Teenagers’ digital feeds are filled with graphic images and claims about U.S. immigration enforcement, including civilian deaths in Minneapolis; geopolitical brinkmanship involving Venezuela and Greenland; and ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine. These events arrive on kids’ phones, compressed into memes and clips long before facts are verified or meaning can be made.

At the same time, schools are locked in public conflicts over cellphone and book bans, curriculum restrictions and artificial intelligence policies. In this environment, many educators understandably see avoidance of potentially contentious topics — including and — as a survival strategy. Discussing the war in the Middle East can be read as advocacy. Talking about immigration raids — or even the meaning of the rule of law — can spark backlash. Staying silent often feels safer.

But young people are not waiting for adults to dive in.

They encounter war, political upheaval and social fracture in the same digital spaces where they flirt, joke and pursue their interests. When something trends or becomes a meme, it immediately shows up in group chats, tests friendships and erupts in classrooms as debates over who belongs.

That is the civics problem hiding in plain sight: Young people are learning how public life works — grappling with evidence and the best resolutions to issues, especially when there are disagreements — in environments that reward certainty and spectacle while punishing nuance and humility.

Since 2024, our researchers have studied how young people and educators are navigating this reality. Through in-depth interviews with more than 100 middle and high school students, educators and school leaders in New York City and Southern California, as well as college students and faculty across the country, we examined how young people make sense of contentious events and decide what information to trust, and how digital media shapes their views and relationships. We are releasing those findings in a new report, .

We found that most teens do not hold extreme views but believe their peers are far more polarized than they are. Many care deeply about issues like immigration, antisemitism, racial justice and climate change but worry that what they say will be misunderstood or weaponized.

Young people are also keenly aware that digital environments distort what they see. They know algorithms are not neutral. Some try to block accounts, follow posts with different perspectives and like content on multiple sides of an issue. But they are also teenagers. They want their feeds to be social and affirming. And they can’t fact-check a disappearing clip the way they can revisit a textbook or compare sources side by side.

The result is a corrosive belief that we heard again and again: Nothing is really true. Every claim has a counterclaim. Every source has an agenda. When nothing feels verifiable, cynicism grows — and creates fertile ground for disengagement.

Teens see classrooms as one of the few places where they can slow down, ask real questions and change their minds. But school functions as a counterweight only when adults establish shared evidence standards and structured opportunities to practice disagreement over time.

This is where many schools are falling short — not because educators don’t care, but because they are being asked to improvise under pressure.

Teachers told us they view engaging complex, controversial issues as part of their responsibility to young people, but they fear being perceived as biased or vulnerable to backlash. In today’s climate, classrooms can feel like both a refuge and a pressure cooker.

Too often, the tools teachers reach for are fragmented: a digital literacy lesson that assumes students encounter information mainly through websites; lessons on active listening divorced from content that would require such skills; and content related to social issues that doesn’t match what students see in their feeds. Teens notice when discussions are avoided or abruptly shut down, making them confused and anxious.

If America’s education leaders are serious about civic learning, they cannot keep treating tough topics as extracurricular.

That includes conflicts like Israel-Palestine and the rise in antisemitism and xenophobia — issues that are deeply personal for many students. Our research probed students’ and teachers’ perspectives on teaching about the Middle East conflict because it is a strong example of what happens when young people are pressed to pick a side on a hotly contested topic before they have had time to learn, debate and sit with moral complexity. These challenges are not limited to any one issue; students we interviewed also disclosed how affected they were by other news they encountered first in their feeds, from Charlie Kirk’s assassination to immigration raids by ICE.

Schools cannot resolve geopolitics. But they can teach the habits of mind and heart that democratic life depends on. Our research points to three practical commitments that school systems and education leaders can act on now.

First, make evidence-building a core civic priority — not “my truth” and “your truth,” but shared texts, verifiable sources and clear norms about what counts as evidence, both for in-person discussions and in digital forums, from social media to group chats.

Second, treat discourse as a practice, not a personality trait. Civil discourse is not about being nice. It is a teachable skill set: asking honest questions, acknowledging uncertainty, resisting easy answers, and maintaining peer relationships even in disagreement.

Third, teach tough topics with good guardrails. Avoidance does not protect students; it abandons them to confront challenging issues alone in digital spaces designed to amplify their outrage rather than understanding. What students need are structured opportunities — in classrooms — to slow down, examine evidence and ask hard questions.

Beyond those more immediate changes, teachers need longer-range help in managing rapid technological change — including how the content that students encounter online inevitably spills into the classroom. Schools need AI-driven learning tools that update easily to include current events, designed to help students learn how to transform information into knowledge and disagreements into deeper understanding of one another.

Young people are not asking for perfect adults or painless conversations. They are asking for adults who will not disappear when things get hard.

At a time when public life rewards outrage and withdrawal, schools are one of the last places where young people can be encouraged to lean into the discomfort of talking through their differences long enough to think, listen and better connect with ideas and with one another. That is education’s most urgent calling.

In an effort to address rising incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia, New York City’s Education Department launched an anti-hate hotline, officials said Monday.

