The Wissahickon School District, like others in the region, has been criticized by community members for alleged bias in its teaching of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Where Wissahickon differs, said parent and school board candidate Dan Strauss, is that it took the feedback it received and applied it to the content taught in schools.
Following accusations that some of a unit taught in the Wissahickon Virtual Academy was unfair to Israel, the board held a vote and decided to remove that class from the list of those offered.
“They held a special vote to remove that from the curriculum moving forward,” Strauss said. “It’s important for two reasons — one, it gets that out of the curriculum. But two, Wissahickon is now leading the charge.”
That vote occurred during a special meeting on June 12. The content that members of the community took issue with and that the board voted to dispel was part of the Wissahickon Virtual Academy’s Honors World Studies B course.
Screenshots from the lesson show pages that state that when Israel declared itself an independent nation in 1948, it was based on a U.N. mandate but not supported by other Middle Eastern countries. It mentions “al-Nakba,” the name for the expulsion of Palestianians from the land to make way for Jewish citizens of Israel. An interactive part of the lesson awards a green check for answering “Arabs” to a sentence that starts, “Before the creation of Israel, Palestine was mostly populated by.…”
Strauss said that his issue was largely with the fact that the narratives were one-sided. He said that the content made no mention of the Jewish people’s ties to their homeland or the historical factors that led to international support for the Zionist movement.
“Israel was described as ‘Israeli-occupied’ or ‘Israeli-settled Palestine,’ or just really inflammatory rhetoric,” he said. “I don’t need kids to be indoctrinated that ‘Israel’s great [and] anyone that hates Israel is bad’ — but I do want my kids to grow up being proud of being Jewish.”
Strauss said that by only telling one side of the story, the class was priming students to feel a certain way about the world’s only Jewish state and the many Jews who support it.
Amy Ginsburg, a board member in the district, said that while specifics of the conversation can’t be discussed outside of the board room, all nine members were concerned about the course from the moment it was brought to their attention.
The class was formulated by the Montgomery County Intermediate Unit, or MCIU. An intermediate unit is an educational agency in Pennsylvania that serves different regions of the state and provides various forms of support for schools. There are 29 across the commonwealth.
“During the initial vote, all but one of us voted against the MCIU contract. The one that did not vote against it had concerns about the options that would then be available to students that need a program of this nature — the program being the entire online education program — not just this course. When we reconvened, all voted in favor of the program as a whole, with the understanding this course would be excluded from the curriculum,” Ginsburg said.
The board first debated not using the MCIU course load in totality going forward before deciding to just focus on the issues in that one course.
“Initially, we decided not to move forward with the MCIU contract due to concerns about this material, as we wanted a thorough review of all the materials provided or to seek an alternative provider for the program,” Ginsburg said. “However, after our vote, we realized that a virtual program was essential for students who are unable to attend in person for health or other reasons, and we needed a program in place by July 1. Consequently, the board reconvened for a special meeting and voted to proceed with the MCIU contract, but instructed the administration not to offer the course in question.”
The board has also requested a more thorough review of the entire virtual program to ensure that the information being taught is accurate.
David Bernstein is the CEO of North American Values Institute, which, according to its website, is against “critical pedagogy,” which it says “shifts education away from learning and towards political activism.” In a statement on the Wissahickon curriculum, Bernstein said that the Honors World Studies B course was one-sided.
“Students are asked to ‘describe the Palestinian desire for independence’ without being equally asked to understand the Jewish people’s historical, religious and legal connection to the land or the trauma of centuries of exile culminating in the Holocaust,” he said in a statement. “This framing effectively assigns sole victimhood to one group and erases the legitimate Jewish experience.”
The school board agreed that the content needed to change. Strauss gave public comment in support of removing this part of the curriculum and was pleased that the board heard his, and others’, concerns.
“They held a special vote … and subsequently voted unanimously … to remove that course from the curriculum moving forward,” Strauss said. “They’ll still use the MCIU educational program for their virtual academy, but that course specifically will not be offered to any student within the Wissahickon School District.”
Elsewhere in the area, the School District of Philadelphia was the subject of a federal civil rights investigation that related to a lack of protection for its students in regards to antisemitism, while Lower Merion School District has had intense debates on antisemitism at board meetings in the past year. The issue is not unique to Wissahickon. Strauss said that the unique response, however, can serve as a blueprint for other school districts with similar problems.
“We’re only a couple months out from the attack in Colorado and the Israeli embassy employees being murdered in D.C. — the temperature is rising everywhere in the country,” he said.
