Members of the Democratic Socialists of America have been discussing an ambitious push to reshape New York City public schools, with participants saying they want classroom instruction to reflect socialist priorities, The Post has learned.
Maureen Fadem, a professor at CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College, urged that children be taught through what she described as a “democratic socialist frame” and said curricula should include Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose writings influenced communist movements later invoked by dictators including Stalin and Mao.
“We need to overhaul the curriculum in a class consciousness frame. . . . The curriculum as a whole needs to be relooked at, revisioned and reframed,” Fadem said.
Fadem also called for students to be taught “class consciousness,” a Marxist concept centered on conflict between workers and owners, while saying educators themselves should receive training rooted in “race consciousness.”
“We need to be teaching teachers about institutional racism in the training of pedagogy,” she said.
Fadem is among several controversial professors employed within the taxpayer-funded CUNY system, including some who have faced criminal charges. She has also advocated for slavery reparations and argued that school curricula have long been shaped by conservative ideas.
“The curriculum was built not under a democratic socialist frame, it was built under a neoliberal and conservative frame,” she said.
The session, titled “Planning for Socialist School Governance,” was led by NYC DSA Labor Working Group co-chair Nina Bruckenthal, a math teacher at NEST+m, a science-focused public K-12 school on the Lower East Side, and Amanda Vender, an ESL teacher at the International High School of Sciences in Elmhurst, Queens.
Another teacher warned that the organization’s revolutionary agenda could cause parents to flee the public school system and opt to enroll their kids in charter schools instead — and urged the DSA to fight school choice and “strengthen the UFT.”
“All of our reforms are obviously not very popular. And so as long as school choice exists, parents are going to pull away and go to charter schools that are ununionized because they believe in that,” one teacher admitted.
The DSA educators vowed to use their connections to fellow socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani to get their agenda through, and also conspired to use upcoming contract negotiations to realize their far-left goals.
“DSA does have a relationship with the mayor and we can leverage that,” Bruckenthal said.
They also pledged to insert their demands into upcoming contract negotiations between the United Federation of Teachers and NYC.
“The webinar made clear that the DSA sees Mayor Mamdani [as a] window of opportunity to advance its agenda,” North American Values Institute Research Director Mika Hacker said.
Former Community Education Council 2 President Maud Maron said parents should beware the power-hungry radicals.
“Childless apparatchiks seeking access to other people’s children in order to convert them to their beliefs is the definition of grooming. Hands off the kids,” Maron told The Post.
The UFT contract for Gotham teachers is set to expire Nov. 28, 2027 and the DSA has progressively been strengthening its grip on the union.
“We can make real wins through our contract bargaining process. I would argue for this group, something that is strategic and winnable could be won through our bargaining,” Bruckenthal said.
Many DSA members are part of the UFT’s Movement of Rank-and-File Educators caucus, and the two organizations have joined together to stage anti-Israel protests throughout the city.
The group articulated a plan to wrest control of the UFT and use its power to influence local politics — noting many members were in the MORE caucus in an internal memo published in Politico.
