Sharif El-Mekki, an adviser to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, is a black nationalist with family ties to Iran who supports school segregation and runs a nonprofit that has raked in nearly $20 million from the taxpayer and nonprofits, including the Gates Foundation. Francesca Block in the Free Press has more.
El-Mekki, a former middle and high school teacher and principal, founded the Centre for Black Educator Development (CBED) in 2019, which defines its vision as “a world where… all black students are taught by high-quality, same-race teachers,” and where “all teachers demonstrate high levels of expertise in anti-racist mindsets”. CBED argues that employing black teachers to educate black students increases educational outcomes.
Since its founding, CBED has trained thousands of teachers across the U.S. in “education activism”, urging a “commitment to liberation education from the racism inherent in America’s institutions, including our schools”. A CBED information packet titled ‘The Anti-Racist Guide to Teacher Retention’, developed with the Pennsylvania Department of Education, defines education as “a political act” that “can upend white supremacy and a racist history of using education as an oppressive social force”.
“Every lesson plan is a political document, and every classroom interaction a political statement,” the guide reads.
El-Mekki’s nonprofit boasts more than $19.5 million in assets, boosted by funders including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which donated over $1.4 million between 2020 and 2021, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which gave over $1.1 million in 2022, according to public tax filings. Other backers include NBC Universal, Nike, the Bezos Family Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania School of Education and dozens more. In 2023 alone, CBED trained more than 1,700 educators. In its most recent tax filing from 2023, El-Mekki drew a salary of $233,410 from the organisation.
“He started up this organisation, which on paper sounds like a really wonderful endeavour, getting more black teachers in the classroom,” said Dr. Mika Hackner, a Senior Research Associate at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, which drafted a report on El-Mekki’s extremist views and activism that she shared with the Free Press. “But if you scratch beneath the surface — not even beneath the surface, it’s on its website — he’s propagating some pretty dangerous and divisive ideas.”
El-Mekki, she added, is “bringing in segregation by a different and more socially and politically acceptable name”.
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