The Zinn Education Project (ZEP) bills itself as a grassroots, educational initiative promoting a more “inclusive” approach to history. However, scrutiny of its curriculum exposes a pattern of radical indoctrination targeting K-12 students. The Project distorts history and employs deceptive jargon to advance an anti-American, anti-white, and anti-Israel agenda.
What is Zinn Education Project?
- Founded in 2008 and named after controversial historian Howard Zinn, ZEP remains true to its namesake’s revisionist history. In his book “A People’s History of the United States,” Zinn oversimplified America’s past by presenting it through a narrow oppressor-oppressed lens and portraying capitalism and U.S. policy as inherently exploitative.
- For example, in chapter 7 of his book, Zinn portrays certain U.S. policies and events as deliberate efforts to exterminate indigenous cultures for economic gain and, in Chapter 12, portrays U.S. foreign policy as driven by imperialism to expand U.S. influence and control, ignoring more substantive explanations for these policies.
- ZEP is a joint project of two U.S.-designated non-profit organizations, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, a structure that allows ZEP not to have to file its own annual tax disclosure and avoid public scrutiny of its activities and finances.
U.S. Portrayed as Racist, Oppressive
- Through a network of radical educators, unions, and activists, ZEP instills racial resentment and denigrates America’s progress in fulfilling its founding principles of freedom, democracy, and equality. ZEP materials portray the U.S. government and its institutions as complicit in maintaining white supremacy and systemic racism as pervasive today as in the past, despite ample evidence of progress made in racial matters.
- ZEP contributors Matt Reed and Ursula Wolfe-Rocca describe the 2014-2016 water crisis in “majority Black” Flint, Michigan, as an “egregious example of environmental racism,” implying that every crisis has a racial component.
Hostility Toward Israel
- A January 2025 ZEP statement titled “Teaching About Palestine-Israel and the Unfolding Genocide in Gaza” expressed hostility toward Israel, framing it as a colonial and oppressive force, while promoting a heavily one-sided narrative favoring Palestinian victimhood.
- The statement alleged the “violent displacement” of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war when, in fact, the exodus of Palestinians was due to a combination of factors including voluntary flight, panic stoked by Arab leaders, and Arab aggression.
- Israel is smeared as an “apartheid” regime, despite the full legal rights and participation of Israeli Arabs in Israeli society, including government, armed forces, many professions, including as judges, and politics.
- ZEP contributors link U.S. domestic racial issues to global conflicts, particularly the Israel-Palestinian conflict, arguing that Israel’s actions toward Palestinians are a continuation of white colonial oppression.
- The January 2025 statement insisted teachers have a moral duty to teach the “truth” about Israeli “oppression” and integrate the conflict into larger discussions of imperialism, racism, and settler colonialism, directly linking Israel’s existence to these themes.
- Black feminist writer Angela Davis is cited: “Our relation to Palestine says a great deal about our capacity to respond to complex, contemporary issues, whether we are talking about imperialism [or] settler-colonialism… Palestine is a litmus test.”