The goal is to streamline related to hate, harassment, and discrimination, adding another avenue on top of a four-year-old online portal for all bullying complaints.

The hotline (718-935-2889), staffed with Education Department employees, will be open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday-Friday. Callers can remain anonymous, but the pre-recorded greeting suggests having your student’s ID number or your staff ID number to “expedite your call.”

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“There is zero tolerance for hate in our schools,” incoming Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos said in a statement, “and this new hotline will help ensure incidents are reported and addressed.”

The announcement was part of a suite of initiatives the Education Department highlighted as the city commemorated the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 terror attacks by Hamas on Israel, which killed more than 1,200 people. More than 250 people were taken hostage and Israel’s subsequent attack on Gaza has killed , including many children, and has led to a.

Prior to the new hotline, students and staff members could report incidents with their school or through a bullying portal the department launched in 2020 in response to a

From September to January last school year, the city saw roughly 440 school reports about incidents related to ethnicity or national origin, up about 30% from the same time the year before, . There were nearly 290 reports related to religion, up nearly 78% from the year before.

, according to the annual school surveys. About 40% of the middle and high school students who responded to the survey reported seeing harassment based on race, ethnicity, religion, or immigration status, up from 30% in 2019.

Many people had been asking the Education Department to create a hotline or dedicated way to specifically report hate-rated incidents, including , who faced a raucous student protest over her support of Israel in the aftermath of the attacks on Oct. 7, 2023.

Marder recently sued the city for failing to protect her before students began marching in the hallways, calling for her ouster. She has, however, remained at the school — she now helps oversee student discipline as one of the school’s deans — and has been heartened that the new school year has started off relatively calm under a new principal. She spent much of the past year calling on outgoing schools Chancellor David Banks to create a hotline like the one that was just launched.

“I’m very happy they are finally doing this though it shouldn’t have taken a year,” she told Chalkbeat.

As , the Education Department’s Office of Safety and Prevention Partnerships expected to deploy additional staffers to public schools on Monday, officials said. And ahead of Oct. 7, Education Department officials sent reminders to principals about the role of schools to create safe spaces for students to engage with current events — but in ways that ensure schools don’t take political stances, officials said. Students have previously complained that

Additionally, the Education Department this fall is offering new anti-discrimination staff training with a specific focus on antisemitism and Islamophobia. The city’s Hidden Voices curriculum — which focuses on historical figures whose stories seldom get told — is expected to release installments by the end of the school year on Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans, and the city is encouraging of different cultures and their histories. The school system’s is continuing to meet this year, as a way to demonstrate to students how to build bridges across different groups.

This story was originally published by . Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at . 

Maud Maron, who New York City Schools removed for “derogatory conduct” in June, can now resume her post on lower Manhattan’s coveted District 2 council. She has also been criticized for making anti-transgender comments against students. 

In her ruling, federal judge Diane Gujarati also deemed the New York City Department of Education’s  anti-harassment policy — which was used to remove Maron — “chilled … expression” and likely violates the First Amendment because of its vague language.

The policy, D-210, is so unclear that it prevents “a person of ordinary intelligence – before such person is subject to investigation” from understanding what conduct is prohibited, the judge wrote.

Schools Chancellor David Banks removed Maron for comments made in the New York Post in which she called an anonymous Stuyvesant High School student author a “coward” and accused them of “Jew hatred” for an op-ed accusing Israel of genocide in Palestine in the student paper.

In December, a 74 investigation revealed Maron also said in a private chat that, “there is no such thing as trans kids,” among other disparaging remarks. In response, Banks called Maron’s behavior “despicable” but did not include the anti-trans comments in documents outlining her removal. 

In a text, Maron told ����Ӱ�� Wednesday she was reinstated because, “free speech still means something in this country. The people who voted for me won today because they were also deprived of their voice by the Chancellor’s unconstitutional decision.”

The judge’s decision was issued after Maron and two other parents sued the Department of Education, the education council for District 14 and its leadership for allegedly stifling their speech. Gujarti’s decision granted an injunction to stop the DOE from enforcing the anti-discrimination policy via removing council members. Their .

Department of Education officials said Gujarati’s decision makes it more difficult to safeguard children. 

“We are disappointed by a ruling that limits our ability to protect students from harmful conduct by parent leaders. Even prior to the court’s ruling, we began reviewing the applicable Chancellor’s regulation and are preparing to propose revisions and initiate our public engagement process,” said spokesman Nathaniel Styer. 

The department, Styer added, is reviewing the ruling for “next steps” and will continue to support district councils in complying with the law. 

Gujarati’s ruling did not call for the reinstatement of Tajh Sutton, who is the only other parent to be removed from a district council post after a D-210 investigation, because it is a separate case. Gujarati’s ruling stated that there is no proper request before the Court to “identically extend” Maron’s relief to Sutton and therefore “is not addressed herein.” 

Sutton, formerly president of Williamsburg’s District 14 council, was removed after their official X account posted a toolkit for a student walkout for a ceasefire in Gaza.  DOE officials said the materials were “perceived by many community members as anti-Israel and antisemitic.” 

