Saudi Arabia is paying to influence the teaching of American public schoolchildren. And the U.S. taxpayer is an unwitting accomplice. A special JTA investigation uncovers the complex path by which teaching materials creep into U.S. public schools. It reveals who creates these materials and how some of America’s most prestigious universities — with the use of federal funds — help disseminate them.
Tainted Teachings [Part 1] What your kids are learning about Israel, America and Islam
http://jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=15966&intcategoryid=4
Tainted Teachings [Part 2] What textbooks have to say about Israel, America and Islam
http://jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=15967&intcategoryid=4
Tainted Teachings [Part 3] What teachers are learning about Islam, Israel and the Mideast
http://jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=15968&intcategoryid=4
Tainted Teachings [Part 4] National resource centers at center of debate over Title VI legislation
http://jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=15969&intcategoryid=4
Tainted Teachings [Part 1] What your kids are learning about Israel, America and Islam
http://jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=15966&intcategoryid=4
With the school year back in full swing, do you know what your children are learning?
In thousands of public school districts across the United States, without ever knowing it, taxpayers pay to disseminate pro-Islamic materials that are anti-American, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.
Often bypassing school boards and nudging aside approved curricula, teaching programs funded by Saudi Arabia make their way into elementary and secondary school classrooms.
These teachings enter school systems with the help of a federal program, Title VI of the Higher Education Act, that is now up for renewal.
Expert analyses of these materials have found them to be full of inaccuracies, bias and proselytizing. They also have found that many of the major history and social studies textbooks used in schools across the country are highly critical of democratic institutions and forgiving of repressive ones.
These materials praise and sometimes promote Islam, but criticize Judaism and Christianity and are filled with false assertions.
Most taxpayers don’t know they’re paying — at the federal, state and local levels — for the public schools to advance these materials.
Much has been written about the anti-Israel, anti-American bias found at many university Middle East studies departments, some of which receive Saudi funding. Critics have also probed the export of Saudi teachings to American mosques and Islamic schools.
A special yearlong investigation by JTA reveals for the first time how Saudi influence is penetrating the American classrooms of young children.
The investigation uncovers the complex path by which biased textbooks and supplementary teaching materials creep into U.S. public schools. It reveals who creates these materials and how some of America’s most prestigious universities — with the use of federal funds — become involved in disseminating them.
Saudi influence enters the classrooms in three different ways. The first is through teacher-training seminars that provide teachers with graduate or continuing-education credits.
The second is through the dissemination of supplementary teaching materials designed and distributed with Saudi support. Such materials flood the educational system and are available online.
The third is through school textbooks paid for by taxpayers, some of them vetted by activists with Saudi ties, who advise and influence major textbook companies about the books’ Islamic, Arab, Palestinian, Israeli and Middle Eastern content.
Ironically, what gives credibility to the dissemination of these distorted materials is Title VI of the Higher Education Act, a federal program enacted in 1958 in part to train international experts to meet the nation’s security needs.
Under Title VI, select universities get federal funding and prestigious designation as national resource centers for the study of places and languages the government deems vital for meeting global challenges.
Eighteen of these centers are for the study of the Middle East; each receives an average of about $500,000 per year. The taxpayer-supported grants are worth at least 10 times that amount in their ability to garner university support and attract outside funding, proponents of Title VI say.
As part of its federal mandate, each center assigns an outreach coordinator to extend its expertise to the community and to school-age children in kindergarten through 12th grade. Outreach usually includes workshops, guest speakers, books, pamphlets and whole syllabuses and curricula broken down into teaching modules, with instruction booklets for teachers, and sometimes visual aids such as films.
While some school district officials are completely unaware of the material reaching their teachers and classrooms, others welcome it: Believing they’re importing the wisdom of places like Harvard or Georgetown, they actually are inviting into their schools whole curricula and syllabuses developed with the support of Riyadh.
The “Arab World Studies Notebook” is one such example. Billed by its creators as an important tool to correct misperceptions about Islam and the Arab world, the manual for secondary schools has been blasted by critics for distorting history and propagating bias.
First published in 1990 as the “Arab World Notebook,” the manual was updated to its current form in 1998. The newer publication was created as the joint project of two organizations — both of which receive Saudi funding.
