Teachers are workers, and they have a real and legitimate interest in their wages and in the conditions of their employment. Many teachers are represented by a union, and here in Massachusetts, many are represented by the Massachusetts Teachers Association.

Teachers in our public schools are also civil servants entrusted with the basic education of children. We expect them to teach the basics of literacy, of numeracy, of history, science, geography, and so forth. And we expect them to educate children in good citizenship.

That’s why a new report on the intended politicization of public school classrooms by politically radical members of the MTA after October 7 is so concerning and requires urgent action.

After October 7, the MTA adopted a resolution calling on the National Education Association, a national teacher’s group, to demand that the Biden administration stop supporting the “Netanyahu government’s genocidal war on the Palestinian people in Gaza,” with no mention of why Israel had gone to war. At the same time, it decided to “develop a framework for discussing and set of curriculum resources for learning about the history and current events in Israel and Occupied Palestine, for MTA members to use with each other and their students.” It held a webinar for members at which the speaker, Prof. Leila Farsakh, set out to “explain the settler-colonial structure of Zionism, of Israel.” According to the report, the webinar defined as “anti-Palestinian racism” any “expressions of support for the State of Israel and even its right to exist. The premise of the entire program was that Jews are colonists who came to settle a land to which they do not belong.” It featured slides that read: “ZIONISM IS ALSO A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR, ISRAELI STATE-FUNDED PROPAGANDA MACHINE” and “JUDAISM≠ZIONISM.” (You might ask why the MTA seeks to tell its members what is and is not part of Jewishness rather than, say, asking the Jewish community how it conceives of itself, as we routinely do or should do for all other minority groups).

Later, the MTA passed a resolution rejecting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, which has been widely adopted in the US and globally, on the grounds that “right-wing” groups are trying to “manufacture hysteria and fear in order to shut down teaching and learning about Israel/Palestine.” This is a real misunderstanding of the IHRA working definition, but regardless, the suggestion seems to be that the MTA wants its members to have the freedom to teach material that, in light of the IHRA working definition and the examples that accompany it, someone might conclude was antisemitic.

What kind of materials? Well, we don’t know if the MTA has yet developed the promised framework and curricular resources on Israel and Palestine. But we see among the materials the MTA makes available to its members:

• an article explaining why Jews must, on account of their privilege, identify themselves as white (never mind that a recent study using typically Jewish or Israeli names and typically gentile (white European) names shows that people who are identifiably Jewish or Israeli face significant discrimination in the job market).
• a reading list that includes Rashid Khalidi’s Hundred-year War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonialism and Resistance, Nora Lester Murad’s novel, Ida in the Middle, the film Israelism, the film The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States, the website Visualizing Palestine, etc.—and no works presenting another viewpoint.

What’s wrong with all this? Here are a few thoughts. First, I don’t know but strongly suspect that most Massachusetts teachers want their union to focus on what unions are meant to do: negotiating on their behalf with their employers. I suspect that most union members have little or no idea of what is going on in their unions. Second, the public does not employ teachers to indoctrinate our students. I have no doubt that one of the radical leaders of this movement within the MTA would claim that everything is political and that more traditional and balanced education about world affairs is just a tool of bourgeois imperialism, or material that privileges Western narratives over the views of the oppressed in the third world and the global South, or whatever. Yawn. But if they’re right and everything is political, surely the political lean of K-12 education should be determined by the School Committees of our cities and towns or by the Commonwealth itself—that is, by the public—rather than by a handful of radical activists who don’t represent the public or its views. Who are these leaders? One is Ricardo Rosa, who according to a report, “referred to the United States as a ‘settler colony,’ glorified Leila Khaled, a terrorist who hijacked a plane, supported a professor who labeled Zionists ‘swine,’ [and] encouraged protests in Jewish neighborhoods.” Surely he is not the kind of person Massachusetts citizens want to trust to decide the content of our children’s education.

I will be reaching out to my representatives to express concern about the MTA’s stance. If you are in Massachusetts, I hope you will do the same. If you are elsewhere in the United States, I hope you will check up on what your local teachers unions are doing.