As also reported by the , Sutton moved her district’s meetings online to limit threats – which included being mailed an envelope of human feces and death threats –  which the department later said violated open meeting laws. CEC 14’s official X account also blocked Maron. Both actions were categorized in Gujarati’s ruling as limiting free speech. 

Ultimately, “the judge upheld the right to free speech even if that speech is offensive,” said David Bloomfield, former DOE counsel and professor of education law with Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. 

He added the ruling doesn’t justify the “odious” statements made, rather their right to be said in the first place, and that the system likely knew this was a possibility but would “rather be slapped down by a court than allow [Maron’s] behavior to persist.” 

“The First Amendment guarantees a marketplace of ideas,” Bloomfield said. “When the government intrudes on that, it’s hard to defend.” 

In the first move of its kind, the nation’s largest school district removed two prominent elected parent leaders from community education councils after controversial rhetoric against transgender students and student advocacy for Palestine.

Elected to serve two-year terms on the city’s closest equivalent to school boards, parents Maud Maron and Tajh Sutton were removed Friday from lower Manhattan’s District 2 council and northern Brooklyn’s District 14, respectively. 

Maron appeared in court June 18, seeking an injunction and reinstatement, alleging the Chancellor’s decision was a violation of free speech. The Education Council Consortium, a parent advocacy organization, has demanded Sutton’s reinstatement and criticized the Chancellor for equivalating Maron and Sutton. 

“It is a sad day when New York City Public Schools is compelled to take the actions I have ordered today, but the violations committed by these two individuals have made them unfit to serve in these roles,” Schools Chancellor David Banks said in the Friday press release announcing the removals. 

In closing their statement denouncing Sutton’s removal, the Education Council Consortium said, “it is indeed a ‘sad day’ when New York City Public Schools uncovers a new way to further erode any confidence in this administration.”

A December investigation by ����Ӱ�� previously revealed Maron said in a private chat that, “there is no such thing as trans kids.” Banks categorized her remarks as “despicable” and promised to take action. By March, a petition to remove her from Stuyvesant High School’s school leadership team for “bigotry” amassed more than 700 signatures. In April, the DOE ordered her to cease “derogatory” conduct. 

For months, parents and city leaders condemned Maron for leading a push to re-examine the city’s guidelines for trans students’ participation in sports, and for calling an anonymous student author a “coward,” accusing them of “Jew hatred,” for an op-ed accusing Israel of genocide. 

Across the East River, Sutton was subject to investigation for supporting a student walkout for a ceasefire in Gaza, including posting a digital toolkit and protest chants. In the letter listing his reasons for removing her, Banks said the materials shared by Sutton were “perceived by many community members as anti-Israel and antisemitic.”  

The reported Sutton, then the president and only Black member of District 14 council, had support from many families in her district who believe she was “unfairly targeted” for her advocacy for Palestine and that the DOE did little to safeguard her council against death threats. Sutton said she was also mailed an envelope of human feces. 

In a recent op-ed in the , Maron defended her actions and revealed Banks’s “official” reasoning for her removal pointed to the comments made against the anonymous student author. “But the real reason the Chancellor wants to remove me is because the Democratic establishment in New York City is furious because I know the difference between male and female and am willing to say so in polite company.” she wrote. 

In the letter issuing Sutton’s removal, Banks alleged Sutton violated open meetings laws for moving council meetings online, a decision she maintains was made over safety concerns after violent threats and multiple police reports, for which the DOE offered to provide additional NYPD officers at in-person meetings. 

Sutton told ����Ӱ�� she was never questioned by the DOE’s equity council for the alleged OML violations, only regarding her advocacy. state that videoconferencing or hybrid meetings may be permitted under “extraordinary circumstances,” and do not state that violations may result in removal. 

“If we were so out of compliance, why did you wait until June to remove me?” Sutton said. “Because you were waiting for Maron’s situation to get so hot that you could remove us together, so you could pretend that what I did is equal to what she did.”  

David Bloomfield, an education law professor with Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center, believes it was no accident Maron and Sutton were removed simultaneously, and questioned the precedent set for free speech. 

“He seems to be treating them as similar situations and trying to balance the scales by removing a left wing member and a right wing member,” said Bloomfield.

While he did not question Banks’s legal right to remove Maron and Sutton, Bloomfield charged the precedent set is, “precisely what the First Amendment is supposed to protect against, which is the chilling of speech and particularly of political speech.” 

Maron is one of three plaintiffs Sutton, Banks and District 14’s council for violating the First Amendment and suppressing parent voices. She has recently launched a consultancy group called ThirdRail, which promises to “help neutralize counterproductive DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] initiatives” and build “flourishing workplaces where ideas – not ideologies – inspire strategy.” 

With just a few hours remaining until the midnight deposit deadline, West Virginia high school senior Sam Dodson thought he knew which university he’d commit to for the fall but second thoughts were bubbling up. Accepted to a number of prestigious institutions, he had narrowed his final choice down to two: Columbia University and Dartmouth College.

There were multiple considerations at play: academic opportunities; social life; Manhattan’s Upper West Side vs. bucolic Hanover, New Hampshire. And over the past few weeks a new one had emerged: the quickly spreading pro-Palestinian campus protests and subsequent arrests for which Columbia was ground zero.