Some of the references are subtle, critics say, making them all the more harmful. For example, the manual:
• Denigrates the Jews’ historical connection to Jerusalem. One passage, describing the Old City, says: “the Jerusalem that most people envisage when they think of the ancient city, is Arab. Surrounding it are ubiquitous high-rises built for Israeli settlers to strengthen Israeli control over the holy city.”
• Suggests that Jews have undue influence on U.S. foreign policy. Referring to Harry Truman’s support of the 1947 United Nations resolution to partition Palestine, separating it into Jewish and Arab states, it says: “Truman’s decision to push the U.N. decision to partition Palestine ended in the creation of Israel. The questions of Jewish lobbying and its impact on Truman’s decision with regard to American recognition — and indeed, the whole question of defining American interests and concerns — is well worth exploring.”
• Suggests that the Koran “synthesizes and perfects earlier revelations,” meaning those ascribed to by Christians and Jews.
• Leaves out any facts and figures about the State of Israel in its country-by-country section, but refers instead only to Palestine.
One of the groups involved in the publication is the Berkeley, Calif.-based Arab World and Islamic Resources, or AWAIR, (www.awaironline.org) founded in 1990 with funding from organizations that include Saudi Aramco, a Saudi government-owned oil company.
The editor of the notebook is Audrey Shabbas, AWAIR’s founder. Saudi Aramco World, the publication of Saudi Aramco, features pieces praising Shabbas and her teacher-training materials.
The second organization involved in the manual is the Middle East Policy Council of Washington, which helps print and disseminate the 500-page manual of essays, lesson plans and primary sources.
The council lists the manual as the primary resource material for its teacher-training program. It employs Shabbas to conduct its training and seminars. According to the group’s Web site (www.mepc.org), more than 16,000 educators have attended its workshops in 175 cities in 43 states. The manual itself claims to have reached 25 million students.
The council, which is headed by Charles Freeman Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, gets direct funding from Saudi Arabia.
In an interview, the council’s acting director, Jon Roth, declined to specify how much money his group gets from Riyadh, but made clear that he is seeking much more.
In September, Roth visited Saudi Arabia to meet with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al Saud, a member of the royal family who owns Kingdom Holding Company, one of the world’s wealthiest companies.
“We have been trying to cultivate the relationship with the prince for a long time, because he has lots of money,” Roth said after his trip.
“Our hope and expectation is millions” from the Saudi prince, who initiated the meeting after hearing about the teaching program, Roth said. He said his group operates on an annual budget of $750,000.
The council’s board of directors includes executives from companies with huge financial stakes in Saudi Arabia, including Boeing, ExxonMobil Saudi Arabia, the Carlyle Group and the Saudi Binladin Group.
Roth said that funding to the organization “has no strings attached.”
Sandra Stotsky, a former senior associate commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education, is one of a growing number of critics of the “Arab World Studies Notebook.” It is one of the examples she cites in a study, “The Stealth Curriculum: Manipulating America’s History Teachers,” in which she examines supplemental teaching materials.
The problem with many of the supplemental materials, which are most often distributed through teacher training workshops, “is the ideological mission of the organizations that create them,” she said in her study, published last year by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington-based think tank on education.
“They embed their political agendas in the instructional materials they create so subtly that apolitical teachers are unlikely to spot them.”
In an interview with JTA, Stotsky called the notebook “a piece of propaganda” rather than scholarly work.
The American Jewish Committee issued a scathing report on the manual earlier this year, called “Propaganda, Proselytizing, and Public Education: A Critique of the Arab World Studies Notebook. "
The report said that the publication, while “attempting to redress a perceived deficit in sympathetic views of the Arabs and Muslim religion in the American classroom, veers in the opposite direction — toward historical distortion as well as uncritical praise, whitewashing and practically proselytizing.”
The result, the AJCommittee report said, “is a text that appears largely designed to advance the anti-Israel and propagandistic views of the Notebook’s sponsors, the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC) and Arab World and Islamic Resources (AWAIR), to an audience of teachers who may not have the resources and knowledge to assess this text critically.”
David Harris, the AJCommittee’s executive director, said upon issuing the report in February: “Educating American children about the Middle East and about different religions is vitally important, but the notebook is precisely the wrong way to go about it.”
Shabbas, in the introduction to the manual, says that AWAIR’s mission is to counter the “rampant negative stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims held by most Americans.”
