A Palestinian flag hanging on the wall in the “World History” classroom of Samia Shoman, one of the drafters of the proposed California high school curriculum, a former teacher at San Mateo’s Hillsdale High School, and a former lecturer in San Francisco State University’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diaspora Initiative. Photo: ProIsraelBayBloggers. |
According to Sarah Stern, founder and president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET), more worrisome in the long run than the anti-Israel ethnic studies curriculum recently proposed---and then scrapped due to widespread opposition---for California’s high schools is the US government’s funding of biased, politicized Middle East studies academics via Title VI of the Higher Education Act. These “overwhelmingly anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, post-colonial, and anti-American” academics, she notes, then participate in Title VI-mandated K-12 teacher-training workshops, leading to the dissemination of the radical curriculum California high school students narrowly avoided (for now).
Campus Watch has a long history of educating for Title VI reform along with EMET and other groups to encourage such reforms under successive presidential administrations. Despite succeeding in doing so under President George W. Bush and currently working to expand those earlier gains, the problem persists.
It remains to be seen whether the Trump administration’s Department of Education, with Betsy DeVos at the helm, and Congress will rise to the occasion. Nothing less than the education, or miseducation, of the next generation depends on it.