Dodson was one of these students, watching closely as protesters occupying Columbia’s Hamilton Hall were cleared from the building Tuesday by the New York Police Department.. 

“All of that made me wait until kind of the last minute to officially decide,” the track runner told ����Ӱ��.

The class of 2024 has had a high school experience bookended by jarring national news, their freshman year coinciding with school shutdowns and COVID-era virtual learning and their senior year ending amid a volatile movement protesting Israel’s assault in Gaza that has swept up dozens of colleges and brought over 2,000 arrests, according to a tally. As seniors weigh options for their future universities, some are looking to the actions of college student activists and the responses of their respective administrations before making final decisions.

“I do think that all of the turmoil and things that are going on definitely had me reconsidering. It had me having second thoughts about different things and had me, I guess, take second looks at different schools,” Dodson said. “But ultimately I guess I tried to look past anything with that and understand that this is a choice I’m making for the next four years and what I think would be the best experience for me — academically, personally, in terms of just student life. All of those things.”

Dodson’s experiences are reflective of as well. Safa Al-Omari, a senior at NYC’s The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology told she is still deciding between City College and Hunter College. The Yemeni student said she wants to do more research about City College’s response to the protests before she commits.

“Being Middle Eastern, I have a lot of feelings about what’s going on,” Al-Omari said. “I would not want to go to a college that is arresting students based on them speaking for people who are suffering.”

For Sam Dodson’s mom, Sarah, there were also conflicting emotions. “It’s very hard to put the ‘yes’ when you have a lot of … chaos,” she said. While she said her son was drawn to the diversity of perspectives on Columbia’s campus, the more heated elements of the past few weeks have given him pause. At the same time, she emphasized the importance of being in a higher education space where free speech is strongly respected and encouraged. 

“You never want your kid to go to a school that is on the national news because of police involvement, right? It just doesn’t sit really well,” she said. “However, I guess I am under the assumption that there’s going to be resolution … I’m guessing because this is a college platform that they are going to hopefully have more engaging, open conversations so that there can be some sort of — I don’t know — persistence of everyday campus life that is not so inflamed.”

For now, all academic activities on Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus — including finals — have been moved fully remote for the remainder of the semester. On May 6, the school to cancel the university-wide commencement scheduled for May 15 and instead focus on school-level graduation ceremonies. The NYPD had been asked to maintain a police presence until two days after the main commencement; it was not immediately clear how the cancellation might impact that.

Sam Dodson, who began his freshman year of high school in hybrid learning, said it would be frustrating if his first year of college classes also goes remote because of campus unrest. On the other hand, “there’s something interesting about being in the center of the news or the center of exactly what’s happening.” 

Students reconsider and recommit

It was about two week after pro-Palestinian students and activists on Columbia’s campus first erected the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that a group occupied Hamilton Hall, a building with a long history of . Hours later, the cops moved in, arresting, 112 people, including 32 who were not affiliated with the university. 

By this point, the movement had spread across the country, including to Dodson’s other contender, Dartmouth, where nearly were arrested this week. About a week and half before that escalation, Columbia hosted its accepted students weekend and Dodson was there. 

He took some time, he said, to wander around campus and speak with protesting students near the encampment. “They were like, ‘Hey, new Columbia students. Come talk to us!’ You know, I guess, they were very like welcoming. They were very much wanting to talk with the admitted students, which I thought was a nice thing.”

While he was disappointed that many of the accepted student weekend activities had been canceled or modified, he was grateful he got to experience the events on campus firsthand and form his own views.   

Around the same time, another high school senior Lila Ellis, who uses they/ them pronouns, was also closely observing the activities on Columbia’s campus. A Jewish student from Massachusetts, they had committed months before to the dual-degree joint program between Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Ellis said that because of their religion, they’re concerned there are certain places on campus they won’t be welcomed. “I think that to just stay away from all secular extracurriculars entirely, is a disservice to myself and to the community as a whole,” they said. “And I’m just thinking about, like, how am I going to balance that while also, you know, recognizing that some spaces don’t want me in them?”

Ellis pointed to the example of a protester outside the gates of campus , “Go back to Poland,” at Jewish students. Recently, a January video of one of the student protest leaders, Khymani James, began circulating in which he said, “be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” He has since been barred from campus and released a of apology. 

Notably, as reported by , protests within the encampment were on the whole peaceful and included Jewish students, though others on campus agreed with Ellis that anti-Zionist rhetoric made them feel unwelcomed. 

While Ellis is sticking with their decision to attend Columbia, they did briefly toy with the idea of a gap year or of moving core curriculum requirements around to stay away from the main campus for a while. 

“I really do want to be in this program,” they said, “And it’s just a matter of thinking about ‘How do we make that work with what’s happening at Columbia?’ rather than ‘Can it work?’ Because I think it can work.” 

As Ellis prepares to enroll for classes — especially literature overview courses on Columbia’s campus — they’re considering a number of factors including whether or not the professors taught from the encampment. 

“Hopefully,” they said, “it’s not an issue in the fall, but just thinking about who were the professors who were willing to do that? And is that an environment that I want to be in for learning and for having an open discussion?”