“Recognizing that no work is of greater importance than the preparation of our young people for their roles as thoughtful and informed citizens of the twenty-first century, and recognizing too that U.S. involvement with the Arab World and with the wider world of Islam is certain to remain close for many years, AWAIR’s goal is to increase awareness and understanding of this world region and this world faith through educational outreach at the pre-collegiate level,” she writes.
In an interview with JTA, Shabbas said the goal of the notebook is “to establish a basis for understanding the Middle East” by examining the largest of the groups that live there — the Arabs.
Responding to criticism specifically about the effect of Jewish lobbying, she said everything in the manual comes from the Arab and Muslim point of view: “The notebook is what it is. If you go out anywhere in the Arab world, you’re likely to hear that view” of the U.N. partition and Jewish influence.
“Most textbooks merely tell people the U.N. voted for partition and the Arabs rejected it,” she said, adding that American students need to “delve into why people do what they do; what are their values.”
She also noted that the publication directs students to solicit other perspectives from various groups, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the American Jewish Committee.
Roth of the Middle East Policy Council dismissed the critics of the notebook as “cranks.” His council touts the manual as an important resource for educators.
The manual is “of such high standards that the Middle East Policy Council believes it should be in the hands of every educator,” the group’s Web site says.
In an interview, Roth said Israel is “a big topic” for the council, but added, “The council does not take a position on Israel’s existence. The council does not take positions at all.”
Criticism also has come lately from parents offended by what their children are learning. Parental pressure led to the manual being banned in school districts in Tulsa, Okla., and Anchorage.
The AJCommittee took the unusual step of issuing a public warning “urging school districts across the nation” not to use the manual.
Still, Shabbas and her publication are welcomed by outreach coordinators to some of the nation’s key national resource centers, including those at Georgetown, Harvard and Yale, from where she said in the interview that she had just returned from conducting a teacher-training session.
Many of the principal players involved in disseminating pro-Islamic, anti-American and anti-Israel materials to the public school system have links, direct or indirect, to a little-known place called Dar al Islam.
Located in Abiquiu, N.M., Dar al Islam (www.daralislam.org), which means “abode of Islam” in Arabic, is an Islamic enclave registered with the state as a non-profit in 1979.
Situated in the remote mountainous desert of northern New Mexico, near the Ghost Ranch where Georgia O’Keefe lived, the massive complex is accessible only by an unpaved, dirt road.
It was created with direct financing from the late Saudi monarch, King Khaled ibn Aziz, and from five princesses in the Royal House of Saud, according to Saudi Aramco World.
A 1988 article in Saudi Aramco World detailed the saga of the royal family’s purchase of 8,500 acres of land and construction of a mosque and other buildings to form Dar al Islam.
According to the enclave’s Web site, the original intent was to establish a “Muslim village as a showcase for Islam in America.” When that became too difficult, the vision changed to an educational conference and retreat center.
Those buildings sit on 1,600 of the original acres; the rest was sold and invested to help finance its operation, Dar al Islam officials say.
In addition to the mosque, the enclave has a madrassa, or religious school, summer camp and teacher-training institute. It runs speakers bureaus and programs and maintains a Web site.
Dar al Islam spokesman Abdur Ra’uf Walter Declerck acknowledges some minor participation in the creation of Dar al Islam by a Saudi princess, but he disputes most of the funding history of Dar al Islam as recounted in the Saudi Aramco World article.
“It was not purchased by the royal family,” he said. Funding then and now “comes from Muslims all over,” he said, but would not elaborate.
Many of the individuals and groups involved in promoting education about Islam and the Arab world in American schools have ties to Dar al Islam.
Some are educators such as Shabbas, whose work is promoted by outreach coordinators at the national resource centers, and some are outreach coordinators themselves.
Shabbas, the lecturer and editor of “The Arab World Studies Notebook,” was director of Dar al Islam’s summer teacher-training program in 1994 and 1995, according to Declerck and Shabbas.
Others with connections to Dar al Islam include:
• Zeina Azzam Seikaly, outreach coordinator at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, a Title VI National Resource Center on the Middle East. For several years she was assistant director of Dar al Islam’s teacher-training institute, according to Dar al Islam’s Declerck.
Seikaly promotes many associates of Dar al Islam, printing their writings and inviting them to lecture. Shabbas has been involved in teacher training at Georgetown. Asked about Dar al Islam, Seikaly at first refused to discuss it, then admitted working there, but only for two weeks.
