As the Trump administration launches a federal civil rights investigation this week into an extremist New York City teachers’ group for allegedly indoctrinating students with antisemitic content, a Queens-based askan is raising pointed questions about whether senior Department of Education officials were long aware of the group’s activities – and deliberately looked the other way.

Moshe Spern of United Jewish Teachers tells Belaaz that the DOE’s repeated insistence that it has no connection to NYC Educators for Palestine rings hollow in light of a documented episode from early 2024 in which a sitting principal used her DOE position to email blast colleagues promoting one of the group’s inflammatory events – with no objection from district or departmental leadership.

“There is a very clear connection between the NYCPS and NYC Educators for Palestine,” Spern alleged. “I’m hoping the Trump administration identifies all evil parties that have spent the last two and a half years indoctrinating our students. The Jewish parents, students, and teachers just want to feel safe at school. We must have politically neutral schools and everyone should be consistent in these regulations.”

The episode Spern describes began in January 2024 with a professional workshop hosted by Tania Romero, a Supervisor of Social Workers at the NYC Department of Education. The workshop was built around a Vox article titled “Everything You Need to Know About Israel-Palestine” – a piece critics say is heavily skewed toward a Palestinian narrative. Among the presenters was Josh Heisler, a New York City public school teacher who is a member of both the United Federation of Teachers and Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist organization. While the workshop was more restrained in tone than the Educators for Palestine events that would follow, Spern says its slant was unmistakable.

A month earlier, in December 2023, Romero had organized a “healing” session restricted exclusively to “those who are currently holding space in support of the liberation of Palestine, as well as for Palestinian, Arab and Muslim kin” — language that explicitly excluded Jewish and pro-Israel educators. Romero, who publicly describes herself as a practitioner of tarot card readings, reiki “energy healing,” and herbology, appeared to encounter no pushback from DOE supervisors for that event.

A few weeks after Romero’s workshop, one of its attendees – Terri Grey, principal of the Virtual Innovators Academy, a remote public school serving first-year ninth and tenth graders with locations in the Bronx and Brooklyn – replied to all attendees of Romero’s workshop, inviting them to an Educators for Palestine virtual “curriculum share” event. That event was billed as an opportunity for teachers to exchange lessons on how to “get around censorship” and teach students about what the group described as “the ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

According to Spern, Grey’s email was sent to all principals and district leadership who had attended Romero’s workshop. Not a single one protested or raised any objection.

That silence, Spern contends, is telling.

Among those in a position to have been aware of the episode was Alan Cheng, who now serves as Supervising Superintendent of High Schools and D79 – one of the most senior positions in the DOE – in a role he assumed under Chancellor Kamar Samuels, who was appointed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Romero served under Cheng’s authority, and Spern notes that Cheng himself attended a workshop in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was discussed – one that Spern describes as virulently anti-Israel in content – without objecting to a word of it.
“It’s upsetting that someone in such a high position of power as a Superintendent wouldn’t realize themselves how inappropriate the training and emails were back then. Not enough leaders call these issues out and they become normalized,” Spern said.

The controversy unfolds against the backdrop of a major development reported last week: the Trump administration has launched a formal civil rights investigation into NYC Educators for Palestine. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights announced the probe following complaints that the group has pushed anti-Israel lessons on young students that discriminate against Jewish children. Among the group’s activities cited by federal officials was a “Teach-In for Palestine” held on Martin Luther King Jr. Day for students as young as six.

The DOE responded to the federal probe by reiterating that the group “is not connected to New York City Public Schools” – the same formulation it has used in the past. The group’s own mission statement, according to federal officials, declares that education “should be a tool for liberation NOT occupation.”

Spern said the DOE’s denials do not square with what he witnessed firsthand. “I’m hoping the Trump administration identifies all evil parties that have spent the last two and a half years indoctrinating our students.”

In a related development, the United Federation of Teachers’ delegate assembly this week voted to advance an anti-Israel resolution to its May agenda for a full vote – a first in the union’s history. Fifty-eight percent of delegates voted in favor of advancing the measure, which critics describe as riddled with factual inaccuracies, makes no mention of Hamas, and contains no reference whatsoever to the October 7, 2023, massacre that triggered the Gaza war.

Observers say the resolution marks a troubling inflection point in which the city’s largest teachers’ union is embracing partisan political advocacy against Israel at the expense of the many Jewish educators it is charged with representing.