Their father, Andy Ellis, added his own apprehension. All parents, he said, are nervous to send their first child off to college. But the protests on campus, he said, add an extra dimension, especially for a Jewish student. 

Ellis, a graduate of MIT, has spent significant time in higher education. He said he was on a Harvard visiting committee and in an academic center there for the last decade but resigned from both positions in October, “when it became clear that people were ripping off their mask around anti-semitism.” 

He said that if he were a current student on Columbia’s campus, he would be on the front lines of the counter-protests, displaying footage from Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel.

“I think I would be that person,” the consultant said, “But I know that Lila is not that person. But I also know that Lila is not going to just duck [their]head and stay completely quiet, but I think find a balanced view. Listening to what Lila said about, you know, ‘find the humanity’ is an amazing, generous take. I’m really proud that I think we’ve created somebody who has a better moral compass than I do because I’m a lot more angry.”

Back in West Virginia and with time to spare before Wednesday’s midnight deadline, Dodson had finalized his decision: He committed to be a member of the class of 2028 at Columbia where he plans to study political science and government. 

“I think it’ll just be interesting,” he said, ”to go from — to take my perspective from this kind of small town area where like, I mean, I’ve met people from other places. I try to read, I try to keep myself exposed to those things, but it’d be cool to actually meet people from all sorts of perspectives and all sorts of backgrounds.”

So it’s perhaps piling on at this point to note that, a century ago, the profoundly antisemitic beliefs of Harvard’s leaders built the cradle that nurtured the much-reviled college admissions essay. Eliminating it now in 2024 would be a concrete and dramatic repudiation of Harvard’s troubled past — and makes even more sense in the wake of last summer’s Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. Which Harvard also lost.

But first, some history. In the summer of 1922, President Lawrence Lowell told Langdon Marvin, a Harvard Overseer, that “apart from the Jews.” the university’s admissions method was working well. As Jerome Karabel explained in The Chosen, the problem wasn’t the process but the outcome: Too many of the wrong type of men were getting in. By 1925, when 28% of the class was Jewish, Harvard’s leaders feared the environment was so poisoned that Anglo-Saxon Protestants would no longer enroll their sons.

Marvin suggested adopting a “character standard,” like the Rhodes scholarship used, to halt “.”  So in 1926, Harvard added a personal essay that could be scrutinized to assess the applicant’s fit. 

Given Harvard’s prominence and influence, the essay soon became a fixed feature of the application at other Ivies, and eventually, universally. The Jewish population quickly fell to a more manageable 15% where it stayed until the 1950s.

Around 1975 Harvard decided that Asian kids with great grades and elite test scores were the new problem. Thankfully, application readers — like at many other elite universities — could scrutinize prospective students’ essays for additional evidence. When the plaintiffs in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case reviewed 160,000 student files they discovered — who’d have guessed it? — that on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” the University’s application readers gave Asian student of any ethnic group.

In last summer’s affirmative action decision, the court ruled unconstitutional the use of racial preferences in college admissions, putting the personal statement back in the news. In its decision, the court pointed admissions officers to a narrow path they could walk in finding evidence of an applicants’ merit from her essay. But the court’s discussion only served to underline, a century later, the essay’s subjective and fundamentally discriminatory purpose.

As any parent of a high school senior can tell you, the admissions essay is a nightmare. With the rare exception of the University of Chicago, which puts its prompts to a student vote, the topics are solipsistic and encourage applicants to stretch their experiences to the limits of credibility. Since everyone knows they’re being scrutinized unfairly, writing the personal statement becomes a metacognitive exercise in guessing what College X wants, while being told to “be yourself.” Brilliant advice for stressed out 17-year-olds emerging from puberty and trying to define themselves, by acting just like their peers.

For some the process involves hiring “counselors” who “advise” the student on how best to tell their story. High schools devote class time to helping students prepare their essays. Time that might be spent discussing actual literature, which suggest just six percent of high school graduates can do really well.

Less advantaged children tell of the or oppression to catch the eye of the application reader. Perceval Everett’s 2001 dark satire Erasure — which just netted an Oscar for best adaptation — cleverly captures the zeitgeist.

Evidence that the three data points most predictive of a student’s success in college are their high school GPA, the challenge of their course load, and their standardized test scores. In a misguided effort to increase diversity, many colleges stopped requiring test scores, but seeing the results, are now reversing course.

To the extent that colleges believe a student’s grades in English or history do not confirm his or her writing ability, they could require a graded essay from one of their junior year classes. It would be far more insightful – and less subjective than the recommendations that are the bane of many teachers’ existence. (And yes, Harvard also invented the recommendation letter as another way to ensure their students were “the right sort.”)

As we approach the 100^th anniversary of Harvard’s spawning of a racist tool to discriminate, while not appearing to do so, it would be a real sign of contrition were the leadership in Cambridge to announce they are jettisoning this shameful legacy. Apart from atoning for their own original sin, this would make it safe for other schools to follow Harvard’s example. As Harvard Law grad Joseph Welch once said, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

founded the International Charter School in Brooklyn and writes frequently on education.

listed the conditions necessary for a bilateral ceasefire, including the release of Israeli hostages and the provision of more humanitarian aid. It excoriated Hamas, both for its Oct. 7 terrorist assault and the brutal repression suffered by Gazans under its control, as well as the Netanyahu government for obstructing the possibility of a two-state solution. Further criticism was reserved for antisemitism, Islamophobia and the attempted censorship of dissenting views.