• The Council on Islamic Education. The group until recently was listed as an associate of Dar al Islam, under the heading of secondary schools. Independent textbook review organizations describe the council as one of the most powerful groups in the country influencing the content of textbooks. Critics say that in its effort to promote a positive view of Islam, it distorts history.
The group’s director, Shabbir Mansuri, says his organization is a “non-advocacy research organization.”
Criticism that his group exerts undue influence on textbook publishers “comes from people who have no idea what we do,” he said.
“The Constitution allows us all a place at the table, without leaving our heritage at the door,” he told JTA. “I can lobby, I can demand and I can contribute.”
In initial interviews, Dar al Islam officials said the council has multiple roles there, including helping to create and evaluate content for its teachers.
After those interviews, the Dar al Islam site was changed to eliminate any mention of the council.
Asked to explain, Declerck said it was taken down to “avoid confusion. We know each other but we are independent organizations, we are not connected.”
• Susan Douglass. An associate of Dar al Islam’s Teachers Institute, she also is the curriculum specialist for the Council on Islamic Education.
She is a former teacher at the Islamic Saudi Academy of Virginia, a Saudi government-supported school, and she consults on textbooks and curriculum by major publishers. She has written a series of books on Islam for K-6 students at Islamic and public schools.
One of Dar al Islam’s Web sites, islamamerica.org, posts articles defending Palestinians and their supporters, while excoriating democracies, including America and Israel.
Some Saudi watchers say Saudi Arabia’s goal is to export the most rigid brand of Islam: Wahhabi Islam, which in contrast to other forms of Islam, is intolerant of other religions, according to experts.
It’s an agenda “more dangerous than communism” ever was, according to Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, a Washington-based pro-democracy think tank, because it targets all non-believers, including Christians, Jews and most Muslims.
Such apostates have only three choices, he said: “Convert, be subjugated or die.”
The Saudi Embassy in Washington did not respond to several requests for comment.
Declerck of Dar al Islam said the kind of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, is “not what we transmit. Dar al Islam communicates much more of a mainstream Islam,” he said.
But Al-Ahmed was adamant. In American public schools, he said, the Saudis are carrying out “a deliberate program to spread their version of Islam everywhere.”
“Their job is to give money to certain groups of Islamic organizations, to fund certain people, and those people they fund are people who they believe will further their goal of spreading Wahhabi Islam,” he said.
(JTA Editor Lisa Hostein and correspondent Sue Fishkoff in California were among the contributors to this report.)
Tainted Teachings [Part 2] What textbooks have to say about Israel, America and Islam
http://jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=15967&intcategoryid=4
The state of California is on the brink of a major election that involves neither Arnold Schwarzenegger nor Clint Eastwood.
The candidates are textbooks and other teaching materials that will influence what schoolchildren across the state — and across the United States — will learn for more than a decade.
With a debate under way over evolution and intelligent design in science textbooks, a less-publicized battle is being waged over the content of social studies and history materials — some of which are pro-Islamic, anti-American, anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic.
California is in the final stages of the “adoption process” for history and social studies materials in kindergarten through eighth grade. The process, which takes place every seven years, determines which books make the mark, enabling local school districts to use state funds to purchase them.
With the political, educational and financial stakes so high, publishers, special interest groups and educators take the process as seriously as any political campaign.
Among the contenders is “History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond,” a seventh-grade textbook, with other course materials, published by the Teachers’ Curriculum Institute.
The course was piloted in Scottsdale, Ariz., earlier this year. But after a series of protests from parents — who objected to what they saw as distortions of Christianity and Judaism, with an overarching positive spin on Islam — the publisher decided to stop the trial.
“There was a lot of objection to the amount of coverage of Islam,” said Liz Russell, the development director of the Teachers’ Curriculum Institute, which is based in Rancho Cordova, Calif.
The book was developed to meet California standards, which require “a lot more on religion in general” than most other states, she said.
California has mandated the study of religion since 1987. Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism are studied in sixth grade, and Islam is covered in seventh grade.
Meanwhile, the institute has pulled “The Modern Middle East,” a package of supplemental materials deemed so objectionable that a report by the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council said it creates a hostile environment for Jewish students.
The material is still for sale, however, and copies already in circulation likely will sit on classroom shelves for years to come, according to educational experts. Both “The Modern Middle East” and “History Alive!” have hit the market since the early 1990s, a period that began what one reviewer has termed “the Islamization of the textbooks.”
