NEWTON, Mass. – A report being released today is a scathing indictment of the Newton Public Schools’ use of educational materials that are inaccurate, biased and plagiarized to teach students about Islam.

Verity Educate, a non-profit organization devoted to verifying the accuracy and objectivity of educational materials, wrote a 150-page-plus report that shows the Newton lessons were based on “poorly developed curricula … Multiple historical inaccuracies; plagiarized and deceptively edited material; material from a proselytizing and hate-filled website; unbalanced, biased presentations …”

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The materials are being presented to 10th graders in world vision classes and ninth grader social studies students.

Executive Director Ellen R. Wald told EAGnews the controversy began 2-3 years ago “when parents of students began to get upset with some of the material their kids we’re bringing home, saying certain things about [subjects] related to the Middle East in terms of things about Islam and also about the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

She explains the lesson plans are developed by individual teachers at Newton who have a lot of leeway. In their research, she say it could not be determined if there was much or any oversight by the administration.

The question has to be asked, are they teaching students about Islam or indoctrinating them into it?

Wald says the school district has not been forthcoming with the material parents and others were asking to see so they could determine for themselves what was being taught. That’s putting it politely. More precisely, they’ve been stonewalling people trying to get answers. Out of frustration, parents contacted Verity Education and asked them to exam the materials after the organization Americans for Peace and Tolerance uncovered a troubling trend of anti-Israel material in the school system.

She says it was clear that no one who was a content expert concerning these lessons had actually looked at them to do an analysis. Verity Educate scholars began going through the lessons line by line and quickly discovered that they did not know where the content had come from. There were no citations or attributions for the material used. Wald says that amounts to intellectual dishonesty. She says with some effort they were able to track down the sources, sources she says that were very problematic.

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For instance, one of the printouts was from a religious, proselytizing website that promotes virulent hatred and dismisses Shi’a Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

In another example, Wald says the lessons label Hamas and Hezbollah as political groups rather than as terrorist organizations. When looking at the content about the Arab-Israeli conflict, they found that only certain points of view were presented. Wald says, “The perspective of the current Israeli government is never mentioned to students at all. Likewise, the Palestinian perspective was presented from Yasser Arafat’s perspective or Hamas’ perspective. There was no perspective of the regular Palestinian people.

Inaccuracies range from misidentifying the entire Middle East as a region that stretches to Southeast Asia, to mistakes of dates and names,” she says. “In our report, we have over 300 points of factual inaccuracies or inconsistencies.”

On three separate occasions, Wald says Verity Education contacted the school board and offered to share the results of their study with them before releasing the study to the public. There was no response. Sounds like the administration and the school board should be sent to detention.

Wald says she realizes that Verity Educate is an outside organization. But she says the report was prepared on behalf parents and concerned citizens living within the district. She says her organization believes education is a local matter and it’s really important for the people who live in that area to advocate on behalf of their students.

For more information, go to www.verityeducate.org/newton to request the report.