WASHINGTON — The leaders of three major public school systems will appear before Congress on Wednesday to answer questions about how they have handled incidents of anti-Semitism on their school campuses.
The witnesses who will testify before a House Education and Workforce subcommittee represent New York City Public Schools, the Berkeley Unified School District in California and the Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland.
The hearing comes amid a series of investigations by the Republican-led commission into how universities responded to pro-Palestinian student protests on campuses.
Those earlier hearings were heated; the first in December led to the resignation of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Recently, Columbia University President Minouche Shafik’s testimony escalated into weeks of protests that spread beyond her campus to colleges across the country.
Wednesday’s hearing will be the first to focus on elementary schools.
David Banks, the chancellor of New York City Public Schools, acknowledged in a speech to reporters last week that the school system has not been perfect in dealing with problems in schools that have arisen since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, but that he was proud of how the leadership had responded.
Banks said he would not be defensive in his appearance before the panel, but appeared critical of the way previous hearings had been quickly reduced to viral moments and video clips.
“I fundamentally believe that if we are really interested in solving anti-Semitism, you don’t do it through cheap political theater and cheap sound bites,” he said. is not the way you ultimately solve problems you care deeply about.”
Both New York City and Montgomery Public Schools are the subject of civil rights investigations by the Department of Education into allegations of anti-Semitism. In both cases, the issue centers on whether districts responded to student harassment in a manner consistent with Title VI, which prevents harassment based on shared ancestry. Karla Silvestre, board chair of Montgomery County Public Schools, was scheduled to testify at the hearing.
In February, the Brandeis Center, a Jewish legal advocacy group, filed a complaint with the department’s Office of Civil Rights citing incidents of bullying and harassment of Jewish students in the Berkeley district, including one instance where the phrase “Kill Jews ” was found. written in a high school bathroom.
In a statement, the district said that Berkeley Superintendent Enikia Ford Morthel “did not request this invitation” but would testify.
“Berkeley Unified celebrates our diversity and stands against all forms of hatred and dissent, including anti-Semitism and Islamophobia,” the statement said. “We strive every day to ensure that our classrooms are respectful, humanizing and joyful places for all of our students. they are welcomed, seen, valued and heard.”
All three districts, in predominantly liberal areas, have diverse student populations and sizable Jewish American communities.
School leaders are also likely to face questions about issues such as freedom of expression and the extent to which teachers’ actions are monitored, including their personal social media presence outside of school.
In a lawsuit filed against Montgomery County Public Schools by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, three teachers alleged that the district placed them on leave and investigated them for expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments, some of which on their personal social media pages stood.
Student-led Pro-Palestinian protests have taken place in high schools across the country, including in the three districts that will go before Congress. The demonstrations included strikes during school hours, and, like their university counterparts, included questions about whether certain phrases, including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”, which mean very different things to different groups mean, cross the border. line in anti-Semitism.
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