What Are They Afraid Of?

“It’s not worth it for the district to make anything public,” a school board trustee said when asked about biased and factually inaccurate lessons about Jews taught by teachers in more than one high school at Sequoia Union High School District, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Yes, in the heart of Silicon Valley, where the “misinformation” police are out on the prowl so everyone can feel like they “belong,” antisemitic propaganda is repeatedly condoned in the classrooms, and the suffering of Jewish students is despicably ignored.  “It’s not worth it” seems to be the sentiment of so many these days not yet negatively impacted by the status quo, having failed to learn from history. 

I first learned about the banalities of evil from my grandpa Srul, a Holocaust survivor who watched his Romanian neighbors convince themselves that violence is justifiable when it is for a “greater good” actually characterized by evil. Barbarism was deemed defensible then, just like the horrors of Oct. 7 are being legitimized today. Yesterday’s Nazis have become today’s “freedom fighters,” as activist teachers rewrite history for the next generation of Jew haters. Those who learn history, of course, concede that it only starts with the Jews, and what we are seeing today is an attack on classical liberal values: those that ended slavery, gave women the right to vote and legalized gay marriage. Western Civilization is now defined as “white supremacy,” as postmodernism ushers in Medievalism 2.0.

In the midst of World War II, my family found themselves under the Soviet Communist regime. My aunt was sent to Siberia simply because her husband was an entrepreneur and was thus reflexively considered a capitalist pig.  Jews in general were best unseen and unheard if they wanted to avoid being “sent away.” The best compliment my parents would get was, “You are good people — too bad you are Jews.”  

My parents wanted more for me than to have my Jewish identity erased and be brainwashed. They wanted me to experience dignity as a human being, to experience freedom of speech and expression of my religion. They wanted all that was impossible living in Ukraine at that time.  They knew they had no choice but to somehow get out. 

We lived stateless in Italy for almost a year as refugees, waiting for a country to accept us. Some of my family ended up in Australia, some in Canada, some in Israel.  Meanwhile, my aunt — a brutally traumatized woman after 14 years in the gulags — my parents, grandparents and I ended up in San Francisco.  My parents’ struggle was palpable in those early years, trying to learn English while working two jobs each. 

Growing up as a relatively poor immigrant in San Francisco, I did not judge others according to their privilege, and didn’t need sympathy or victim status to feel better about myself.  I needed empowerment, which I was grateful to receive from a quality public school education, of the sort that is virtually nonexistent today.

Inertia in our schools and throughout our education system has stifled meaningful solutions. All kids suffer as a result.  And parents who take the time to review curricula and raise valid concerns are dismissed. 

In today’s California public schools, ideological dogma is prioritized over reading, writing and math. The virtue-signaling equity agenda systematically adopted by school districts across California is focusing on variables that appear to have very little impact on improving outcomes. “Mainstreaming” or “streamlining” are new terms used for the common practice of lumping students of all levels and needs in the same classroom. “Diversity” is achieved at the expense of meeting each individual child where they are. Everyone suffers, but the state’s DEI scores look good. Silicon Valley has become ground zero for garbage data, cherry-picked to push a predetermined narrative. No transparency. No accountability. No actual leadership. Inertia in our schools and throughout our education system has stifled meaningful solutions. All kids suffer as a result.  And parents who take the time to review curricula and raise valid concerns are dismissed. 

What passes for high school education these days is appalling. This year, a week-long high school assignment entailed drawing an “identity flower,” where each petal was colored and described — like one would do in elementary school. Cartoons are regularly brought in as supplementary educational materials to push the “counternarrative,” a new term for rewriting history.  

As unbelievable as it sounds, my freshman daughter came home with one homework assignment called “Designing Race” and another called “Race Sorting,” while a student in a parallel Ethnic Studies class was told to stand in front of the room while other students took turns guessing her race. Discipline is doled out by arbitrary intersectionality criteria that only the teacher gets to define. Some teens are shamed while others glorified, simply based on their immutable skin color.

The oppressor/oppressed power lens has been woven into subjects from English to Science. Now even Math isn’t spared: My daughter’s geometry class spent an entire lesson discussing ableism and the Paralympics, while fundamental math concepts were overlooked. Last year, my other daughter spent multiple weeks in her junior year Advanced Placement U.S. History class on “trans heroes” in the American Revolution, while the Holocaust and even WWII were glossed over.  

It seems parents don’t matter. Four months after teachers presented students with factually incorrect and biased material in the classroom, the school has neglected to notify parents of impacted students, nor have they corrected the discriminatory materials that the students were forced to learn. 

 Why do you ask? Because ”It’s not worth it for the district to make anything public.”

Diana Blum is a concerned mom of two students in the Sequoia Union High School District.