Parents Want ADL’s Leftist Partisanship Out of San Diego Public Schools

Parents Want ADL’s Leftist Partisanship Out of San Diego Public Schools

To nobody’s surprise, a new controversy has arisen surrounding California schools. This time, parents in the Coronado Unified School District (CUSD) are up in arms over what they say is the school system’s political indoctrination of their children under the guise of combatting racism.

Yet another branch of the Golden State’s public education system has landed itself in hot water via efforts to foster “equity”. This is not unique; we’ve reported on mulitple similar instances, especially over the past year. These include:

• California State Board of Ed Dumbing Down K-12 Math Curriculum to Ensure “Equitable Outcomes”
• Report: California Public School Teachers Being Told to Hide Critical Race Materials From Parents
• Community College Students in California Must Now Fulfill ‘Ethnic Studies’ Requirement to Graduate
• Critical Race-Based California Ethnic Studies Curriculum Passes State Board of Education Vote
• California ‘Ethnic Studies Curriculum’ Proposal Gets Worse, Heavy On Critical Race Theory and Anti-Israel Activism;
• California Proposed Ethnic Studies Curriculum A Subterfuge For Anti-American And Anti-Zionist Activism
• Equal Rights Organization Files Complaint Against California School District Over Critical Race Training
• Legal Insurrection Foundation opposes proposed anti-Israel public school curriculum in California

Now, Coronado parents are objecting to the imposition of the No Place for Hate program—run by the non-profit “civil rights” organization Anti-Defamation League (ADL)—on their children in school.

[A screenshot from ADL’s No Place for Hate website.]

The No Place for Hate (NPFH) program purports to help schools “improve your school climate through anti-bias and bullying prevention education” by guiding students to examine ethnic, gender, and racial “diversity” and its relationship to “bias”, “power”, and “justice”; some students say it also focuses on practicing “kindness” and striving for equity and inclusivity in schools.

[A screenshot of Coronado Unified School District board meeting agenda explaining implementation of ADL’s No Place for Hate program in schools.]

While the ADL program sounds innocuous, some parents are outraged that the school district has partnered with the ADL at all, given its increasingly (especially in recent years) transparent partisanship. Indeed, many in the mainstream Jewish community have expressed anger at

…ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, for turning the 100-year-old organization, whose mission is to monitor and expose anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, into a platform that “represents an echo chamber of left-wing Democratic politics.”

This is an issue LIF has been tracking for years. In fact, you can read Professor Jacobson’s 2017 post on the ADL’s new direction in Charlottesville is being exploited to attack freedom of speech and internet freedom, and watch a highly illuminating March 2021 panel discussion on the problem (featuring Professor J, Dr. Charles Jacobs of Americans for Peace and Tolerance, and Jonathan Tobin of JNS) here or below.

In May 2021, a Coronado Unified School District board meeting featured multiple parents and board members speaking out against the program and the involvement of the ADL in schools. At the meeting, one parent—a member of the Equity Committee—stated that, instead of focusing on remedying students’ scholastic deficits brought on by over a year of isolation and Zoom learning,

…The leadership of the equity committee—they’re hyperfocused on identity politics, gender pronouns, implicit bias, microagressions, and all of the ‘isms’…Do we have a rampant problem at CUSD that deserves all this urgent focus above all else right now…? Why [is] the community is being pushed on this really divisive SDCOE material?

You can watch the entire discussion below. [Note: At one point in the meeting, one speaker objects to the ADL on the grounds that it “attacks” and discriminates against Black and Arab groups. This particular criticism of the ADL is patently false, and is generally leveled at it by radically fringe anti-Israel or Islamist groups (such as Jewish Voice for Peace or the Council on American-Islamic Relations) in order to delegitimize ADL defenses of Israel.]

Last month, one San Diego resident wrote to The Coronado Times (and school board members):

As a decades-long activist in matters of civil rights and racial discrimination, I have been aware of the gradual transformation of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) from being a civil rights organization strongly focused on antisemitism, the defense of Israel and other issues of specific importance to the Jewish community, to being an organization now more focused on pushing some agendas of the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party. …

• First, ADL, like its CEO, is very ideologically narrow and hyper-partisan and promotes some of the worst ideas of the radical left.

• Second, the NPFH program on the surface has a very nice veneer to its introductory materials that talk about “kindness” and “bullying;” but if you follow link after link down into the abyss, you will find an abundance of the same contentious, ideological, partisan ideas, prescriptions and misinformation that ADL promotes more openly outside its programs for K-12 students.

• Third, it is a betrayal of its fiduciary duty for any administrative or governing entity of a public institution to partner in any way with partisan organizations like ADL or to advocate for imposition of the political preferences and practices of such organizations on public agencies and institutions or, worst malfeasance of all, on students.

The writer—a professor emeritus of biology at San Diego State University—posted his analysis of the NPFH handbook and excerpts from nearly 60 articles and reports showing ADL’s leftist partisanship on the website of Californians for Equal Rights (an organization fighting Critical Theory Creep in California schools).

In the document, he noted,

ADL does not represent even the Jewish community as a whole and is regarded with distaste by a large segment of it. That disaffection increased in 2015 when the directorship passed from Abe Foxman to hyper-partisan, radically left Jonathan Greenblatt. ADL has long engaged in smear attacks and hate-mongering against organizations and politicians who push for enforcement of immigration laws and the reduced quotas for legal immigration as long recommended by various national commissions. It continues to do so. ADL opposes the letter and spirit of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the California Constitution; it endorsed the pro-racial preferences Proposition 16 in California last November while that was opposed by 57% of Californians. In a recent Supreme Court case, ADL submitted an amicus brief supporting Harvard’s discrimination against Asian applicants for admission.

You can see the entire document, and read all the criticisms of ADL below.

Debunking No Place for Hate by Samantha Mandeles on Scribd

No word yet on whether this parental resistance be enough to force the Coronado school system to backtrack on working with the ADL. We’ll keep you posted.

Samantha Mandeles is Senior Researcher and Outreach Director at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. You can reach her on Twitter at @SRMandeles.

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