Radical Activist Groups Partner With Philly Teachers on Classroom Content
TAG-Philadelphia conference , featuring Abolition School and Rethinking Schools, shows how activist organizations work with educators to shape classroom content in the School District of Philadelphia
Quick Take-Away:
TAG-Philadelphia functions as a coordinating hub connecting educator networks, union-linked caucuses, and outside activist organizations.
At its annual conference, TAG-Philly had a workshop on “US Imperialism” in Iran and Venezuela, featuring Abolition School and Rethinking Schools which encouraged educators to bring “insights” from the workshop into their classroom.
School District of Philadelphia Director of Social Studies Curriculum, Ismael Jimenez ,sits on the advisory board of the Abolition School, linking district leadership to an organization that explicitly aims to develop activists through K–12 education; district teacher Hannah Gann has also hosted its programming in her classroom.
FULL STORY
Teacher Activist Groups is a coalition of teacher activist organizations across the country who work together for shared political goals. Members include the Association of Raza Educators (ARE), Rethinking Schools, New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCORE), Teachers for Social Justice in Chicago, and Teacher Action Group(TAG)-Philadelphia.
This weekend, TAG-Philadelphia, or TAG-Philly, held a workshop for teachers in the School District of Philadelphia. The workshop included a session delivered by Rethinking Schools’ Adam Sanchez and head of the Abolition School, Geo Maher, on “US Imperialism under Trump” from “Venezuela to Iran.” The session included tips on how to incorporate “insights from this workshop into your classroom.”
The collaboration between Rethinking Schools and the Abolition School, which is explicitly Marxist in orientation and works to develop a pipeline of ‘revolutionary’ activists within K-12 classrooms, is yet more evidence of the influence that both of these activist organizations have in the district. But who is the organization that brought them together for this workshop?
Who Is TAG-PHILLY
TAG-Philly is an activist group made up of Philadelphia-area teachers. TAG-Philly believes teachers should be “political actors’ and should, according to one of the panelists at its 10 year anniversary, fight against “capitalism” and “white supremacy” in schools.
TAG-Philly holds Inquiry to Action Groups (ITAG)- “study groups” made up of educators and community activists. The ultimate goal of these groups is to form activist groups targeted at specific actions.
In the below clip, Christopher Rogers, previously of the Black Lives Matter at School group, now with the Abolition School, talks about the ITAGs and how the study groups are a place where they can plan “resistance.”
The Caucus of Working Educators (CWE), a “progressive” caucus within the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, developed out of TAG-Philly. Likewise, the Racial Justice Organizing Committee, which sprung from the CWE and in turn created the Philadelphia Educators for Palestine, can be called a product of TAG.
At the 10th annual TAG-Philly Education for Liberation Conference, held in 2019, Kelley Collings, a leader within CWE, is flanked by Ismael Jimenez, core member of the CWE, the RJOC and also the Director of Social Studies Curriculum for the School District of Philadelphia, and Christopher Rogers, educator with the Abolition School. The Abolition School takes on TAG’s formula of “study groups” to strategize for revolution and liberation).
TAG-Philly’s 2025 conference also featured the Abolition School and a session on Teaching Palestine (in the video, leader of Philly Educators for Palestine and member of the Philly Palestine Coalition, Hannah Gann, can be seen, as well as Ismael Jimenez and Christopher Rogers).
TAG-Philly sends out regular emails to its members, advertising union business and other events in the district, like Philadelphia Educator for Palestine “teach-ins” or a petition in support of Ismael Jimenez.
TAG-Philly is a central actor in the activist ecosystem of the School District of Philadelphia - serving as an information hub and a way to bring groups like the PEFP, Abolition School and Rethinking Schools together.
More on the Abolition School
The W.E.B Du Bois Movement School For Abolition and Reconstruction (Abolition School) is a school run by activist-educators, including
Geo Maher (who had to resign from Drexel after tweeting that he wanted “white genocide”);
Ant Smith, a former SDP teacher who was incarcerated for setting fire to a police car during a protest, who has shared the stage with Samidoun, a U.S. designated terror entity, and who has written that he doesn’t condemn Hamas and that the media is controlled by Jews;
I don’t have time to condemn Hamas when the conditions that agitate Hamas have not been addressed.
