California Demands Oakland Schools Make Sweeping Changes Over Antisemitism Complaints

The California Department of Education has demanded that Oakland’s school district take sweeping corrective actions over allegations of antisemitism on campuses, as schools across the country grapple with how to teach about the war in Gaza.

In a decision of appeal issued last week, the department said it found antisemitic discrimination within the Oakland Unified School District on multiple occasions over the past two years. The determination stemmed from a number of discrimination complaints over Palestinian flags and pro-Palestinian posters hung in schools, communications sent by district staff encouraging a ceasefire, and pro-Palestinian curriculum educators created and taught.

“School districts should be nonpolitical,” said Oakland attorney Marleen Sacks, who has filed a number of the complaints that predicated the CDE decision. “Students should be taught how to think and not what to think. And that’s not what’s going on in OUSD.”

Sacks and the advocacy group Oakland Jewish Alliance have alleged that since the beginning of the war in Gaza in 2023, there has been ongoing pro-Palestinian activism in schools that “created a hostile environment for Jewish students and staff.” The complaints led to a district investigation, which found that there had been “pro-Palestinian propaganda” on district campuses, as well as pro-Palestinian curriculum and instruction in classrooms and political activism by district staff.

The district found that “there has been disparate attention and prioritization via District programs and support for the District’s Arab community compared to the District’s Jewish community,” according to the CDE’s decision last week.

Still, Sacks said the district didn’t investigate all of the complaints or conduct a thorough enough review, prompting the appeal to the state.

In October, the state found antisemitism in the district on multiple occasions, and last week, issued a new decision building upon those findings, and requiring new remedial measures.

CDE found that, in part, the appeal had merit, and prompted a slew of corrective actions, including: districtwide communications to families and staff condemning antisemitism; training for staff to prevent and remedy antisemitism; and a Board of Education discussion on the CDE’s findings. Some school sites where allegations of discrimination were made must also hold educational assemblies and OUSD will be required to plan ongoing professional development that ensures education doesn’t have discriminatory bias.

OUSD did not respond to a request for comment.

Sacks said that she believes the decision doesn’t go far enough and plans to ask the state to require OUSD to revisit its own investigation and look into complaints it didn’t previously investigate fully. Still, she said, it marked a “turning point for Jewish and Israeli students and employees in Oakland.”

“The evidence clearly showed a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students and families, and the CDE has stepped in to enforce meaningful corrective action,” Sacks said in a statement.

But Musa Tariq, a policy coordinator with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the decision could have a “chilling” effect for educators trying to teach about the war in Gaza across the state.

“There have been coordinated efforts to restrict how Palestine is being discussed in classrooms,” he told KQED. “This decision, unfortunately, is something that will be cited statewide and can embolden complaints designed to intimidate educators rather than addressing real discrimination.”

Earlier this month, a controversial new state law meant to prevent antisemitism in K-12 schools went into effect, despite concerns from opponents that it could similarly deter educators from discussing criticisms of Israel. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee filed a lawsuit in December to block Assembly Bill 715, but a federal judge declined the group’s request to temporarily prevent the law from taking effect as it awaits trial, saying the state, not teachers, should determine what is taught in classrooms.

At the federal level, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights launched an investigation into OUSD over an unauthorized pro-Palestinian teach-in in December 2023. The Oaklandside reported that dozens of district teachers coordinated to take time out of their class periods to present Palestinian perspectives on the war in Gaza and provide resources on the history of the conflict to their students.

In the fall, Congress launched an investigation into the neighboring Berkeley Unified School District and two other school districts across the country over antisemitism concerns.

Tariq said schools are supposed to be a space for open and critical discussion, but said the moves represent “a nationwide effort to suppress Palestinian and pro-Palestinian narratives under the guise of fighting antisemitism.”

“We believe that that’s troubling and counterproductive, and that real education should allow students to wrestle with the complexity of history and understand injustice and truth and not just sanitized versions of history,” he said.