A nonprofit organization with financial support from Wall Street heavyweights including Jamie Dimon, Bill Ackman and Dan Loeb is developing a curriculum about hate crimes for New York City public schools.
(Bloomberg) — A nonprofit organization with financial support from Wall Street heavyweights including Jamie Dimon, Bill Ackman and Dan Loeb is developing a curriculum about hate crimes for New York City public schools.
Facing History & Ourselves will create the lessons for 6th through 12th graders for use starting later this year.
The units will be the first the group has created for the New York City Department of Education, and the first developed with the city’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, which commissioned the project and provided the public funding.
“It’s really a decision on the part of the city to take an intentional and active role in addressing hate crimes, in every way possible,” said Hassan Naveed, the office’s executive director.
The project began after a 19% increase in hate crime complaints in 2019, largely attributed to anti-Jewish graffiti and vandalism in Brooklyn. The following year, the pandemic prompted a wave of harassment, discrimination and attacks against Asians, accounting for 20% of violent offenses. About 30% of violent incidents were LGBTQ-related.
US Education Department surveys in recent years have tracked an increase in bullying at schools. In the 2018-2019 review, about 25% of students ages 12 to 18 saw hate words or symbols written in their schools, such as homophobic slurs and references to lynching. Physical attacks with a weapon nearly doubled.
The Facing History & Ourselves curriculum will be broken up into lessons: defining a hate crime, examining the impact of such crimes on schools and students, studying methods of prevention and how to repair communities in their wake. Materials will be online, with teacher training done in New York and made available elsewhere.
The organization operates in more than 100 countries, and has created curriculum for public schools in Chicago, Boston and Memphis, Tennessee. It began 47 years ago with a case study on the rise of the Nazis in Germany and has expanded to include materials on the Reconstruction period and the civil rights movement in the US.
“We teach young people how to make sense of current events by making connections to historical moments,” said Pam Haas, executive director of the nonprofit’s New York office. “Our mission is to give students the tools to look at history to ultimately stand up to bigotry and hate.”
The lessons are designed to be taught over five to 10 class periods of 45 minutes to an hour each in middle and high schools. They fold into existing humanities courses or social studies classes that touch on the historical roots of hatred, Haas said.
Among the group’s other financial supporters are Dan Och, the Bezos Family Foundation, Barry Sternlicht and Boaz Weinstein.
Glenn Greenberg, founder of Brave Warrior Capital, has backed the group for 30 years and recently gave an unrestricted gift that will support the development of this curriculum.
“I hate people who pick on other people because they’re weaker and can’t defend themselves,” Greenberg said in an interview, adding “the dangers are increasing with inflammatory rhetoric, social media, which is easy and anonymous, even music lyrics.”
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