The process to pass Assembly Bill 715 out of committee should have been a straightforward political debate. The issue at the Senate Standing Committee on Education at the Capitol on Wednesday, Sept. 10 was safety for Jewish students in California schools, where they’ve been under attack. This is a matter of record. The bill’s authors, Assemblymembers Rick Chavez Zbur and Dawn Addis, and coauthors Assemblyman Mike Fong, Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel, Senators Lena Gonzalez, Akilah Weber Pierson, and Scott Wiener, had all done their homework, as had Attorney General Rob Bonta.
Bonta’s 2025 annual Hate Crime in California Report provided the factual basis for the bill.
As the data show, religiously motivated hate crimes in California have risen dramatically over the last two years. Of all these offenses, 76 percent have been anti-Jewish — almost 13 times the number of anti-Islamic (Muslim) hate crimes. Those have dropped by 40 percent over the same period.
Don’t get me wrong — hate against any ethnic group or religious community in California should be addressed swiftly and unambiguously.
But the numbers tell our story, and the spike in anti-Jewish hate incidents in K-12 classrooms is unique and unmistakable.
This is why there’s such a large and urgent backlog of antisemitic discrimination cases at the California Department of Education (CDE). Since the Oct. 7, 2023, slaughter and mass rape in Israel, hate against Jews is on the rise in California schools. And if you want to understand the state of hate in California classrooms, you ought to read some of the latest landmark CDE rulings on antisemitism cases.
In CDE Case Matter 2025-0040, the CDE ruled that a public school teacher in Marin — in class, during instructional time — had indeed made the shockingly antisemitic statement, “There are too many Jews in this district.”
In CDE Case Matter 2025-0008, the CDE ruled that a public school teacher in Campbell had taught an antisemitic lesson including false and biased information about Jews and Israelis, and then failed to intervene in the discriminatory class discussion that followed. The teacher also posted these biased materials and student work on social media.
In CDE Case Matter 2024-0133, the CDE ruled that a public school teacher in Santa Clara had first taught a discriminatory, antisemitic lesson that was strongly biased against Jewish students; she then failed to intervene appropriately against subsequent biased student conduct that contributed to a hostile and unbalanced environment for Jewish students in the classroom.
These are just three of the dozens and dozens of Uniform Complaints that have been filed from across California over the last two years with the CDE. Each of these first three was decided against a school district tasked with ensuring the safety and civil rights of all students, regardless of their religion or ethnicity. Each of these districts was therefore assigned corrective action, requiring it to train — and retrain — its teachers on how to provide instruction free of antisemitic hate and discrimination.
Shouldn’t following the basic California Education Code provisions be covered in teacher credentialing programs?
To their credit, when it came time to bring AB 715 forward, California’s Legislative Diversity Caucuses stepped up and agreed with Attorney General Bonta’s and the CDE’s assessment. Like NATO, these legislators did not hesitate to sign onto a mutual defense pact and cosponsored this important legislation against hate directed at one group among them. Among other benefits, the bill establishes an Office of Civil Rights that will benefit all California students from minoritized and disfavored ethnic groups for years to come.
So what went wrong at the Senate Education Committee?
It looked less like public comment and more like the precursor to a Jan. 6-style assault on democracy in California.
As Rachel Maddow often reminds us in situations that produce cognitive dissonance, watch what they do, not what they say.
From the moment of AB 715’s introduction, the California Teachers Association (CTA) and its allies have obstructed, threatened, and interfered with the legislative process in marked and unusual ways.
From the moment AB 715 was introduced the California Teachers Association (CTA) and its allies have obstructed, threatened, and interfered with the legislative process in marked and unusual ways.
While they claimed to be peacefully opposing what they called “censorship” and objecting to AB 715’s restatement of the Education Code’s existing requirements for factual accuracy in instruction, there was a large and observable gap between their words and their actions.
You see, they had sent in an organized, uniformed battalion to assault the democratic process.
Their troops wore matching keffiyehs, masks, and message t-shirts intended to communicate power and hostility. Many wore masks to conceal their identities. Everyone arrived at the same time, well in advance of the meeting. They lined up early together and stayed in formation, studying their scripts on their phone screens. There was no mingling with the civilian population.
This practice spectacle of power did not happen by accident; it was the result of a well-organized, hierarchical command-and-control structure.
Their behavior at the microphone was even more unsettling.
From their first speaker to their last, they refused to defer to the basic norms of civic behavior we use at public meetings in California. The committee chair held her patience, calmly defending the rights of each of the 500-plus citizens who had shown up to tell their legislators what they thought. But it was exhausting.
One by one, every new opponent to the bill refused to comply with the committee chair’s instructions. For hours, each opposing speaker would wage the same battle with the committee chair. Advance to the microphone and start speechifying. This would be interrupted by the chair, who would cut their microphone and restate the instructions. When she turned the microphone back on, speakers would simply pick back up where they had left off — at which point the chair would again cut the microphone and redirect speakers to give simply their name, affiliation, and position for or against the bill. Over and over.
This was not normal civic behavior — it was more like a siege of the hearing room. A dominance display against democracy.
So what does this mean for the future of education policy debates in California?
For one thing, it makes me wonder if we are still even engaging in democratic debate any more. Our differences seem have devolved into a kind of unconventional asymmetrical civil warfare — a set of conflicts being played out both in our classrooms and in governance over our educational system.
The number of Democratic legislators running for Superintendent of Public Instruction and therefore abstaining from a vote on AB 715 to avoid angering the CTA is a warning bell for democratic governance of education in the state.
This is a dangerous moment for California education, and it’s definitely not what democracy looks like.
