Extremism in American Classrooms

by Melissa Brodsky, The Lioness Writes.  See more about The Lioness Writes by clicking here.    

Right now, across the country, teachers are getting ready for the fall semester. Dedicated professionals spend their summers hunting for good resources to bring back to their students. They trust union-backed educational portals to give them safe, vetted materials.

Activist organizations are exploiting that exact trust. They are completely bypassing local oversight and pushing biased, oppressor-versus-oppressed frameworks straight into the classroom. The planning phase of this campaign ended in mid-June, and the distribution phase is now up and running nationwide.

The Summer Training Ground

From June 15 to 18, 2026, the “progressive” activist group CODEPINK threw a four-day summer workshop series called “Challenging Zionism in Schools.” Organizers brought educators together to train them on injecting anti-Israel and anti-West talking points into history and social studies classes.

Deeply entrenched activists led the charge, including retired teacher Marcy Winograd, who organizes for CODEPINK’s “Drop the ADL” campaign, and a Palestine campaigner named Jenin. Together, they handed teachers “strategies” to bring anti-Western, antizionist political advocacy straight into K-12 classrooms under the guise of summer professional development.

A False Seal of Approval

To gain mainstream acceptance and dodge red flags from administration, these organizers put union-decorated leaders front and center. The workshops prominently featured Lupe Carrasco Cardona, a 24-year-old Ethnic Studies educator and Region 3 leader within United Teachers Los Angeles and the National Education Association (UTLA/NEA).

Cardona holds major industry honors, like the 2022 California Teachers Association Cesar Chavez “Si Se Puede” Human Rights Award and the 2023 NEA Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence. When activist workshops highlight educators holding top honors from the nation’s biggest teacher unions, the underlying political agenda gains immediate institutional backup. Principals and peers are far less likely to question the content when an award-winning union leader is the one delivering it.

The Distribution Engine

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) runs a massive digital clearinghouse called Share My Lesson. The site acts as a huge repository of free teaching materials for educators coast to coast. Framed as a “Back-to-School Toolkit” offering free summer professional development, CODEPINK uploaded several of their self-authored lesson plans straight to this AFT platform.

The available materials focus on highly polarized international relations, with titles like “School Board & Students Debate the IHRA Definition” and “South Africa vs. Israel Genocide Case at the International Court of Justice”. Activists use this platform as a direct pipe into classrooms, completely sidestepping local school boards and district curriculum committees. Unsuspecting teachers downloading these toolkits right now are handling coordinated propaganda.

Naming the Framework: Critical Pedagogy

To fight this, we need to know exactly what we are looking at. The oppressor-versus-oppressed dynamic driving these lesson plans has a specific name: critical pedagogy. By explicitly naming this framework, parents and educators have the precise terminology to spot it when it shows up in their own school districts’ professional development programs.

Weaponizing the Student Body

The true scope of this curriculum hits hard when you look at the required assignments. The lesson plans actively push teachers to assign social media creation as a core piece of the coursework.

Students are told to make infographics and short social media videos that parrot the activist framing. By turning these political viewpoints into graded homework, the curriculum essentially morphs the student body into a free public relations wing for these activist organizations. Once submitted, students are pushed to post their work online. This deliberate move floods social platforms with anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda, amplified by thousands of young voices trying to get a good grade.

NAVI’s K-12 Extremism Tracker

The North American Values Institute (NAVI) has been leading the charge in investigating this national crisis. Through their K-12 Extremism Tracker, NAVI shines a light on how extremist ideologies are taking root in education.

Their investigations uncover a deeply connected network. NAVI documented the June CODEPINK webinar, showing exactly how presenters told teachers that broad state history standards act as an “open door” to bring anti-Israel lessons into classrooms. Their reporting also reveals how Chicago-area teachers can snag professional development credit for going to “Drop the ADL” workshops.

The Approaching 250th Milestone

The timeline is incredibly pressing when looking at the calendar. Although July 4th has passed and the official 250th anniversary of the United States just took place, activist groups are manipulating the "America at 250" teaching materials being rolled out this fall. They are linking the ongoing semiquincentennial observations to international conflicts to paint the U.S. and Israel as global villains. We are defending both the current semester and the country's entire historical foundation from being rewritten for a captive audience.

Foreign Interests in the Classroom

We also need to look at who is footing the bill for this push. Investigations into CODEPINK’s money trail reveal ties to foreign nations such as China, Iran, and Cuba. Since 2017, roughly a quarter of CODEPINK’s funding has come from entities linked to Neville Roy Singham, an American businessman who has been scrutinized for bankrolling pro-China propaganda networks.

The group’s activism constantly opposes U.S. foreign policy regarding nations like Cuba and Iran. The influence pipeline draws a straight line from these foreign interests, through activist groups like CODEPINK, into the AFT, and finally down to American students.

The Institutional Solution

How do we fix it? NAVI lays out a clear roadmap in their recent white paper, When the Classroom Turns Hostile. NAVI emphasizes that because the problem is a systemic capture of our educational institutions, the fix requires a system-wide push for “institutional neutrality”.

This means demanding that schools uphold their core educational purpose and stay completely out of political activism. Parents, teachers, and community members must organize to hold local school boards accountable and demand that public school classrooms remain neutral spaces focused on academic excellence, free from ideological capture.

Join the Fight for Our Classrooms

Exposing how these activist agendas bypass standard vetting is essential work. If you found this investigation helpful, subscribe to The Lioness Writes to get more deep dives into history, media literacy, and the fight against hate delivered straight to your inbox. Click here to visit The Lioness Writes.