And in so doing, has helped demonstrate why California’s schools, once among the best in the nation, are now among its worst.

C alifornia has a problem with antisemitism in its public schools, but the proposed remedy — a massive new regulatory agency outlined in a bill on the governor’s desk — will do approximately nothing to end the madness.

But not exactly nothing: If you’re a leader of the state’s powerful teachers’ union, debating “settler colonialism” in Israel, the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, genocide, the virtues of Hamas, and whether American Jews are “white” or “white-adjacent” (and in either case equally “privileged”) is far better than confronting the union’s role in the 40-year decline of public education in California.

In February, months before it arrived on Governor Gavin Newsom’s desk, Assembly Bill 715 started life as a laser-focused response to the problem of antisemitism in the state’s schools. Approved unanimously in the state assembly, it seemed certain to move through the state senate with a standing ovation, ticker tape falling from the gallery, and a college drumline.

Instead, the bill ran into the state’s powerful California Teachers Association (CTA). Lengthy negotiations followed. By the time the state senate approved the bill and moved it to the office of Governor Newsom, AB 715 had become something different and even malign: a blueprint for the creation of a massive new office of civil rights attached loosely to California’s education department — an office charged with policing “violations” of the civil rights of all of the familiar racial, ethnic, and gender-fluid identities favored by the far left . . . plus antisemitism. It’s small comfort that, among its new employees, AB 715 “would also require the Office of Civil Rights to employ the Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator to be appointed by the Governor and confirmed by the Senate” — all of whom benefit magnificently from CTA political campaign activities. The legislation even helpfully provides a job description for that employee: “to, among other things, develop, consult, and provide antisemitism education to school personnel to identify and proactively prevent antisemitism and to make recommendations, in coordination with the executive director of the state board, to the Legislature on legislation necessary for the prevention of antisemitism in educational settings.”

That’s a lot of developing, consulting, and recommending in the proposed law. But there’s little — if any — obvious authority. And that’s one reason to bet that Gavin Newsom will sign the bill: In this fight between his allies in the state legislature’s Jewish Caucus and the California Teachers Association — itself a kind of fourth branch of government — AB 715 is the perfect political solution: a do-nothing law that promises to do everything.

But there is a silver lining. In blocking real reform, AB 715, the California Teachers Association has revealed why California’s schools, once among the best in the nation, are now among its worst.

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In its July letter opposing the assembly measure, the CTA makes it clear that its highest priority isn’t the education of students. It’s about progressive politics.

The letter opens with a prefabricated declaration that the union is (of course) “firmly committed to schools that are free of racism, sexism, religious and gender discrimination.” The implied “but” arrives promptly: “We are also concerned with academic freedom and the ability of educators to ensure that instruction include perspectives and materials that reflect the cultural and ethnic diversity of all of California’s students.”

The union tips its hand immediately, and all of its cards are political. Supporting the assembly version of AB 715, the union says, would offer comfort to the real enemy — “a regime [a regime!] in Washington D.C. that sows division at all levels of academia and seeks to drive a wedge between communities that should be working together to address hate and discrimination.” To make matters worse, the CTA says, the assembly version “would unfortunately arm some others” — “ill-intentioned people” — with the tools they “seek to weaponize public education.” The CTA knows this will happen because, it says, these “extremists” have already filed “meritless” complaints “meant to disrupt or challenge policies that support LGBTQ+ inclusivity or to target LGBTQ+ students and staff.”

But the CTA’s biggest concern about the antisemitism bill is that it might “privilege” Jews over other groups, and that would undo the union’s primary political objective of advancing the rights of some groups above others — not of eliminating “privilege,” in other words, but of granting privilege to the people CTA believes deserve it.

The letter allows us to watch as the CTA performs a magic trick in reverse, stuffing a rabbit back into a top hat, turning the problem of antisemitism into merely one problem among many. As approved in the assembly, the CTA asserts, AB 715 would “impose limits and define standards for course instruction regarding Israel, Palestine, Zionism, or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, something that we don’t do for any other active conflict in the world, e.g., conflicts in Ukraine, Rwanda, Congo.” Union “members have expressed concerns about lifting these experiences of inequity above those of other groups,” the letter claims. “Focusing on antisemitism alone might be seen as prioritizing one form of discrimination over others, potentially alienating groups facing other forms of systemic discrimination, such as racism, Islamophobia, or anti-LGBTQ+ bias.” The bill’s key provision, the creation of a state Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, would “not address any other forms of hate or discrimination, something that is equally needed.”

“Equally needed”? Equating the very real problem of antisemitism in public education with other “forms of hate or discrimination” ignores reality. There is, thank God, no pedagogical effort in California schools — no curriculum, no program, no courses, no teacher, no third-party vendors or nonprofits — working to resuscitate the Ku Klux Klan, marginalizing Muslim children, forcing young women into a handmaid’s tale of barefoot early motherhood, or campaigning to vilify gay kids.

None of that exists. On the other hand, the CTA and its hundreds of local affiliates — and the thousands of state and local officials, from the governor to every local school board member, whose political campaigns those unions fund — have indeed run a very well-organized campaign to bash Jews.

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The strange fruit of the teachers’ unions’ formalized antisemitism is evident everywhere in the state’s public schools. Following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israelis, the Oakland Unified school board backed Hamas. “We want to make sure Palestinians have the liberation they so rightfully deserve in their own land,” said board member Valarie Bachelor, switching seamlessly between singular and plural first-person pronouns. “I want to make sure we stand on our progressive organizing history and we don’t just sit on it. We stand on it and we say we need to do more and we need to do this now.”

