“Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.”
"A traitor speaks to you of loyalty, a thief explains the meaning of honor, and an oppressor threatens you with prayers against you... yes, my dear, that is the world we live in 🌱 !".
The report warns that the trend also contributes to declining academic outcomes and increasing anti-American views
By: Haley Cohen
Published: Feb 9, 2026
Political activists seeking to push extremist perspectives into the classroom are behind a nationwide acceleration of antisemitic content in K-12 classrooms, with increasingly active movements targeting school boards, district leadership and teacher organizations, according to a report published Monday by the North American Values Institute.
The group’s 58-page report, “When the Classroom Turns Hostile: A Strategic Response to Extremism and Antisemitism in K-12 Education,” shared exclusively with JI, found that in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, what it described as radical ideological frameworks have dominated key education institutions across the country. Ideologies such as “oppressor-oppressed” are common in schools of education, accreditation bodies, teacher unions and district bureaucracies, all of which shape classroom materials.
The paper highlights teachers’ unions and activist nonprofits as major sources of embedding radical views and ready-made anti-American content into professional development, much of which is able to bypass traditional oversight. It also raises concerns about “substantial” foreign funding flowing into Western education institutions to influence ciriculums by the Qatar Foundation International and Confucius Institutes in China.
The North American Values Institute, formerly the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, is a nonprofit that monitors antisemitism in K-12 schools. It was founded by David Bernstein, a longtime Jewish nonprofit official who led the Jewish Council for Public Affairs from 2016-2021.
“We’re very concerned about the ideological activists taking over union leadership,” NAVI’s chief program officer, Dana Stangel-Plowe, told JI. “While that may not seem new, we’re seeing the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] in particular taking a much more active role.” According to the report, DSA “urges members to enter the field in order to ‘transform our schools, our unions, and our society.’”
The report warns that these dynamics contribute not only to rising antisemitism, but also to declining academic outcomes and increasing anti-American views.
Attempts to combat this framework by promoting Holocaust or Jewish education have failed, the report’s authors argue.
Rather, the writers offer several suggestions for reforming K-12 education, including changing teacher preparation programs and accreditation standards, confronting politicized teacher unions and advocacy networks, strengthening standards around curricula, addressing foreign funding and influence in education, empowering parents and school boards and building multi-ethnic coalitions.
NAVI rebranded in February 2025 in an effort to detach from its Jewish roots to expand partnerships in fighting antisemitism with other ethnic communities.
At the time of the rebrand, Bernstein told JI that the Jewish community “has been reluctant to fight at the ideological level.”
A year later, Stangel-Plowe said that while there is still room for improvement, NAVI has increasingly been partnering with leading Jewish organizations.
The report comes two months after the House Committee on Education and the Workforce opened investigations into public school systems in Fairfax County, Va.; Berkeley, Calif.; and Philadelphia over alleged failures to address antisemitic incidents.
Federal investigations are “a good start but certainly not enough,” said Stangel-Plowe. “School districts are used to functioning without much accountability. We need more federal and state oversight.”
Still, she emphasized a need to address the root cause, rather than responding after incidents occur.
“K-12 education is being treated as a vehicle for social change and an oppressor-oppressed framework is dangerous to Jewish students, Jewish teachers, and teaches hostility towards Israel and more broadly Western values,” Stangel-Plowe continued.
We’re seeing active networks, [including] in New York City and Philadelphia,” she added. “We’re seeing radical political actors taking over union leadership and that has an influence on teachers unions which influences school board elections. The problem is embedded not just in the unions but the entire education system from teacher training, licensing and programs.”
“We can’t fix an institutional problem with more lessons or programs,” she said. “As important as education about the Holocaust and Jewish life is, institutional problems persist unless we have a real allocation of investments in a comprehensive solution across the ecosystem.
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NAVI’s white paper, "When the Classroom Turns Hostile," offers a practical guide for confronting a challenge too complex for any single inte
“When the Classroom Turns Hostile” is meant to serve as a practical reference for confronting a challenge that is too complex for any single intervention or organization.
Rising extremism and antisemitism in K–12 education are the result of the systemic ideological capture of America’s schools and institutions. Most efforts to address antisemitism in schools focus on symptoms rather than causes, as a result, extremism and antisemitism persist, learning declines, and civic norms erode. The problem is institutional and political, so restoring educational integrity requires comprehensive action across the entire K–12 ecosystem.
In this white paper, NAVI maps the problem and provides a strategic framework for a comprehensive response. It (1) identifies the nature and scope of the problem, (2) outlines a comprehensive framework for the solution, and (3) aims to catalyze collaboration among organizations committed to restoring educational integrity to our nation’s K-12 schools.
One thing I gotta say is: self-love doesn’t solve the oppression fat people face
There’s this kind of a belief going on where people think the correct way of dealing with being oppressed is by becoming so confident that you don’t care about your oppression anymore. I see this in especially how we treat fat people.
A confident fat person who partakes in body positivity but doesn’t speak loud on the discrimination fat people face (or if they do, they call fat people experiences’ bullying), will get more respect from thin people than a fat person who might or might not be confident, who speaks loud on fat activism.
Some thin people will also water down fat activists’ messages by making them about bullying instead of discrimination, saying stuff like ”you’re not fat you’re beautiful” to fat activists, and by just overall ignoring what fat activists say and making the message about self-love instead of changing the system that harms everyone but especially fat people.
A lot of fat celebrities speak on self-love, not on fat liberation. They make the messages more easily swallowable by not trying to change the status quo upright. And like, being body-positive alone is better than nothing, but if what we’re doing is just constantly trying to appease to thin people and their beliefs, we’re not going to change the system that puts down fat people.
A fat person who talks about self-love is easier to love, easier to be respected, easier to be defended and protected against hate. But messages of pure self-love still do nothing to not discriminate fat people.
We shouldn’t cobble thin people by making our messages easier to accept by thin people. Messages of self-love are important but will only get you so far if the additional message is ”you can love yourself but only if your goal is to lose weight”.
That’s not self-love, that’s not revolutionary, that’s literally just another form of saying that fat people should only accept ourselves if our goal is to change our bodies drastically.
A good fatty is a confident fatty who loves themselves but only with the condition of weight-loss. Who doesn’t try to label what fat people experience as oppression.
But the messages are still harmful if the same old oppression is wrapped into a beautiful pink gift box.