The document was notable for its timing as well as its substance. By the end of January, a growing number of union affiliates and leaders had already made similar pronouncements, though often voiced in much harsher terms. 

Becky Pringle, speaking for the National Education Association’s three million members, demanded a permanent truce on December 8 — a position by the organization’s board of directors. In mid-November, Israel’s military campaign violated the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights, but made no mention of the Oct. 7 attacks or the captivity of over 200 hostages. And in early December, a pro-Palestinian by Oakland Education Association members who developed special lesson plans the local school board.

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, AFT president Randi Weingarten said her union’s process moved more slowly in order to build support. Study groups were held to gather the views of internal constituencies, including the organization’s . Partly in order to gain the unanimous backing of its 43-member executive council, she acknowledged, drafting the resolution “took some time.”

“Early on, it was hard to have a real conversation…because it was so fractured,” Weingarten said. 

Four months after the events of Oct. 7, significant political fractures still cleave the labor movement, both within organizations and between unions and their allies in the Democratic Party. Several of the resolutions have been rejected by members as , or even , and while President Biden is now toward a six-week ceasefire, he with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or significantly altered his administration’s stance on the effort to capture or kill Hamas’s leaders. The division threatens to influence the outcome of the 2024 elections, with a faction of NEA members the union’s endorsement of Biden against Donald Trump. 

Those dissenters will almost certainly fail, and Israel’s armed incursion may culminate long before November. But while the war is unlikely to directly unseat Biden, it is a reflection of fissures on the left that very well might. suggests that many Americans favor a ceasefire, but also that Democrats are much more divided than Republicans on whether the U.S. should continue to support its closest ally in the Middle East. That divide is both a product of long-term political trends and a potent short-term threat.

Michael Hartney, a political science professor at Boston College and fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution, said that the decision to take a stance on something as controversial as the Gaza war illustrated how the currents of polarization could determine the course of even formidable political actors: Though distant from the day-to-day priorities of nonprofit and activist groups, hot-button issues like Israel have become central to the political identity of many members and have gradually become boxes that such organizations must check.

“I think it’s due to the changing landscapes of the incentives facing these interest groups,” Hartney said. “For them to fundraise and be influential, they basically have to pick a team.”

Rise in pro-Palestinian sentiment

Teachers unions, and particularly the AFT, have previously been involved in organizing and advocacy in the Middle East. Just two days before Hamas attacked Israel in October, Weingarten — a Jew who has made multiple trips to Israel during her nearly 16-year tenure as the Federation’s president — , a liberal nonprofit that lobbies politicians on American-Israeli relations and security priorities. Her counterpart, the NEA’s Pringle, of schools in Israel and the Palestinian territories last year.

But the posture of some groups within the labor movement as criticisms of Netanyahu’s leadership and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank have grown louder on the left. In 2021, following an outburst of violence in East Jerusalem that left hundreds dead, the United Educators of San Francisco became America’s first teachers’ union supporting the “boycott, divest, and sanction” [BDS] movement, a contentious project Israel. United Teachers Los Angeles, representing 30,000 school employees in America’s second-largest district, debated a similar measure before .

At the same time, perceptions of Israel have become more divided in U.S. politics overall. In public opinion surveys long predating the violence of the last few months, younger Americans have been to directly blame Israel for its periodic clashes with Hamas, and people between the ages of 18 and 29 to Palestinians than Israelis in the wake of Oct. 7. 

Jack Jennings, a former longtime Democratic staffer in the U.S. House, said the emerging generation gap was largely explained by the country’s changing demographics, which have seen in the number of students of Middle Eastern origin. Both Jewish and Muslim Americans have tended to vote Democratic in recent elections, but the mounting salience of Israeli-Palestinian conflict had generated tension that was being felt “first in the classroom,” Jennings said.

“What has caused this change, and caused the local unions to adopt these resolutions, is that the number of Muslims in the country has doubled” , Jennings said. “When the teacher opens her door on Monday morning, she may have five Palestinians in there.”

Weingarten has generally attempted to in the public debate, while also opposing BDS resolutions and as a “progressive Zionist.” The AFT resolution appeared to reflect that nuance, leaving out the invocations of Israeli “genocide” or “settler colonial violence” seen in the rhetoric of some other teachers’ unions.

David Dorn, who headed the AFT’s International Affairs division for decades before retiring 10 years ago, applauded the resolution as one of the best he had seen from an advocacy group. During his time with the union, he remembered, he had found the work of drafting such documents “hard and boring.”

“They mean nothing. It’s a piece of paper that is usually forgotten 24 hours later,” Dorn lamented. “But that was a good resolution, and maybe she can have the union play a good role under the circumstances.”

Dorn represents a tradition of international activism within the labor movement that helped shape geopolitics throughout the 20th century, but isn’t well remembered today.