Leaders of the city’s teachers’ union, the Oakland Educators Association, amplified the board’s declaration with their own statement calling for the elimination of Israel. More than 30 Jewish families left the district. “I just felt that there wasn’t a path forward for Jewish families because I had reached out to OUSD and asked them to have a conversation about how they were going to keep Jewish families feeling safe and included,” one parent explained. “When there were lesson plans that were being taught that said, ‘Draw the Zionist bully,’ or ‘I for Intifada, J is for Jesus,’ to me, it felt like – honestly – we were being targeted and singled out and alienated.”

In February 2024, the Louis D. Brandeis Center and the Anti-Defamation League filed a federal complaint against nearby Berkeley Unified, alleging “severe and persistent” antisemitic harassment of Jewish and Israeli students. The complaint cited students being taunted with such slurs as “You have a big nose because you are a stupid Jew,” asking what their “number is” (an apparent reference to Holocaust tattoos), a teacher posting “messages of anti-hate” targeting the district’s only Jewish teacher, and antisemitic imagery in art classes. Some students have departed the district. Anti-Israel teachers marched students in Berkeley’s middle school and high school out of classes in 2024 protests — in one case to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack.

Across the Bay, immediately following the October 7, 2023, attack, the San Francisco Unified School District hired the Arab Resource and Organizing Center to run student and teacher trainings “related to leadership development and cultural empowerment.” AROC describes itself as a group of “abolitionists, feminists, and internationalists who believe that the liberation of SWANA (South West Asian and North African) people is inextricably tied to the liberation of all oppressed people.” Meanwhile, the district’s antisemitism training for teachers ran into organized resistance from teachers’ union activists. By contract, the district could require teachers to attend the training — but not to listen. Members of the American Jewish Committee asked to run that training say that as soon as their training began, a leader of United Educators–San Francisco stood up and described “at great length” his own take on the problem of antisemitism: it’s an exclusively right-wing phenomenon, the union leader asserted. He then led most of the teachers out of the room for a separate conversation. By then, the clock on the formal training had nearly run down.

We could go on and never exhaust the catalog of formalized antisemitism. In July 2024, federal officials concluded that Jewish students in the central coast town of Carmel were “subjected to pervasive, antisemitic harassment over a three-year period, exposed to repeated swastika graffiti in bathrooms and on desks, a Hitler reference and a verbal threat targeting Jewish people.” California officials say two ethnic studies teachers in the nearby city of Campbell violated state law by presenting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a “one-sided anti-Zionism” lesson. In Los Angeles, teachers at an August 2024 United Teachers of Los Angeles Leadership Conference were caught on video training their colleagues to “advocate and leverage your positionality” in the classroom in order to “globalize the intifada” — that is, to help Los Angeles students understand the putative link between the war in Gaza and their own struggles in California.

In April, officials at a meeting of the Pajaro Valley Unified School District upbraided Jewish parents for their objections to an ethnic studies curriculum that singled out Jews for their white privilege. “I’ve been a little bit taken aback by the lack of acknowledgement of the economic power historically held by the Jewish community,” said board member Joy Flynn.

“I don’t see you people at protests against immigration,” said board member Gabriel Medina. “I don’t see you at protests when people are being taken away right now. I don’t see you advocating to bring back Abrego Garcia or Mahmoud Khalil. I don’t see you guys doing that. You only show up to meetings when it’s beneficial for you, so you can tell brown people who they are.” Days later, the district’s superintendent offered the usual anodyne explanation that, their Jew-bashing notwithstanding, Pajaro Valley “stands firmly against all forms of racism, antisemitism, and hate.”

The most prominent case erupted in Southern California’s Santa Ana Unified, where that district, the eighth largest in the state, settled a lawsuit in February 2025 over its ethnic studies courses. The highlight in that showdown came when district officials offered the defense that they were merely relying on guidance from the California Department of Education. The department’s 2019 draft Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum condemned Israel and otherwise omitted mention of Jewish Americans. The compromise version released a year later still allowed districts to include materials linked to the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement.

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It’s much easier to opine on the plight of the Palestinian people and to assert what’s simply not true about Israel than to defend the 40-year decline of public education in California. And what a trajectory: Data emerging from the most recent national student testing shows that all U.S. students continue to fall behind their global counterparts in math, writing, and science. The decline has been especially steep in California. Despite spending more per student than any other state in the union, California consistently ranks among the nation’s worst states for public education.

Some California teachers’ union leaders deny they’re running a political campaign with children as their targets. Others admit that’s the plan — and accept any learning loss as a necessary trade-off. Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of United Teachers of Los Angeles, famously told a reporter, “It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables . . . They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.” It was Myart-Cruz who, confronted with a parent rebellion over lousy teacher performance, launched a UTLA “research project” to track the ethnic identity of the union’s public critics. Like most teachers’ union websites in California, the United Teachers of LA website looks like an advertisement for the Democratic Socialists of America: it’s a visual cacophony of demonstrations, bullhorns, protest signs, and clenched fists.

To paraphrase the old joke, those who can’t do, teach — and those like Myart-Cruz who can’t teach fall back instead on controversial political ideologies they half-learned as college sophomores in order to lecture California K–12 students about the evils of Israel.

It’s time to end that sort of pedagogical sleight-of-hand — to stop bashing Jews. Terminate teachers who, misunderstanding the actual job for which they’ve been hired, prefer to use their classrooms as indoctrination camps.

California could follow that with a classic California practice: the burning of sage in every school and government building in the state, after which, having banished all bad spirits, it could return to the teaching of math, English, and science along with the classroom practices that once made a California education the envy of the world.