The Los Angeles Unified School District, the country’s second largest with nearly 550,000 students at more than 1,500 schools and centers, made a “monumental” decision when it found in a probe that one of its teachers discriminated against Israel, according to Ilana Cohen, founding attorney of Emet Legal Services.

“If you are constantly talking about how much you hate Israel and you have giant Palestinian flags and your students are being forced to do scavenger hunts on how many Palestinian flags do I have in the classroom, then that’s just discriminatory,” Cohen told JNS. “You don’t need students or faculty to come forward and say, ‘Well, I feel personally targeted because—.’”

Cohen, whose firm addresses Jew-hatred at the kindergarten to 12th grade level, filed a complaint to the district alleging that the teacher presented one-sided messages about Israel in the classroom.

The district’s finding, which she called a “great victory for the students and families of Los Angeles, and by extension families all across California who have been living with the same kinds of biased and discriminatory content in their school districts,” is saying, essentially, that “all of this anti-Israel indoctrination and propaganda is discriminatory on its face,” Cohen told JNS.

A U.S. history, ethnic-studies and health teacher at Downtown Magnets High School violated Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the state education code by displaying Palestinian flags in her classroom, the investigation found.

Some students saw the teacher’s “related classroom messaging as favoring Palestine over Israel, and that current events references touching on Palestine, Gaza and related issues were presented in a manner that did not provide students access to instruction on fair, equitable and neutral terms,” it stated.

The district determined that there was no legitimate, neutral justification for the teacher’s repeated use of “one-sided displays and related instructional messaging on a topic closely associated with shared ancestry, ethnic characteristics, national origin and religion.”

But the district found that a teacher did not engage in hate speech by wearing a keffiyeh in her official district photo and during class.

Cohen plans to appeal the district’s finding on the keffiyeh to the California Department of Education.

“It’s just not really discussed in the report. It just says it doesn’t violate anything, but there’s no discussion about it,” she told JNS. “I would like for there to be a discussion about it.”

“Keffiyehs, unless they’re worn for cultural reasons, if they are political statements, should not be tolerated on school campuses,” Cohen said.

A district spokesman told JNS that “the matter referenced is part of the district’s uniform complaint procedures, a state-required process used to review and address specific concerns.”

Scott Portnoff, a Jewish teacher at the school who said that he told Cohen about his concerns after telling the district about them for two years, told JNS that “the investigative report feels anti-climactic.”

“There’s no feeling of relief,” he said. “Just deep disillusionment with the entire system and the people in it.”

Portnoff and “one non-Jewish teacher and one other non-Jewish faculty member I would speak with routinely were disturbed by this teacher’s behavior and the failure of the administration and LAUSD bureaucracy to enforce its own rules and policies.”

‘Very extreme personal opinions’

Cohen alleges that the teacher draped a Palestinian flag from the ceiling in a way that was visible to students walking by on campus.

District investigators couldn’t confirm that it was visible in that way, but Portnoff showed JNS a picture that he said demonstrates the Palestinian flag was visible. “The school quad is right below the window,” he said.

The teacher told investigators that students were asked to find the number of Palestinian flags in the classroom as a part of a scavenger hunt that was an “ungraded community-building activity,” the documents stated.

Cohen told JNS that the teacher shared slides in class that talked about “how many Palestinian kids were killed randomly.”

“Like, ‘News alert: Palestinian children massacred by Israel,’” Cohen said. “She would bring it into the curriculum that way.”

Cohen shared slides from the teacher’s class, which she said she received via a public records request, that included a screenshot of a February 2024 Associated Press social media post stating, “Breaking: Health officials say more than 12,300 Palestinian minors have been killed in Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza.”

The words “Palestinians” and “minors” were underlined in red.

“When the district investigated, they found that she’s talking about her very extreme personal opinions about Israel in her health class,” Cohen told JNS.

The district is giving until June 10, the last day of school, for it to undertake a series of measures, including reviewing all displays, teaching materials and current events readings in history and ethnic-studies classes, in addition to making a process for students to report discrimination, harassment and bias in classroom material directly to administrators.

“I’m told that all the displays are still up,” Cohen told JNS. “I don’t know why it would take them two months to take down discriminatory displays if they know that they’re up, so I’ve communicated to their attorneys that they need to act now.”

A district spokesman told JNS that “the timeline for corrective actions is consistent with standard practice and is designed to allow sufficient time for full and thoughtful implementation.”

Cohen told JNS that “when LAUSD does something, districts around California typically follow, because they are the large district with resources.”

“Teachers don’t have the right to insert their personal discriminatory biases into the classroom to students that have no choice but to sit in these classes,” she said. “They’re a captive audience.”

“There is this power imbalance between the teacher and the students, where students aren’t comfortable standing up in class and saying, ‘You’re wrong, that’s factually inaccurate. Why are you talking about this? You’re making me feel unsafe,’” Cohen told JNS. “When they do, they’re often retaliated against.”

“It’s just a huge problem,” she added. “As a community, we have to be fighting it through all ends.”