Under the , who led the AFT from 1974 to 1997, the union energetically worked to bolster democratic movements and labor rights throughout the world. Its maneuverings were sometimes controversial, as when the stridently anticommunist Shanker and his allies Nicaragua’s far-left Sandinista government in the 1980s. But even decades later, the AFT still touts its work to in Poland and challenge apartheid rule in South Africa.

The fall of Soviet Communism — along with the passing from the scene of Shanker and other internationally minded figures at the AFL-CIO — led to a decline in unions’ outreach overseas, Dorn said. Weingarten “wasn’t really steeped in that tradition” to the extent of her predecessors, he added, and many organizational leaders are now more focused on sustaining their membership at home.

“Going to conferences or making statements is one thing, but I don’t see many unions using their own resources and grants” to effect change abroad, Dorn said. “It’s too bad, but life goes on, and the Cold War is over.” 

While acknowledging that the AFT has been “more limited” in the range of its international involvement over the last few years, Weingarten said the union still played a robust role promoting issues of democracy and self-determination on the world stage. After Weingarten made a 2022 visit to Ukraine, for example, the Federation and partnered with a Polish teachers’ union to deliver them to schools affected by Russia’s attacks on the country’s power grid.

“Other unions have really ratcheted down, but we’ve always had an international department,” Weingarten said.

Post-Janus realignment

What the spate of ceasefire resolutions will accomplish — and what they signify for a labor movement that has attained more prominence in recent years even as it has — remains to be seen.

Some have , at a time when schools are faced with expiring COVID relief funds and students experience profound learning challenges, their designated bargaining representatives are staking their credibility on a conflict unfolding thousands of miles away. Others are distressed that their organizations haven’t gone farther to demonstrate opposition to Israel’s actions.

William Galston, a veteran scholar at the Brookings Institution who has previously advised Democratic presidential candidates, observed that unions weren’t the only political players to comment outside of their traditional areas of interest. With the members of America’s ideological camps increasingly converging toward shared preferences — such that the AFT, the Sierra Club, and Planned Parenthood share many of the same donors and preferred candidates on the left, while NRA and Americans for Prosperity do so on the right — groups that previously organized around a relatively narrow slate of issues are under more pressure to demonstrate their adherence to a party line.

“They used to be more narrowly focused on occupational issues, but for purposes of coalition maintenance, unions and other activist organizations are called upon to take positions on a very wide range of issues,” Galston said.

The Hoover Institution’s Hartney offered an additional theory. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME, the case that forbade public sector unions from extracting fees from non-members, those organizations were left with a choice: quiet their political activities to attract more potential members, or tie themselves closer to Democratic politics to further engage their most enthusiastic organizers. While potentially polarizing, he said, the second course might be more workable in the short run.

“It’s possible that they’re doubling down on appealing to their true believers by making them feel extra valued,” Hartney said. “Maybe they can get double the PAC donations from true believers to offset the fact that they’ll get zero support from the marginal person who can leave post-Janus.”

Even so, there is a risk of significant downside in any position that leaves daylight between national entities like AFT and the Biden White House, especially in an election year in which all segments of the Democratic coalition will be called on to help reelect the president. Polling continues to suggest that Biden’s stance on the war is , and a union-led opposition to Israel’s operations in Gaza could highlight that faultline.

Weingarten said she was unconcerned about the possibility of a split between her union and the president, pointing to Biden’s and Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s furious efforts to contingent on hostage releases. Notwithstanding the substantive differences between that policy and activists’ hope of a more lasting peace, she added, key officials are “very much involved in attempting to get to a ceasefire.”

“There’s a big difference between what the president of the United States can say publicly and what the president of the United States operationalizes privately.”

Amid reports of heightened antisemitism and Islamophobia in schools and colleges since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, a senior Education Department official said the agency has received a “huge, huge influx” of civil rights complaints that have led to a surge in federal investigations. 

Since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists on Israel and the subsequent bombing and invasion of Gaza by the Israeli military, the into schools’ and colleges’ responses to complaints of discrimination based on shared ancestry, which includes antisemitism and Islamophobia. 

Of the new investigations, the senior official told ����Ӱ��, 19 are in response to conduct that unfolded in schools in the last two months alone. Of the incidents since Oct. 7 that are now under investigation, 17 took place on college campuses. 

Last fiscal year, by contrast, the office opened 28 shared ancestry investigations over the entire 12-month period. The year before, there were just 15. Such inquiries seek to determine whether schools adequately respond to incidents that create hostile learning environments in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, ethnicity or national origin. 

“We are deeply concerned about the incidents that we’ve seen reported in schools all over the country, and about the safety of students, and the protection of non-discrimination rights for students in P-12 schools as well as in institutions of higher education,” Catherine Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in an interview Wednesday with ����Ӱ��. “We’re very, very concerned about what we’re seeing in schools.”

Though officials declined to comment on the specifics of active federal investigations, a spike in reported antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents in and outside of schools have convulsed the nation and elevated student safety concerns. 