Analysts say today’s history and social studies textbooks, and supplementary materials, sow positive propaganda about Islam, the Palestinians and the Arab world, while denigrating — in subtle and not so subtle ways — America, Israel, Judaism and democracy.
Distributed in public elementary, middle and high schools, the materials are paid for by U.S. taxpayers.
At least one Jewish parent, Dr. Murray Zucker, found “The Modern Middle East” so troubling that he withdrew his son from the public high school in Santa Rosa, Calif., and sent him to Jewish day school.
His son, David, was 14 when he was subjected to the materials and a teacher who endorsed every word of them, Zucker said.
Among other things, “The Modern Middle East” includes an exercise that has teachers divide the class into “Jeds” and “Pads,” representing Jews and Palestinians. The Pads are grouped inside a central area, meant to represent Palestine, while the Jeds are dispersed around the room.
Students then debate whether the Jeds should immigrate to the “Land of Pad.” Teachers are directed to show favoritism toward the Jeds, guiding the class to see the Jews as both victims and aggressors who succeed in taking over land that belongs to others.
The four Jewish students in a ninth-grade class of 30 pupils felt “powerless and marginalized and unrepresented,” said Zucker, whose son is now a freshman at Brandeis University.
Parents’ complaints in northern California led to a published analysis of the material by a team headed by Jackie Berman, an educational consultant at the San Francisco JCRC.
The report, issued two years ago, concluded that “historical distortion and factual misrepresentations woven throughout the Case Study of the Arab-Israeli Conflict render it unacceptable for classroom use.”
“As a result of the bias, a potential exists for the creation of a hostile environment in the classroom against Jewish students,” the report says.
The report says the teaching materials are studded with “misinformation, manipulation, omissions of key facts, oversimplification of complex issues, historical inaccuracy and lack of context.”
Tax money actually pays for these materials twice — once at the state or local level, where the materials are purchased, and again at the federal level, where some universities with federally funded Title VI national resource centers focusing on the Middle East help produce, promote and endorse such materials.
For example, at Ohio State University’s Middle East Studies Center, a Title VI national resource center, “The Modern Middle East” is recommended as one of many resources for educators.
As a result of parental intervention and the JCRC report, officials of the Teachers’ Curriculum Institute met with community members and agreed to rewrite the section in “The Modern Middle East” that dealt with Jews and Palestinians vying for one land.
That never happened, but the institute now says the material is no longer on the market.
“It’s quite dated. It was time for it to die,” said the institute’s Russell.
However, a sales representative for the institute said that even though the publication recently was pulled from the group’s Web site, it is still available for sale. And experts say teaching material can stay on school shelves for years even after it is no longer being published.
Alarm about the penetration of problematic teaching materials in America’s schools is growing.
Sandra Alfonsi, head of Hadassah’s Curriculum Watch, has focused on the issue for years.
“We believe that we can no longer ignore the pattern of Islamist revisionism that leads us from the K-12 textbooks to university courses and demonstrations on the college campuses and to the issue of the infusion of Arab petrol dollars that have funded and continue to fund American education,” she said.
In 2003, Gilbert Sewall of the American Textbook Council published “Islam and the Textbooks,” an analysis of some widely circulated social studies and history textbooks.
In their quest to expand coverage of Islam and non-Western civilizations — laudable, given 21st-century geopolitics — textbook publishers have distorted history, wrote Sewall, the former education editor of Newsweek.
At the end of September, he reiterated his concerns in a letter to the California Curriculum Commission in advance of its public hearings on teaching materials by 12 publishers for grades K-8.
“It is not accidental that world history texts submitted to California read alike when they present Islam or that coverage of Islam in these books is lyrical and uncritical,” Sewall wrote. “Islamic pressure groups have been working energetically for 15 years to scrub the past in instructional materials. Textbooks either gloss over jihad, sharia (Islamic law), Muslim slavery, the status of women and Islamic terrorism — or omit the subject altogether.”
Sewall, who has testified in Congress on the issue, has said that the shrinking industry has come to be dominated by four main publishing companies — Pearson, Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt and McGraw-Hill — with an estimated 80 percent of the textbook market.
In his recent letter, Sewall said that, starting in the early 1990s, the publishers “allowed Islamic organizations — notably the Council on Islamic Education — to strong-arm them and in effect act as censors.”
