Instagram is a roller coaster of teenage braggadocio and attention-seeking and meticulously crafted selfies.
High school students often post strong declarations on their social media pages such as this one:
The world may laugh at this statement; many laughed at my words back then. But time will show that there is more truth to this prophecy than today’s adversaries can love. Nations will rise against those who push them into conflict, chaos, and destruction.
But this wasn’t just any old “I’ll show you” declaration by a love-scorned adolescent.
This was a San Jose high school student at a top Bay Area school on his named, personal Instagram account, quoting Hitler’s call for “the annihilation of the Jewish race” — just beneath an artfully-composed photo of eight friends lying on the grass of the Branham High School football field, arranged in the form of a human Nazi swastika.
This incident made national and international news — and not the kind of international educational news coverage most Bay Area school districts are hoping for.
This was followed by all the foreseeable outrage, politicians’ statements, and calls for justice you’d expect if you’d been even half-paying attention since Oct. 7, 2023.
Because these hateful antisemitic incidents keep happening in schools, Bay Area Jewish parents started filing official complaints of discrimination — known as Uniform Complaint Procedure (UCP) filings — with their school districts for violations of nondiscrimination law (Education Code section 33315). And then, once a district’s legal department predictably exonerated itself of any possible wrongdoing, Jewish parents filed appeals to the California Department of Education (CDE).
And as we saw in Part 1 of this series, in dozens and dozens of cases, they are winning.
The CDE started pushing back against the normalization of antisemitism in schools in 2025. In addition to taking a more muscular approach against inadequate, biased, or wrongly decided rulings by school districts themselves, the CDE also started assigning more meaningful and more consistent corrective actions when districts were found to have violated the Education Code’s nondiscrimination laws.
The more of these decisions you read, the more apparent it becomes that in an insanely antisemitic situation, one calm, clear naming of the problem rings out like a bell.
Decisions of Appeal are the highest-level administrative rulings and give definitive legal guidance from CDE on how California’s Education Code applies to a particular allegation of antisemitic behavior, speech, or action in public schools. Each one answers the question, does this situation in all its particularity constitute unlawful antisemitic discrimination under the Education Code, yes or no?
And when the answer is “yes,” some of those reversals can cause a real earthquake. Here is a sampling of five of the dozens of landmark CDE rulings from 2025 clarifying how the law is to be applied. All quotes are citations from the actual CDE letters of decision.
1 – Political advocacy attire worn by a teacher at school is discriminatory.
A non-Palestinian teacher in San Francisco Unified School District “wore political attire and accessories related to Palestine at school,” “made statements about his opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to students,” and “displayed political items about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” in district classrooms and on district equipment.
The CDE ruled that his actions and communications constituted antisemitic discrimination because they “were blatantly polemical, presenting the views of only one side of a highly complex and controversial conflict,” ensuring “students of Jewish identity … would experience distress … that could reasonably impact on their education in ways that differed from their peers.”
2 – Biased “professional development” held on school property is discriminatory.
Approximately 12 district teachers in the Oakland Unified School District held an unauthorized anti-Zionist “Teach-In” on the Israel-Palestinian conflict using district resources and on district property and using materials that “focused solely on the pro-Palestinian perspective” without factoring in “an Israeli perspective, or a balanced review of both sides.” District teachers redistributed these materials and used them in assignments.
The CDE ruled that “the conduct as to the Teach-In … “constitute[d] discrimination” and that “such conduct constituted discrimination or intimidation against Jewish students and staff.”
3 – Improper vetting and supervision of an antisemitic guest speaker is discriminatory.
With district approval, a comedian with a history of antisemitic views was hired to entertain at a Mountain View Los Altos district-sponsored event hosted by a student club on district property. The comedian proceeded to make antisemitic remarks during the event, and district staff failed to interrupt him or intervene against his discriminatory speech during the event.
“The CDE determine[d] that … the District’s actions/inactions in failing to vet the comedian amounted to discrimination … [and] the District’s immediate actions/inactions (once the comedian made the remarks and while he was still on stage) [contributed] to the discrimination caused by the comedian.”
4 – Biased flag display allowed to linger on school property is discriminatory.
The CDE determined that administrators in Oakland Unified allowed a biased and prolonged political flag display at a school’s entrance, which “contributed to a discriminatory environment for Jewish students and staff.”
The unbalanced flag display “could be perceived as a show of [District] support for a particular viewpoint in the conflict.”
5 – Antisemitic statement made by a teacher to her class during instruction is discriminatory.
“The Complaint center[ed] around an October 11, 2024, classroom incident in Marin in which a Tamalpais Union High School District … Spanish teacher, during class time instruction, questioned why school was out on a Jewish holiday and then answered that rhetorical question with the comment that it was because there were ‘too many’ Jews, thereby causing … certain students, some of whom were … Jewish … to experience discomfort and distress.”
The CDE found that the teacher’s “shockingly antisemitic” statement to her students violated her “students’ rights to be free from discrimination, harassment, intimidation, or bullying on the basis of protected characteristics.”
As such, it amounted to discrimination and “warrant[ed] corrective action.”
The more of these decisions you read, the more apparent it becomes that in an insanely antisemitic situation, one calm clear naming of the problem rings out like a bell.
Reading the full text of each CDE legal decision is the only way that California’s 1,000-plus school boards, superintendents, and general counsels — as well as the California Legislature and the public at large — can understand these rulings about what the CDE deems antisemitic discrimination given the laws of our state.
This understanding is vital to enable school districts to implement nondiscrimination policies, balanced and legally valid curricula, and acceptable instructional standards that will meet CDE’s standards on what constitutes a nondiscriminatory learning environment that is free from antisemitic discrimination and harassment.
And that’s why we need the state of California to step in.
In Part 3 of this series, we’ll look at the issues surrounding access to this body of legal decisions and we’ll suggest what students, parents, and districts need next from the CDE if we’re going to fulfill the promise of educational equity that is worthy of California’s six million public school students.