JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Last week, the librarian at my daughter’s school — Watkins Elementary School in Washington, D.C. -— instructed a class of third graders to “act out” the Holocaust. She instructed the children to pretend they were on a train going to a concentration camp and to pretend to shoot each other, dig mass graves and die…
(JTA) — A high school principal in Boca Raton, Florida, told a parent that inquired about the school’s educational plan for teaching the Holocaust that “Not everyone believes the Holocaust happened.” Spanish River Community High School principal William Latson wrote in an April 2018 email that “the curriculum is to be introduced but not forced upon…
NEW YORK (JTA) — The heads of the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors jointly condemned a law proposed by Israel’s education minister that would bar the expression of political views in classrooms. “The ‘code of ethics’ that the government of Israel is considering for the country’s academic institutions is a…
A Chicago Public Schools teachers’ strike was narrowly averted when union leaders, Mayor Rahm Emanuel and school board officials came to a tentative last-minute agreement late Monday night, just minutes before the deadline at midnight October 9. The strike, which would have kept nearly 380,000 students out of class, had been scheduled to begin at…
Rachel Rosenthal teaching students and their parents in the Dr. Beth Samuels Drisha High School program I had my first teaching experience as an 8th grader, leading groups at my synagogue. I was immediately in love. The person I became when I was teaching — confident, funny, charming, and able to command the attention of…
(JTA) — Just before classes started in September, the teachers union at Barrack Hebrew Academy in Bryn Mawr, Pa., successfully negotiated a new contract with the administration. Five years earlier the pluralistic middle and high school’s teachers had gone on strike, forming a picket line outside the school after contract negotiations broke down. But since…
A labor union battle raging at a Philadelphia Jewish day school has highlighted the scarcity of collective bargaining in the Jewish education system and the use of religious exemptions to ban union contracts. Perelman Jewish Day School, with 300 kindergarten to fifth-grade students on two Philadelphia-area campuses, announced on March 24 its decision to unilaterally…
Last Halloween, 17-year-old Eleanor Glockner threw a red wool jacket over an old black dress of her mom’s. She dyed her hair gray, pinned it into a bun and stuck a homemade Chicago Teachers Union button on her lapel before marching down the street to trick-or-treat at the home of her neighbor, Mayor Rahm Emanuel….