Near Louisiana’s Tulane University, a clash between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel and police are investigating a as a potential hate crime targeting an Arab Muslim student. At Rutgers University, officials chapter following claims the group disrupted classes and vandalized campus. At Harvard University, a rabbi to hide the campus menorah each night of Hanukkah due to vandalism fears. In California, a with involuntary manslaughter and battery after an alleged physical altercation broke out at a demonstration that led to the death of a Jewish protester. 

Outside of schools, police said a 6-year-old Chicago boy was in an alleged anti-Muslim attack, and in Burlington, Vermont, three college while walking down a sidewalk over Thanksgiving weekend. 

The escalating confrontations have embroiled school leaders, who have been criticized for failing to clamp down on hate speech and discrimination. Just days after in Washington about rising antisemitism on college campuses, Elizabeth Magill resigned as University of Pennsylvania president. She and the presidents of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were accused of being equivocating and evasive after giving carefully worded replies to repeated questions about whether calling for the “genocide of Jews” violated their schools’ code of conduct. Magill responded that it’s “a context-dependent decision,” underscoring school leaders’ obligations to ensure safe learning environments while protecting people’s free speech rights. 

Harvard University President Tuesday after facing similar scrutiny for her testimony at the congressional hearing and unrelated plagiarism allegations.

Of the 29 active federal Title VI investigations opened since Oct. 7, just eight are focused on incidents in K-12 schools — including at three of the nation’s 10 largest districts. Among them are the New York City Department of Education, the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Hillsborough County Schools in Tampa, Florida, and the Cobb County School District in suburban Atlanta.

Though the circumstances prompting the investigations remain unknown, many of the institutions included on the Education Department’s list of active investigations have experienced high-profile incidents involving discrimination. 

In New York City, a raucous, and prompted a lockdown after a teacher posted a picture of herself at a pro-Israel rally on social media. Also turning to social media, one student said the teacher “is going to be executed in the town square,” and another promoted “a riot” against her. 

In suburban Atlanta, the Cobb County School District sparked controversy following the Hamas attack to the school community that warned of an “international threat,” noting that “while there is no reason to believe this threat has anything to do with our schools, parents can expect both law enforcement and school staff to take every step to keep your children safe.” Because of the message, several Muslim parents said their children had become the targets of Islamophobic bullying. 

In , the civil rights office highlighted hypothetical instances that put school districts at odds with their Title VI obligations. Among them: A Jewish student is targeted by his peers with swastikas and Nazi salutes but his teacher tells him to “just ignore it” without taking steps to address the harassment. Another example involves school officials failing to remedy a Muslim student’s complaints that she was called a “terrorist” and told “you started 9/11.”

Even before the most recent conflict between Hamas and Israel, law enforcement agencies across the U.S. have reported an uptick in hate crimes over the last several years, including on campuses. 

Reported hate crimes surged 7% between 2021 and 2022, released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in October, including a 36% increase in anti-Jewish incidents — which accounted for more than half of incidents based on religion. Among all reported hate crimes, 10% occurred at K-12 schools and colleges.

The Education Department last month released its most recent Civil Rights Data Collection, the first since the pandemic. Students reported 42,500 harassment allegations during the 2020-21 school year, including bullying on the basis of sex, race, sexual orientation, disability and religion. Of those, 29% involved harassment or bullying on the basis of race while only a sliver — 3% — involved students saying they were targeted because of their religion. 

The current climate has put Jewish college students on edge, according to , a nonprofit focused on eradicating antisemitism. Since the beginning of the academic year, 73% of Jewish college students said they’ve been witness to antisemitism. Prior to this school year, 70% reported experiencing antisemitism throughout their entire college experience. Yet just 30% of Jewish college students said their college administration has taken sufficient steps to address anti-Jewish prejudice. 

During a televised interview on MSNBC Friday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said he thought conditions would improve on college campuses for Jewish students because the Title VI investigations now being launched by the Education Department would force college administrators to take action. 

Muslim Americans of all ages have similarly . In a two-week period between Oct. 7 and Oct. 24, reports of bias incidents and requests for help at the Council on American-Islamic Relations surged 182% from the average 16-day period in 2022. 

As lawmakers call on school leaders to take a stronger stance against hate speech, they’ve faced pushback from free speech advocates. Earlier this month, New York of “aggressive enforcement action” if they failed to discipline students “calling for the genocide of any group of people.” In a statement, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a right-leaning nonprofit focused on students’ free speech rights, said Hochul’s admonition “cannot be squared with the First Amendment.”  

“Colleges and universities can and should punish ‘calls for genocide’ when such speech falls into one of the narrowly defined categories of unprotected speech, including true threats, incitement and discriminatory harassment,” the group said in the statement. “But broad, vague bans on ‘calls for genocide,’ absent more, would result in the censorship of protected expression.”

The senior Education Department official said that schools must “navigate carefully” their obligations under Title VI and the First Amendment. Even if a student’s speech is protected, the official said, school leaders still have an obligation to uphold all students’ nondiscrimination rights.

“What concerns me is when a school community throws up its hands and says, ‘This speech is protected and so there’s nothing more for us here,’” said Lhamon, the assistant secretary for civil rights. “That may be true, but that’s only true where a hostile environment isn’t created that the school needs to respond to.”