How talks to clean up California’s controversial antisemitism law fell apart

Por Eric He — POLITICO – TOP Stories

SACRAMENTO, California — Two words sank seven months of negotiations in Sacramento: “factually accurate.”

The phrase was a major source of controversy in AB 715, the contentious law passed last year to combat antisemitism in California schools despite fervent opposition from teacher unions, school administrators and civil rights groups who said it would force teachers to censor themselves when discussing the war in Gaza and other charged subjects. Its authors say it does nothing of the sort.

After signing the bill into law, Gov. Gavin Newsom implored the two sides to “work quickly on a follow-up measure” to address the “urgent concerns about unintended consequences” from “the entire education ecosystem.”

Roughly 20 drafts of a fix were traded in weekly meetings starting in February, said Assemblymember Dawn Addis, who authored the measure with Assemblymember Rick Zbur.

But the legislative session ended last month with no deal.

In the end, the talks were thwarted by an unbridgeable divide: The two sides couldn’t even agree that there was a problem to be solved.

“I still don’t believe that there’s anything really that’s defective about” the law, Zbur said in an interview with POLITICO.

Troubled by what they said was a surge in antisemitic incidents on campuses around California, the Legislature’s Jewish caucus and a coalition of Jewish organizations rammed through the measure in the final hours of the legislative session last year.

Particularly divisive was its requirement that teachers be “factually accurate” in lessons and adhere to unspecified “standards of professional responsibility,” while avoiding “advocacy, personal opinion, bias or partisanship.” Education groups representing both teachers and administrators, the ACLU and others protested that the provision was vague to the point that it would leave teachers afraid to teach about the war in Gaza and other controversial issues.

After losing the fight to defeat the bill, David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association, highlighted Newsom’s comments on unintended consequences and the need for a cleanup bill, calling them “significant.”

“At a time when too many are seeking to attack academic freedom and weaponize public education, AB 715 would unfortunately arm ill-intentioned people with the ability to do so,” Goldberg said.

Negotiations took place between Zbur and Addis and five of the state’s main education groups: CTA, California Federation of Teachers, California School Boards Association, California County Superintendents and Association of California School Administrators. As talks began, the groups proposed striking out the “factually accurate” language, which the authors promptly rejected, according to a person familiar with the negotiations granted anonymity to discuss the private conversations.

Zbur and Addis countered in April with AB 2615, a proposed clean-up bill that would have removed the “standards of professional responsibility” language from the law and done nothing to the “factually accurate” wording beyond adding a slight clarification about how it should be interpreted.

That did not satisfy CTA. Seth Bramble, a lobbyist for the group, didn’t try to hide his frustration during a hearing held by the Assembly Education Committee. After having presented the authors with “very specific examples” of how the law’s language would disrupt teachers’ jobs, it was “very dismissive” for them not to remove the wording, he said.

The committee approved the clean-up bill, but it stalled on its way to the Assembly floor in the face of continued opposition. When a procedural deadline in June passed, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas parked the bill in the rules committee to give the two sides more time to negotiate.

Meanwhile, other groups not involved in the talks made their own bid. The powerful union, SEIU California, the California Faculty Association and the Council on American-Islamic Relations sponsored a proposal by Assemblymember Robert Garcia that would have removed from the law a reference to a contested definition of antisemitism. And it would have made a newly established antisemitism prevention coordinator a civil servant position rather than an appointee of the governor. But Jewish California, a statewide coalition of Jewish organizations, immediately objected to the proposal, and Rivas squashed it.

Zbur said the groups behind the proposal hadn’t been at the negotiation table because “they didn’t ask to be” and accused them of not being open to compromise.

“They wanted the whole bill repealed, so that’s not a productive negotiating partner,” he said.

Oussama Mokeddem, legislative and government affairs director at CAIR California, put the blame back on Zbur, saying the lawmaker was not “interested in engaging with us despite our multiple attempts at talking to his staff and engaging with his staff on the bill.”

In May, the school representatives submitted an ambitious demand that lesson plans, instructional material and several other big touchpoints be exempted from the “factually accurate” requirement. The hope, according to the person familiar with negotiations, was that Zbur and Addis would pare back the wish list “to the bits and pieces that they could accept.” Weeks later, the authors countered yet again. In a draft of that proposal obtained by POLITICO, they sought to add language to affirm that nothing in the law would restrict teaching “controversial issues,” as long as teachers presented them in a “balanced and complete manner” that included “competing views.” But the “factually accurate” line still remained.

As lawmakers broke for summer recess in early July, the education officials responded. They would be fine with the provision, but only if “factually accurate” was defined broadly to include criteria such as the “good-faith examination of matters on which reasonable persons may disagree,” “teaching established facts alongside disputed interpretations” and “subjects that are contested, evolving, unresolved or publicly debated.”

That idea landed as a non-starter for Zbur and Addis. With less than a month to go in the legislative session, they sent over what the person familiar with negotiations described as their “last, best and final offer.”

The document, obtained by POLITICO, contained three options they were willing to sign off on, none of which addressed the contested language. The first consisted of a small number of changes to the law that the two sides had agreed on, including that school districts would be required to remove only portions of a textbook found to be discriminatory rather than entire books or instructional series. The second was the proposal that had passed out of the Assembly Education Committee in April. And the third contained similar language to the authors’ June proposal.

None got traction with the law’s opponents. Troy Flint, chief communications officer for the California School Boards Association, said that accepting just a few concessions from the authors was an unacceptable “piecemeal approach” that did not provide “comprehensive reform.” Theresa Montaño, a chairperson of CFA’s Teacher Education Caucus, said Zbur and Addis had presented “insignificant amendments” that amounted to a “broken promise.”

In the end, lawmakers departed the Capitol at the end of their legislative year without voting on a clean-up bill.

“Reasonable minds disagree,” Addis said, pointing out that a federal judge in July tossed out a lawsuit claiming that AB 715 is having a chilling effect on students and teachers. “We really tried hard to get to a place where we could all agree on making some minor changes, and unfortunately, it just wasn’t able to happen this year.”

Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories