The Oakland Unified School District has determined that an unauthorized teach-in on Dec. 6, 2023, about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict included “highly charged terminology” that would have made Israeli or Jewish students feel “unsafe.”
However, the district has also decided not to discipline anyone involved in the teach-in, which was organized by pro-Palestinian activists in the district’s teachers union.
OUSD released the findings of its investigation on May 12 to Marleen Sacks, an Oakland attorney who filed a complaint about the teach-in 17 months ago. Sacks, who said she is dissatisfied with the results of the lengthy investigation, has filed an appeal.
The district’s report, which was seen by J., was signed by OUSD ombudsperson Gabriel Valenzuela.
Four days before the 2023 teach-in, Sacks filed a Uniform Complaint Procedures (UCP) complaint on behalf of the Oakland Jewish Alliance, which formed shortly after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel with the goal of fighting antisemitism and safeguarding Jewish civil rights, according to OJA’s website.
The Dec. 2, 2023, complaint alleged that the Oakland Educators Association members who were organizing the teach-in — a group called OEA for Palestine — intended to indoctrinate students with antisemitic and anti-Zionist beliefs through a proposed curriculum they had shared in a Google Doc.
The proposed teaching materials, which circulated ahead of the teach-in, and a YouTube video of the teach-in remain online.
OUSD’s report found that at least 12 district teachers “likely” took part in the teach-in. All but one of those teachers denied participating in it, Valenzuela wrote, even though a different teacher among the 12 identified herself as a participant in an ABC News article published shortly after the teach-in.
Despite these findings, the district determined that “corrective action against any specific employee is not appropriate,” according to its May 12 report.
The report comes long after dozens of Jewish families left the Oakland district during the last academic year following what they described as anti-Israel and anti-Jewish bias in classrooms.
The district hopes the report reflects its efforts to support students.
“OUSD takes all complaints seriously,” John Sasaki, OUSD’s director of communications, wrote to J. in an emailed statement on Tuesday. “Ensuring that students feel safe and supported at school is the District’s priority.”
The report confirmed the district’s previous statements that it did not approve the curriculum materials shared by teach-in organizers.
OUSD Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell issued a statement on the district’s position two days before the teach-in.
“I want to make clear that the District does not authorize this action,” Johnson-Trammell wrote on Dec. 4, 2023. “I am deeply disappointed by the harmful and divisive materials being circulated and promoted as factual.”
For its response to the complaint filed by Sacks, the district relied on an independent third-party investigation conducted by Liz DeChellis, a partner at employment law firm Van Dermyden Makus, which specializes in cases of workplace misconduct, including at educational institutions.
Remarking on the district’s choice not to discipline any employees, Valenzuela wrote that DeChellis was unable to confirm which, if any, teachers actually ended up teaching the most inflammatory lessons from the teach-in’s proposed materials.
“It was not possible to definitively determine who accessed the [shared Google Doc], which lessons they might have accessed, or when they might have accessed them,” Valenzuela wrote.
Besides being unapproved by the district, Valenzuela wrote, the proposed lesson plans also violated the district’s policy on teaching about controversial issues, which prohibits teachers from imposing personal opinions onto students.
“Many of the stories and lessons postured Palestinian individuals as victims and Israeli individuals as aggressors,” Valenzuela wrote, adding that such materials “reasonably created an environment in which Jewish and Israeli students were labeled as being complicit in the harm” that the lesson plans accused Israel of inflicting.
Sacks said the results of the investigation were a confirmation of the district’s failures around the teach-in.
“For 11 out of 12 of those teachers to deny that they participated in the teach-in when in fact they did — that’s dishonesty and insubordination, warranting very serious discipline,” Sacks told J. “Possibly even termination.”
In total, the district interviewed 31 people. Soon after the teach-in took place on Dec. 6, 2023, several news outlets, including J., reported that dozens of teachers had participated, based on information from the teach-in’s organizers.
Sacks, an employment lawyer, has conducted these types of investigations in the past, she said. If the district had required interviews of more teachers, she said, it could have identified many more teachers who attended the teach-in.
“Teachers can be fired for refusing to cooperate with an investigation like this,” Sacks said. “The district absolutely has the right to compel their cooperation.”
During the investigation, DeChellis interviewed district administrators, principals, teachers, support staff and other “community members.” Sacks, however, noticed one group missing from the list of interviewees: students.
“When you don’t interview any students, it really does make it seem like you don’t really want to know what’s happening,” Sacks said.
In the May 12 report, Valenzuela wrote that the district did not receive any complaints from students about biased lessons following the teach-in, suggesting that the teachers who used the proposed curriculum either during or after the teach-in “strove overall to present a balanced viewpoint to their audience.”
In the weeks following the teach-in, however, J. spoke to several Jewish families in Oakland who were seeking to transfer their children to nearby districts. For at least one family, the teach-in was the deciding factor that convinced them to transfer out.
After receiving the district’s May 12 report, Sacks began working on an appeal, which she filed with the office of the district’s ombudsperson the next day.
“Had the investigator bothered to interview any of the parents or students who requested transfers out of the district, they would have heard an earful about how offensive the teach-in actually was,” Sacks wrote in her May 13 appeal.
“We really do doubt the sincerity of these findings,” Sacks told J. “Viewed in their totality, they come across as an attempt to minimize the gravity of the antisemitism and indoctrination that is going on all over the district.”
Sacks’s appeal elevates the complaint to the California Department of Education, which may conduct its own investigation following a review of the district’s report.
At the same time, the OJA is challenging the district in Alameda County Superior Court. In a March 28 petition filed on behalf of the OJA, Sacks accuses the district of failing to complete UCP investigations and provide requested public records in a timely manner or to properly address the “ongoing and systemic antisemitism” in its schools. According to the California Code of Regulations, school districts must investigate and resolve UCP complaints within a 60-day period.