4 minSociety
Parents in Philadelphia had to turn to Congress to see school curriculum
A House congressional report on Philadelphia's social studies curriculum has revealed materials that parents were denied access to, prompting a call for schools to make instructional materials public.
Philadelphia parents who noticed troubling signs in their children's social studies curriculum asked to see all the materials and were unable to obtain them. Those materials have now come to light through a congressional investigation. A new majority staff report from the House Education and Workforce Committee documents how a small group of school personnel turned the curriculum into what the report describes as a political platform for extremist causes.
The North American Values Institute, an advocacy organization, said it was approached by the parents and also struggled to learn what the district was teaching. Eventually a teacher shared the curriculum on the condition that her anonymity be protected. The author of the piece argues that the episode alone should give pause: a teacher feared sharing public school instructional materials with people seeking to understand what children were learning.
According to the congressional report, one world history assignment asked students to honor a resistance movement, including the Great March of Return, a series of demonstrations along the Gaza-Israel border that the terrorist organization Hamas supported and that involved violent confrontation. Another exercise asked students to identify the United States and Israel as terrorist states. The author notes that students should study political movements, including violent ones, and hear competing views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American foreign policy, but that asking students to honor a particular movement crosses from studying it to celebrating it.
Philadelphia superintendent Tony Watlington maintained that the curriculum did not indoctrinate students. He told investigators he was unaware that it included materials from the Racial Justice Organizing Committee, a highly ideological group led by district employees. The district told investigators it would stop having district teachers and administrators write social studies curricula and would standardize instruction with help from national experts. It also said it had placed its social studies curriculum director, Ismael Jimenez, who celebrated the October 7 massacres, in termination proceedings.
The author calls this an important first step but argues that replacing personnel will accomplish little if the curriculum remains shielded from public view. Without access, curriculum disputes become contests of credibility, with administrators assuring parents that lessons are balanced while critics point to single passages from individual assignments. Officials say such claims have been taken out of context.
The piece recommends that districts publish curriculum guides, reading lists, assignments and supplementary resources on searchable websites, identify the outside organizations providing content and the officials who approve it, and make changes visible when materials are revised. The same standard, the author argues, should apply to teacher professional development, since families deserve to know what schools encourage teachers to teach their children. Most of these materials already exist electronically, the author notes, so districts could make them accessible without producing elaborate new reports.
The author acknowledges that access will produce disagreements but argues that this is a feature of public accountability, in which school boards can hear objections, weigh evidence and defend instructional choices. Publishing a curriculum, the piece says, does not give every parent veto power over teaching, but it makes informed oversight possible. Congress, the author concludes, can investigate only a few districts, so parents and school boards need the means to scrutinize their own schools every day.
6
