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.