We can tell the media is Jewish owned because look how quick they cancel you over anti-semitic comments!
Christopher Rogers, who has spoken explicitly about how the goal of the Abolition School is to work through K-12 in order to turn students into revolutionaries.
The Abolition School has publicly stated that it is being negatively impacted by H.R. 9495, legislation targeting tax-exempt status for “terrorist supporting organizations”, and as a result can no longer rely on donations from standard non-profits.
The Abolition School and the School District of Philadelphia
The Abolition School has deep ties to the School District of Philadelphia, part of its plan to have a pipeline into K-12 classrooms.
The Director of Social Studies Curriculum for the School District of Philadelphia, Ismael Jimenez, sits on the advisory board of the Abolition School.
In 2025, the Abolition School ran a workshop for middle and high school students in collaboration with Hannah Gann, a teacher in the District. Gann is a member of the Racial Justice Organizing Committee and a leader in the Philadelphia Educators for Palestine, an activist group known to involve high school students.
Ant Smith has taught in Hannah Gann’s classroom.
The Abolition School seeks to abolish the state and sees violence as a legitimate political tool.
Adam Sanchez and Rethinking Schools
Rethinking Schools is an influential actor in K-12 education. Its materials are used in teacher training programs like UCLA’s, which recently taught Rethinking Schools’ “Teaching Palestine” in its Ethnic Studies Certificate Program. Rethinking Schools recruits teachers to contribute to its materials, including the current School District of Philadelphia educators who wrote “Teaching Palestine-Israel from the Perspective of Civil Rights and Black Power Activists,” which was included in “Teaching Palestine.”
Through the Zinn Education Project, which Rethinking Schools runs with Teaching for Change, it provides free lesson materials to teachers. Over a hundred thousand educators in the United States have downloaded their lessons.
Adam Sanchez is the managing editor of Rethinking Schools. Under his watch, Rethinking Schools has published “Teaching Palestine” and “Don’t Stop Teaching About Gaza.”
Sanchez himself has published and taught lessons which help students place October 7 “in context” so that they understand why Hamas carried out a massacre on that day.
He has used his public social media to make light over concerns about antisemitism in the Teaching Palestine curriculum.
The TAG-Philly Conference
This year’s conference was titled “All Hands on Deck.”
Panels included:
Blyweiss is a member of the Caucus of Working Educators. CWE received training from CORE, the caucus leading the Chicago Teachers Union.
Maher called the execution of Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, a US designated terror organization, a “fucking nightmare.”
In a webinar for Haymarket Books, an independent “radical” publishing house, Maher gives a spirited defense of the Venezuelan regime. During the panel, Maher criticized liberal democracy and the U.S. system of checks and balances - he says rather than being a check on power, the U.S. system is instead designed to make revolution impossible.
Because we’re sort of deeply steeped in this idea of liberal democracy, right? Liberal democracy is founded on a separation of powers, which we’re told is a check against tyranny. The objective and the goal and the sort of function of the separation of powers in the US and elsewhere is to slow and prevent revolutionary change. That is what it means, and that is the goal of it. And we see this all around us, not even revolutionary change. We know that in the United States, we can’t change the system because of the structure of the electoral college, the Supreme Court, and the Senate, which were instituted to prevent everyday people from being able to transform their system. Right?
When Venezuelans begin to look at a different kind of system and begin to think about a different way of formulating power that would allow elements of the state, and Chavez in particular, to act decisively against bureaucratic enemies of the revolution, and to do so hand in hand with grassroots institutions of democracy, bypassing the more bureaucratic layers of the state, we begin to yell and sort of clutch our pearls about so-called authoritarianism, or the centralization of power. When all that is happening is that a level of authority is being accomplished. And that’s the first real misunderstanding, is that we want a revolution to have authority.
The Zinn Education Project, of which Adam Sanchez also serves as a Teacher Leader, published an article calling the joint US-Israeli operation against Iran “illegal and immoral” and “against the people of Iran.”
Rethinking Schools has also published articles which gloss over the harms and violence of the Iranian regime while painting the United States as the aggressor.
The School District of Philadelphia should publicly account for which “insights” from Abolition School and Rethinking Schools are reaching its students—and who within the district is responsible for facilitating Abolition School and Rethinking Schools’ pipeline into its K-12 classes.