The council’s executive director, Shabbir Mansuri, rejects these charges, insisting that his group is a “non-advocacy research organization.”
At the same time, he said in an interview with JTA at the hearings in Sacramento last month, “The Constitution allows us all a place at the table, without leaving our heritage at the door. I can lobby, I can demand, and I can contribute.”
The council’s contributions to the process are clear: It is listed as a content consultant to three of the 12 publishers submitting programs — the term used for textbooks plus other teaching materials — for adoption. It also submitted a lengthy report to the curriculum commission commenting in detail on all the religions described in the teaching materials.
Mansuri testified at the public hearings, as did representatives of other religions, including Jews, and he appeared well-acquainted with many of the publishers’ representatives present.
The Council on Islamic Education was one of many groups that consulted on the “History Alive!” course, even though it is not listed as such, said Russell of the Teachers’ Curriculum.
Beyond the council, another scholar who consulted on “History Alive!” is Ayad Al-Qazzaz, a sociology professor at California State University at Sacramento, who was co-editor of the “Arab World Notebook.” That’s the predecessor of the “Arab World Studies Notebook,” a widely used teaching manual that has been banned in at least two school districts because of what critics say is pro-Islamic propaganda and anti-Israel distortions.
Many states have a textbook-adoption process, but those in California and Texas are the most important since those states have huge populations. In fact, some school districts in California buy more books than entire states.
“Texas and California are the states in which publishers introduce new textbooks,” Sewall said. “By looking at what’s available in California today, we will know what’s going to be available in the nation tomorrow.”
“History Alive!” and “World History” were among the nine programs that California’s curriculum commission recommended to the state board of education after its public hearings last month. The board is slated to make its final selection Nov. 3.
Berman of the San Francisco JCRC said she believes the Council on Islamic Education has been so influential because it has been pro-active in getting its views across, especially when it matters most — as a book is being compiled.
“It’s perfectly legitimate” for the council to want American students to have a positive view of Islam, she said. “If you look at the textbooks, you see they have been very effective.”
The Jewish community, in contrast, “hasn’t been at the table. The publishers have not been getting a unified, well-articulated point of view” from the Jews, she said.
Berman and her team recently created the Institute for Curriculum Services to serve as a resource center for Jewish subject matter in school curricula.
Their review of some sixth-grade books that California is considering for adoption turned up inaccuracies and troubling depictions of Jews and Judaism.
In their reviews, the institute cites as an example “the depiction of Passover as a celebration of the deaths of the Egyptian firstborn instead of a celebration of the Jews’ escape from Egyptian slavery.”
Their reviews say that “many of the texts contain narrations of the Crucifixion that blame or clearly implicate the Jews, presentations of the parable of the Good Samaritan that identify uncaring passers-by as Jews, and Paul as a persecutor of Christians when he was the Jewish Saul — all of these have been used throughout history as a means of implanting anti-Semitism in young minds.”
In a surprise move, the curriculum commission, during its Sept. 29-30 hearings, rejected an Oxford University Press sixth-grade history program that Jewish and Hindu groups had blasted as biased, erroneous and culturally derogatory.
The commission also passed a motion requiring publishers to make changes requested by the Institute for Curriculum Services before their programs can be adopted by the state board.
While buoyed by that decision, Berman said that being involved in the review process is not enough.
“We need to be involved while books are being conceived,” she said, just like the Council on Islamic Education.
(JTA Editor Lisa Hostein and correspondent Sue Fishkoff in Sacramento were among the contributors to this report.)
Tainted Teachings [Part 3] What teachers are learning about Islam, Israel and the Mideast
http://jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=15968&intcategoryid=4
Chairs are lined up in neat rows. Coffee is brewing, muffins arrayed. The table is thick with handouts.
One of them is Saudi Aramco World, a magazine published by Aramco, the Saudi government-owned outfit that is the largest oil company in the world.
“The Arab World in the Classroom,” published by Georgetown University, thanks Saudi Aramco on its back cover. Alongside it is the brochure of The Mosaic Foundation, an organization of spouses of Arab ambassadors in America, whose chairwoman and president of the board of trustees is Her Royal Highness Princess Haifa Al-Faisal of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia.
