Philadelphia Public Schools are having a rough go of things lately. The district is facing an ongoing congressional investigation into their failure to curb anti-Semitism and a $300 million deficit amidst abysmal proficiency rates in math and reading. Yet instead of focusing on academics, the radical school district chose to use public funds to host “liberation” workshops for students as young as 12 led by a convicted felon and a cabal of anti-Semites.
Over 150 Philadelphia Public Schools students as young as 12 attended workshops over the past two years on topics such as “Imagining A World Without Prisons,” “”Restorative Yoga for Restorative Justice,” and “”Let’s be Forreal: What does restorative justice look like in practice?” Described by district officials as “Liberation Symposia,” attendance at each event was reportedly mandatory although students were allowed to pick from a variety of sessions.
The educators leading these workshops are notable for more than for their educational attainments. Anthony Smith is a self-described “organizer and educator” at the W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School for Abolition & Reconstruction, which partnered with Philadelphia Public Schools to organize the so-called “Liberation Workshops.” The Movement School lists creating a “revolutionary pipeline” for K-12 students as among its goals and its website proudly quotes Karl Marx. As for Smith, the man chosen to lead workshops for schoolchildren has a criminal record and was convicted for his role in aiding and abetting arson after he participated in the deliberate burning of an empty police car during the riots that took place after George Floyd’s death.
Smith also has a long history of promoting anti-Semitism. He praised Hamas’s brutal October 7 massacre of innocent Israeli Jews, saying that it “sounded lit” and has parroted anti-Semitic conspiracies, writing in a social media post that “the secret illuminati made of Jewish billionaires … are desperately trying to *cancel* the REAL revolutionaries standing up against the ‘man’ by ruining their white-owned, million dollar business.”
“We can tell the media is Jewish owned because look how quick they cancel you over anti-semitic comments,” Smith also stated. “They don’t do that for anti black shit though.”
Other facilitators leading the workshops are notable for their anti-Semitic and extremist views. Those include Eliana Atienza, a University of Pennsylvania student who took part in that school’s illegal “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” and Professor Geo Maher, currently a lecturer at U Penn, who notoriously tweeted in 2017, “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.”
The sessions took place at the Workshop School, part of the Philadelphia Public Schools district, where, as the Washington Free Beacon notes, “zero percent of students are proficient in math” and “just 18 percent of eighth-graders read at grade level.” The Philadelphia school district, that paper notes, is “facing a $300 million deficit .”
The workshops were organized and promoted by a slew of radical Philadelphia Public Schools faculty and administrators. District social studies director Ismael Jimenez, who is also a board member of the radical W.E.B. Du Bois Movement School which led the workshops, signed off on the initiative. Jiminez has repeatedly honored now-deceased fugitive cop-killer Assata Shakur and has proclaimed that “every child should walk into a classroom and feel the revolution stirring in the air.”
Jimenez is also an unapologetic anti-Semite and October 7 denialist, who has labeled Israel a “terrorist state” and “racist apartheid theocracy” and claimed absurdly that it has been “proven recently that Hamas had nothing to do with kidnapping that started current invasion of the Gaza strip.”
The partnership between the radical Movement School and Philadelphia Public Schools was also facilitated by tenth grade history teacher Hannah Gann who has a long history of questionable radical activism within the school district. Gann recently led a rule-breaking online chat where students were allowed to participate and taught slogans such as “All Resistance is Righteous” and “Honor the Martyrs.”
Gann was thanked for her efforts in organizing the liberation workshops by district Assistant Superintendent for School Performance Jeffrey McFarland who praised her “efforts within the school.”
“The District needs to answer for why it has repeatedly allowed a radical organization, one that boasts of creating a ‘revolutionary pipeline’ into K-12, access to its students,” said Mika Hackner, director of research at the North American Values Institute (NAVI) which obtained numerous documents revealing the radical teachings at the workshops.
It is clear that within the Philadelphia Public Schools, the rot goes all the way to the top.
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