Educators in the country’s second-largest school district are facing repression in the wake of a new California law.

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Teachers in the second-largest school district in the nation have had to remove Black Lives Matter, Land Back, and Palestinian flags from their classrooms as part of so-called corrective actions taken following a complaint alleging discrimination. The changes occurred at Downtown Magnets High School in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The district has over half a million students and 1,500 schools and centers.

“Part of the thing that makes this very difficult, and also that makes it very pressing for people to understand, [is] if LAUSD falls and starts to institute policies that create censorship, this is going to be a model across the country,” Jessica Rodarte, National Education Association vice president for United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and vice-chair of the California Teachers Association’s Civil Rights in Education Committee, told Truthout.

“If LAUSD falls and starts to institute policies that create censorship, this is going to be a model across the country.”

The changes at Downtown Magnets High School followed a complaint filed in March with LAUSD’s Office of Student Civil Rights by Emet Legal Services, alleging violations of anti-discrimination statutes, including Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and California’s Assembly Bill (AB) 715. Specifically, the complaint, which Truthout reviewed, alleged that Tiffany Do, an 11th-grade social studies and health teacher, had created a hostile environment for Jewish faculty and students by displaying Palestinian flags in the classroom, wearing a keffiyeh in their staff photo on the school’s website and sometimes on campus, and “fail[ing] to present pro-Israel or pro-Zionist speech, posters, or classroom content.” The complaint claimed Do had “indoctrinate[d] students to become political activists while silencing and intimidating Jewish and Israeli-American staff and students.”

“When it first came down, to use the current slang, I was crashing out, not having a good time, in shock, really upset that this could happen, wondering ‘Why me?’” Do told Truthout. “But this is so beyond me at the end of the day. This is about the state and the state of education, and this is about Palestine and liberation movements, and it’s about censorship.”

The complaint was among the first to be filed citing AB 715, a state law that passed last year in a process its opponents, as well as some lawmakers, characterized as undemocratic. The bill was one in a long line championed by California’s Legislative Jewish Caucus that opponents argued sought to censor classroom instruction on Palestine, as well as other Palestine-related speech in public schools. A diverse coalition that included California’s largest and most powerful unions of teachers and faculty — as well as the Coalition for Liberated Ethnic Studies, American Civil Liberties Union California Action, and local branches of Jewish Voice for Peace from across the state — organized against the bill.

Sources told Truthout they are now seeing the far-reaching consequences many warned would follow AB 715’s passage, including ramped-up attacks on teachers and disruptions to the rollout of ethnic studies classes, which earlier state legislation made a graduation requirement. “What we’re seeing is school districts are afraid to roll out ethnic studies,” Guadalupe Cardona, a high school educator and member of the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium, told Truthout. “We’re seeing that when teachers say, ‘Hey, we’re supposed to have ethnic studies. Why aren’t we having ethnic studies?’ They’re being discouraged from teaching ethnic studies.”

Cardona told Truthout that part of that fear stems from the actions of Zionist groups that are using AB 715 to pressure schools to censor teaching on Palestine, settler colonialism, and related themes, and to incorporate pro-Israel talking points into classroom materials. Truthout previously reported that the Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies (ACES) was emailing school administrators with instructions on “preparing for AB 715 compliance.” ACES positions itself in direct opposition to a critical or liberated approach to ethnic studies, which it claims promotes a “militant, anti-Western agenda [and] views history and civics entirely through a …