If you think this is a meeting of Saudi oil executives or Middle Eastern exporters or Saudi government officials, you are wrong: It’s a social studies training seminar for American elementary and secondary teachers, held last year at Georgetown University.
It’s paid for by U.S. tax dollars, as the organizer points out in her introduction.
“We are grateful to the grant we have under Title VI of the Department of Education that underwrites these programs,” Zeina Azzam Seikaly, outreach coordinator of Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, tells the more than three dozen current and former teachers at the seminar.
Georgetown’s Middle East outreach program is one of 18 affiliated with federally designated national resource centers, each of which receives hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal funds under Title VI of the Higher Education Act.
Much has been written about the biased nature of many Middle East studies programs at universities around the country.
Less known is that with public money and the designation as a national resource center, universities such as Georgetown, Harvard and Columbia are dramatically influencing the study of Islam, Israel and the Middle East far beyond the college campus.
As a condition of their funding, these centers are also required to engage in public outreach, which includes schoolchildren in grades K-12. Through professional development workshops for teachers and resource libraries, they spread teaching materials that analysts say promote Islam and are critical of Israel and the West.
Georgetown’s outreach and the materials it disseminates are singled out for special praise by Dar al Islam, an educational center in Abiquiu, N.M.
Dar al Islam, which houses a mosque, religious school, summer camp and teacher training institute, was financed in part by the late King Khaled ibn Aziz of Saudi Arabia. Its Web site lists four other outreach centers it admires: the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan.
Professional development workshops like the one at Georgetown provide the most frequent paths for the dissemination of supplementary materials to history and social studies teachers, according to “The Stealth Curriculum: Manipulating America’s History Teachers,” a lengthy inquiry by educational expert Sandra Stotsky.
Stotsky is a former director of a professional development institute for teachers at Harvard and a former senior associate commissioner of Massachusetts’ Department of Education. Her study was published last year by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington-based education think tank.
The problems with many of the supplemental materials, Stotsky said in her report, stem from “the ideological mission of the organizations that create them.
“Their ostensible goal is to combat intolerance, expand students’ knowledge of other cultures, give them other ‘points of view’ on commonly studied historical phenomena and/or promote ‘critical thinking,’ ” she wrote.
But an analysis of the materials convinced her that their real goal “is to influence how children come to understand and think about current social and political issues by bending historical content to those ends.
“They embed their political agendas in the instructional materials they create so subtly that apolitical teachers are unlikely to spot them.”
Among the materials Stotsky cites is “The Arab World Studies Notebook,” which has been widely criticized for bias, inaccuracies and proselytizing.
Two school districts have banned the book, and the American Jewish Committee has urged others to follow suit.
Audrey Shabbas, editor of the notebook, rejects the criticism.
“We’re providing the Arab point of view,” she said.
Responding to criticism that the material paints an overly rosy picture of Islam, she said, “My task is not to defend what Muslims do in the world” but to focus on the “difference between what people call themselves and what they do.”
Experts say the materials are popular because they’re recommended by the national resource centers of prestigious universities.
In an interview with JTA, Stotsky recounted that in the summer of 2002, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Massachusetts Department of Education decided to offer a seminar on Islam and the Middle East for area teachers. They accepted a proposal from Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies that “looked very promising.” One of the organizers of the seminar was Barbara Petzen, the center’s outreach coordinator.
But when Stotsky and other officials saw the syllabus, which included the “Arab World Studies Notebook,” they requested that the course present a more balanced view of Islam. Officials wanted at least to include a book by Bernard Lewis, a Princeton University professor emeritus who is considered one of the pre-eminent authorities on Islam.
But Petzen and her colleague “ducked recent history” by agreeing only to include one of Lewis’ older books from the 1970s, rather than one of his more recent critical perspectives on Islam, Stotsky said.
Petzen could not be reached for comment.
Stotsky was further shocked when she saw the lesson plans created by some of the seminar participants. One, which required the students to learn an Islamic prayer and design a prayer rug to simulate a mosque in the classroom, crossed the line. “It’s really indoctrination to have students do such religious things,” she said.
While there is no way to know the extent to which the teachers, from 20 Massachusetts schools, ultimately incorporated their proposed lessons into the classroom, the assumption of the education department, which paid for the seminar, “is that the teachers use the material they learned,” Stotsky said.
In New York City, meanwhile, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has barred the head of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute from lecturing to city teachers enrolled in professional development courses on the Middle East.
Klein’s move in February against Rashid Khalidi, who holds the Edward Said chair at Columbia, was in response to “a number of things he’s said in the past,” said Michael Best, the department’s general counsel, according to The New York Times.
A spokesman for Klein said last week that “nothing has changed” in Khalidi’s status, meaning that he still is barred from lecturing at teacher-training seminars.
Khalidi declined to comment on the issue.
For Stotsky, a major problem with the teacher-training seminars is the lack of oversight. “What teacher or principal is going to challenge” material that comes “with the sterling credentials of Harvard?” she said.
While she doesn’t claim to have all the answers, Stotsky recommends halting public funding for professional development until there is “strong evidence that most history teachers learn something useful from a majority of workshops they attend.”
(JTA Editor Lisa Hostein was among the contributors to this report.)
Tainted Teachings [Part 4] National resource centers at center of debate over Title VI legislation
http://jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intarticleid=15969&intcategoryid=4
U.S. lawmakers and academics are engaged in fierce debate over the renewal of Title VI of the Higher Education Act.
Under Title VI, select universities get federal funding and prestigious designation as national resource centers for the study of places and languages the government deems vital for meeting global challenges.
The legislation was first enacted in 1958, during the height of the Cold War, as part of the National Defense Education Act. Its purpose, according to its framers, was to ensure “trained manpower of sufficient quality and quantity to meet the national defense needs of the United States.”
National defense, according to current Department of Education publications, “remains central to the programs forty years after their inception.”
Critics seeking to amend the legislation contend that universities often promote anti-American and anti-Israel biases and do not merit federal funds that were intended to serve American interests.
Many academics worry that restrictions will violate academic freedoms.
While Title VI may have had a noble purpose, it does not work in practice, according to Middle East scholar Martin Kramer. He analyzed Middle East studies centers and the work of the Title VI national resource centers in his 2001 book, “Ivory Towers on Sand — The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America.”
Kramer was the first to charge that, using Title VI monies as a base, many Middle East studies departments pushed an anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic and pro-Palestinian agenda on students and faculty.
This “group think” required obeisance, Kramer said, to what he described as the anti-Western “post-colonialist” beliefs of people like Edward Said, the late Palestinian activist and Columbia University professor of comparative literature.
At the same time, these academics denigrated the work of prominent mainstream Middle East scholars, such as Bernard Lewis, the Princeton University professor emeritus, as too pro-Western.
Kramer wrote that these departments encouraged a world view in which instruction about Israel is twisted and degraded, while instruction about the United States eliminates positive and patriotic references.
The negative emphasis often found in these departments is like “teaching about the United States through the lens of what happened at Abu Ghraib prison” in Baghdad, said Sarah Stern, director of the Washington office for governmental and public affairs of the American Jewish Congress, which formally protested Title VI educational practices to the U.S. Department of Education.
“And it’s teaching about Israel through the lens of Deir Yassin,” she said, referring to an infamous battle during Israel’s War of Independence in which Jewish militias allegedly murdered Arab civilians.
In written testimony submitted to Congress in 2003, the then-director of Georgetown’s national resource center on the Middle East, Barbara Stowasser, and a colleague, defended the work of Georgetown’s national resource centers.
“We have had scholars working at our centers who have come to differing conclusions on an array of issues, as one would expect in an academic setting which is premised on the principle of academic freedom and the belief that rigorous research and serious intellectual discussion are important to informing both our students and others who benefit from contact with the work of our centers.
“We would make the point, however, that in the process, our centers’ work has been balanced and reflective of diverse views,” they wrote.
Legislation introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives this session by Rep. Patrick Tiberi (R-Ohio) would create an advisory board to observe the workings of Title VI and report to Congress. Academic associations oppose the legislation as an attack on free speech and academic freedom.
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce recently passed the legislation as part of the Higher Education reauthorization bill, but it has yet to pass the full House.
In the Senate, Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) attached a different version of the legislation to the Higher Education reauthorization bill. The Senate version does not include an advisory board provision, but it does require a survey of national and defense agencies to determine what they most need from the university community, with the assumption being that it is Arabic speakers.
The Senate version also requires an objective grievance procedure if university students feel they’re being discriminated against. It also requires schools to show how many students who have studied in these resource centers actually go into national security and defense fields.
The House and the Senate are now slated to try to resolve the different versions of the legislation.
