A left-wing education nonprofit organization that the Washington Examiner recently found to be publishing classroom materials promoting political violence has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayer funding, according to public records reviewed by the North American Values Institute.
Teaching for Change, alongside allied nonprofit organization Rethinking Schools, runs the Zinn Education Project. The project, named for late socialist academic Howard Zinn, has published classroom materials containing praise of violent organizations, riots, and other illegal activity oriented toward left-wing political goals. Despite this, the D.C. municipal government and the federally-funded Smithsonian Institution have doled out large grants to Teaching for Change in recent years.
D.C. public schools, the mayor’s office, and the city’s commission on art collectively approved nearly $330,000 in contracts with Teaching for Change between the 2023 and 2025 fiscal years. The Smithsonian, meanwhile, paid out roughly $20,000 to the nonprofit organization between 2019 and 2022 to hold “teach in[s].”
Teaching for Change is linked to radical and violent politics through its work operating the Zinn Education Project.
Classroom materials developed by the Zinn Education Project praised members of the Black Panther Party implicated in violence, such as Eldridge Cleaver, who organized an armed ambush of Oakland police officers in 1968, and Assata Shakur, a left-wing activist who was convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper in 1977. Angela Davis, who purchased firearms used by a fellow activist to engage in a shootout with police and murder a judge, was also praised in the materials.
The Zinn Education Project distributes materials expressing approval of the Stonewall Riots, a series of violent clashes between law enforcement and members of the LGBT community, and crimes targeting critical energy infrastructure in service of advancing environmental activism. Additionally, the organization produced materials equating actions taken by the American and Israeli governments to 9/11, as well as lessons arguing that Israel brought the October 7 terrorist attacks upon themselves.
The Washington Examiner recently reported that, despite these publications, the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, has extensive partnerships with the Zinn Education Project and, by extension, Teaching for Change.
“These organizations earned teachers’ trust by leading honest conversations about race and Indigenous history,” Naomi Rodriguez, an NEA member, told the Washington Examiner. “That work mattered. It gave people hope. But now their messaging about Jews feels like a betrayal. It’s a bait and switch. They built their reputation on justice and inclusion, then used that trust to spread misinformation about Jews.”
“Many teachers, and even NEA leadership, still treat them as equity leaders, even as their lessons on the history of the Middle East fuel bias against a people who’ve endured persecution for generations,” Rodriguez continued. “When so few Americans understand Jewish identity beyond the Holocaust, those false lessons don’t just misinform; they shape worldviews. They’ve turned education into prejudice and curricula into propaganda.”
Teaching for Change is very active in the D.C. metropolitan area, hosting D.C. Area Educators for Social Justice, a network of liberal educators who “seek to strengthen and deepen social justice teaching” in order to “challenge systems of oppression through anti-bias, anti-racist, and multicultural education.” It works towards this goal by disseminating documents, hosting working groups, and organizing left-of-center protests.
Another NEA member accused Teaching for Change of contributing to antisemitism through its “distorted and biased lessons” in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
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The Smithsonian’s links to the Zinn Education Project go deeper than grant funding.
In 2022, the two organizations joined to hold a teacher workshop for high school and middle school educators on how to teach African American history following the Civil War.
The Smithsonian and the D.C. Executive Office of the Mayor did not respond to requests for comment.
