Published on May 1, 2024 in
Book bans and curriculum censorship legislation are the curricular counterpart to voter suppression laws. That’s why during this election year, we’re working to alert everyone that they threaten an informed and engaged democracy and hosting the 4th annual
Teach Truth Day of Action. Whether in your classroom or in the community, please join us to defend the right to teach history and the freedom to learn.
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Published on April 28, 2024 in
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have taken over parts of college campuses across the U.S., the latest in a decades-long string of protests ignited by political activism — some of which have spiraled into violence amid police crackdowns. In the past, free speech sit-ins quickly escalated into massive rallies, Vietnam War college demonstrations turned deadly and U.S. civil rights protests ended in mass arrests, as seen at the Zinn Education Project website. Today’s demonstrators also have specific changes in mind, often involving divestment from Israel, citing the deaths of more than 34,000 Palestinian people who died in Gaza amid Israel’s bombardment and ground assault.
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Published on April 12, 2024 in
The Zinn Education Project’s annual Teach Truth Day of Action, organized throughout the country by ZEP members, brings an increasing number of people together — educators, parents, and community members — to learn about threats to public education and why it matters if curricula are restricted, books are banned, and progressive dissent is silenced. The goal, of course, is to build grassroots opposition to right-wing attacks and support educators.
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Published on January 5, 2024 in
The backlash against Palestine in education isn't just happening in universities. There have also been dozens of educators disciplined at primary and secondary schools across the United States for teaching about the Israeli attack on Gaza. “We’re seeing McCarthy-era levels of repression, not just at universities, but at the K–12 level,” Zinn Education Project co-director Deborah Menkart told Mondoweiss. “Historically we’ve seen that people in power understand the potential impact of young people thinking critically and looking through the lens of history.”
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Published on January 2, 2024 in
The Zinn Education Project, a
website with downloadable lessons and articles about history topics, calls Jan. 6 “an attack on the United States Capitol by an armed
white supremacist mob, determined to block the democratic process” and suggests teachers note examples of white mob violence against Black Americans in the Reconstruction era. Among the suggestions is a link to a lesson that guides students on how to design their own reparations bill “to help them reflect on what a path toward justice might look like today.”
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Published on November 22, 2023 in
While the Israel-Palestine conflict has always been a difficult subject for educators, the recent adoption of policies in some states that limit conversations on topics such as race has added to teachers’ fears about discussing such contested issues, said Deborah Menkart, co-director of the Zinn Education Project, a collaboration between progressive nonprofits Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change.
Those concerns notwithstanding, her colleague Mimi Eisen, program manager at the Zinn Education Project, said teachers can seek to have substantive conversations that, for example, explain the differences between Judaism and Zionism, and between Palestinian people and groups like Hamas.
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Published on September 27, 2023 in
In this episode of the Into the Mix podcast, host and writer Ashley C. Ford examines ongoing book bans in Florida and governor Ron DeSantis’ attempts to silence marginalized voices in Florida classrooms. Ford talks to Andrea Phillips, an elementary school teacher, and Jesse Hagopian, Rethinking Schools editor and Zinn Education Project staff member. “This debate really isn’t about obscenity at all,” Hagopian said. “Education is such a powerful force and it can help young people understand themselves and that can help them transform society, or it can be used to create conformity and impose authority and train young people to believe that they should accept the current inequalities.”
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Published on September 24, 2023 in
Despite the vast majority of parents and members of the public supporting climate change education, the scrutiny has had a chilling effect on some teachers’ and schools’ willingness to address it.
It’s become “a kind of curricular hot potato,” said Bill Bigelow, a former social studies teacher and co-director at the Zinn Education Project who has helped edit and write climate education lessons. Adequate climate education, he said, necessitates coverage in not just science classes but subjects ranging from history to language arts. Yet this interdisciplinary relevance makes it especially dicey. “The standards that states and school districts and teachers adhere to lag behind the consciousness of the crisis,” he said.
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