Support justice-driven, accurate and transparent news — make a quick donation to Truthout today! 

Teachers in the second-largest school district in the nation have had to remove Black Lives Matter, Land Back, and Palestinian flags from their classrooms as part of so-called corrective actions taken following a complaint alleging discrimination. The changes occurred at Downtown Magnets High School in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The district has over half a million students and 1,500 schools and centers.

“Part of the thing that makes this very difficult, and also that makes it very pressing for people to understand, [is] if LAUSD falls and starts to institute policies that create censorship, this is going to be a model across the country,” Jessica Rodarte, National Education Association vice president for United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and vice-chair of the California Teachers Association’s Civil Rights in Education Committee, told Truthout.

“If LAUSD falls and starts to institute policies that create censorship, this is going to be a model across the country.”

“If LAUSD falls and starts to institute policies that create censorship, this is going to be a model across the country.”

The changes at Downtown Magnets High School followed a complaint filed in March with LAUSD’s Office of Student Civil Rights by Emet Legal Services, alleging violations of anti-discrimination statutes, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and California’s Assembly Bill (AB) 715. Specifically, the complaint, which Truthout reviewed, alleged that Tiffany Do, an 11th-grade social studies and health teacher, had created a hostile environment for Jewish faculty and students by displaying Palestinian flags in the classroom, wearing a keffiyeh in their staff photo on the school’s website and sometimes on campus, and “fail[ing] to present pro-Israel or pro-Zionist speech, posters, or classroom content.” The complaint claimed Do had “indoctrinate[d] students to become political activists while silencing and intimidating Jewish and Israeli-American staff and students.”

“When it first came down, to use the current slang, I was crashing out, not having a good time, in shock, really upset that this could happen, wondering ‘Why me?’” Do told Truthout. “But this is so beyond me at the end of the day. This is about the state and the state of education, and this is about Palestine and liberation movements, and it’s about censorship.”

The complaint was among the first to be filed citing AB 715, a state law that passed last year in a process its opponents, as well as some lawmakers, characterized as undemocratic. The bill was one in a long line championed by California’s Legislative Jewish Caucus that opponents argued sought to censor classroom instruction on Palestine, as well as other Palestine-related speech in public schools. A diverse coalition that included California’s largest and most powerful unions of teachers and faculty — as well as the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies, American Civil Liberties Union California Action, and local branches of Jewish Voice for Peace from across the state — organized against the bill.

Amendments Protecting Pro-Palestine Speech in........

© Truthout