas has spent two decades preparing for an attack on innocent civilians instead of spending the time to build up Gaza’s infrastructure. There were no historical perspectives about the complexities of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, including that Israelis are indigenous to the land. These omissions are common practices to undermine Israel and grow Jew-hate. These omissions are also, regardless of the content, poor educational practice.
In the immediate aftermath of the troubling keynote, when Milken faculty reached out to NAIS, the response was that the leadership of NAIS was “blindsided” by the keynote speech. Even if this is true—and a mere cursory look online would make this hard to believe—why was the speaker allowed to continue once she began to echo anti-Zionistic tropes recognized as synonymous with antisemitism by the United States? If it had been anti-black hate or transphobia, would NAIS have allowed the presenter to continue? Unlikely. The message in this and so many of our educational settings is clear: diversity, inclusion and belonging for every population except one: The Jews, even if, of course, American Jews, like Israelis, are often people of color.
Even after many voiced outrage, the malpractice continued, as the same agenda was propagated by the closing speaker, who, like the keynote, was slated to talk about a completely different topic and, in a bait-and-switch, similarly advocated that Israel’s self-defense was illegitimate and should be dismantled. She described the “death of martyrs,” the rubble and the killing, the loss and devastation in Gaza, and “and yet,” she said, “amidst the genocide, our Palestinians are lovingly, stubbornly focused on preservation” and then her impassioned call to action, which the crowd went wild for, was this: “and if they are not giving up, who are we to give up? It raises the question, what is the role of teachers, what is the role of teachers in this midst? ”
What is the role of teachers? What is the role of supposedly the nation’s best teachers in the nation’s best schools? How about teaching students to think for themselves—to understand that every situation, particularly complex geo-political ones, requires serious study and consideration, not pithy, demonizing slogans? How about machloket “constructive debate,” instead of preaching and proselytizing? How about curriculum design and innovative pedagogy that birth classrooms that inspire curiosity instead of certainty? How about modeling that othering one marginalized group to elevate another won’t build inclusive, democratic communities; it never has and never will.
The Sizers were crystal clear that the very health of our democratic, civil society relies on sound educational practice. Educator Linda Darling-Hammond echoes this in her claim that educating for democracy “means that we educate people in a way that ensures they can think independently, that they can use information, knowledge and technology, among other things, to draw their own conclusions.”
The crisis in the Middle East is seemingly intractable. Antisemitism is having a resurgence. K-12 teachers and leaders certainly cannot control complex, geo-political conflict or age-old hate. However, we can hold ourselves to a standard of educational practice that will insist our students grapple responsibly with the thorny intellectual moral dilemmas of the world they will inherit.
Some 2,000 years ago, Rabbi Hillel, living in the Land of Israel, famously asked: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?”
For everyone committed to education, not indoctrination, the answer must be: I will stand up and speak out: for myself, for our students, and for our shared humanity. There is no time to waste.