Undercover video: The Trojan horse of radical content into schools
September 1, 2023
Hidden inside Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan is a provision that combines with other COVID legislation to make $190 billion available to help K-12 schools upgrade their curricula to Newsela, an online platform run by a progressive former teacher who is dedicated to teaching Critical Race Theory in public schools.
It is a resource that educators across the country told Accuracy in Media about using time and time again.
Today, the company boasts that it has more than 40 million registered students with 3.3 million teachers. It has published more than 15,000 texts and adds more content daily. That content has been made available in 90 percent of schools.
“We must address two awful truths: that many Black students and educators are in pain, and that institutional and individual racism is pervasive within our schools,” said Matthew Gross, the founder and CEO of Newsela.
“Now more than ever, it is our moral obligation to support those experiencing trauma, and to cut racism at the root before it spreads outside the walls of our schools into larger society,” added Gross.
To accomplish this objective, Newsela has teamed up with radical content providers like the Zinn Education Project, the 1619 Project, and the Southern Poverty Law Center, along with more mainstream news sources to provide Critical Race Theory content into the classroom to promote Marxist ideas like “equity,” and “social justice” that “educates [children] on the issues, alongside the tools to discuss and take action,” in words of Gross.
The result has been to land Newsela on the list of fastest-growing companies as complied by accounting company Deloitte and for Fast Company to call the platform one of the most innovative companies in America today.
Gross emphasizes the “trusted” nature of the 175 publishers that Newsela uses to teach America’s most impressionable students, but the partners Newsela uses to push an agenda that’s antithetical to the pursuit of the American Dream and cause controversy wherever it’s taught.
Again and again, Accuracy in Media captured educators across the country in hidden-camera investigations admitting to teaching material that was banned in their states and proudly saying they would always find a workaround. Many of those educators cited Newsela as one of those workarounds.
The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory may be banned from being taught in their district. But that same content can be shared with students under the banner of “Newsela,” which does not raise alarms with parents like mentioning 1619 or The New York Times directly. That “functionality” extends to many other topics parents and school boards have found objectionable.
Far from being from the “trusted” sources that Newsela claims, the company pushes the most radical, dangerous content every day inside and outside the classroom.
It’s content that even had academics as far back as 1998 warning that CRT is “spreading a range of unbaked antiblack conspiracy theories, trying to transform social pathologies into new cultural paradigms.”
And this is the heart of the newest, most innovative, teaching platform in your kids’ schools — a daily textbook that will teach them about the world and how it works, and determine what kind of citizens they will become.