Rep. Andrew Garbarino is pushing federal legislation to mandate 9/11 curriculum in all 50 states after a study found most states leave lessons optional.
Garbarino, 42, who represents Long Island, told The Post that the nation is failing its promise to “Never Forget.” Only Arizona and Florida currently require that the Sept. 11 attacks be taught in public schools, while ten other states merely encourage it through moments of silence, assemblies, or loose classwork guidelines, according to an August University of Wisconsin study. New York, despite being the primary target of the attacks, only mandates a moment of silence and includes 9/11 in broad social studies standards without a required curriculum.
“We made a promise to ‘Never Forget’, but today, only a handful of states require 9/11 to be taught in their schools,” Garbarino said.
Into that vacuum, activist-developed lesson plans are flowing. “Teaching Beyond September 11th,” created by the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education in 2020, is now recommended by education departments in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Oregon. The curriculum devotes a single paragraph to the attacks themselves and never refers to the hijackers as terrorists, instead organizing units around “Right-Wing Extremism,” “Islamophobia and the Oval Office,” “Surveillance of Muslims,” and “Muslim Youth and Resistance.”
The curriculum’s sparse account of the attacks reads: “On the 11th of September 2001, 19 hijackers flew two airplanes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one airplane into the Pentagon in Virginia, and a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania. A total of 2,996 people were killed, including the hijackers.” The lesson omits Osama bin Laden’s multiple confessions, his declaration of jihad, and his description of America as “the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind,” instead stating only that “The US accused Saudi national Osama bin Laden, living in Afghanistan at the time, of being the mastermind behind the attacks.”
Dr. Mika Hackner, director of research for the North American Values Institute, an education watchdog that analyzed the curriculum, said the material exploits tragedy for activism.
“This curriculum erases the victims of 9/11, erases the causes of 9/11 and instead uses the terrorist attack and its aftermath as a convenient vehicle to push a political agenda and activism onto children,” Hackner said.
The curriculum’s website states its goal is to “relate anti-Muslim racism/violence with other forms of racism and violence (e.g. Black Lives Matter; xenophobia, anti-Semitism etc.) in the United States and abroad.” One lead developer, Deepa Iyer, runs Solidarity Is, a project of the Building Movement Project, which has received at least $1.35 million from George Soros through fiscal sponsor Third Sector New England, according to public records. Other contributing academics are affiliated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Georgetown University’s Saudi-funded Bridge Initiative on Islamophobia.
Zineb Riboua, a Research Fellow at the Hudson Institute, tied the curricular approach to a broader ideological project.
“You teach kids that America is responsible for the atrocities around the world to develop a moral framework that can be activated very quickly to get policies that reduce America’s power and sovereignty,” Riboua said.
She added that targeting students follows methods used by America’s adversaries.
“Ayatollah Khamenei said the best audience to target is students,” she said.
The curriculum’s effect may already be measurable. A poll by the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa found that 66% of American Middle East studies professors believe college students cannot correctly identify who carried out the 9/11 attacks or why. The same survey of 470 respondents found two-thirds of those professors believe scholarly work actively shields anti-American regimes, groups, and ideologies.
Individual teachers are amplifying the ideological tilt. Adam Feinberg, who teaches at Brooklyn’s City Polytechnic High School and earned $113,394 in 2025, uploaded a worksheet to the American Federation of Teachers’ Share My Lesson Portal in February 2020 that has students read bin Laden’s “Letter to America.” Assignment questions include “Why do you think Osama bin Laden hates Jews so much?” and “For what reasons does he believe that America is the ‘worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind?'” Feinberg did not deny authorship but declined further comment.
Family members of the 2,977 victims and the nearly 10,000 first responders and civilians who have since died from Ground Zero-related illnesses say the curricula erase their suffering. Gail Silke, whose police officer brother Stephen Driscoll, 38, was killed in the South Tower, dismissed the educators behind the alternative frameworks.
“They’re not affected by it, they’re not in our shoes, and they don’t want to be in our shoes. Those people can kiss my ass,” Silke said.
Kevin Byrnes, whose father Kevin Byrnes Sr. Was an FDNY battalion chief who died from 9/11-related illness in 2004, said the lessons distort basic facts.
“I find these woke theories offensive; they should teach what happened and who did it,” Byrnes said.
A Manhattan mother whose father-in-law died in the attacks said her children came home in tears from classroom material that blamed America.
“They were disgusted with the s–t they were taught, it’s not fair, they lost their grandfather,” she said.
State Assemblyman Matt Slater, a Republican from Yorktown, framed the curricular fight in starker terms.
“Nearly 3,000 innocent people were murdered by al Qaeda on September 11th. They were the victims. The terrorists were the perpetrators. Any curriculum that blurs that fundamental truth, or makes the victims secondary to a political narrative, isn’t teaching history, it’s rewriting it,” Slater said.
Dr. Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, the project lead for “Teaching Beyond September 11th,” said the curriculum was designed as a supplement focusing on post-attack developments rather than replacing core instruction. An NYC Department of Education spokesperson noted it was one of approximately 40 options offered to teachers, with other choices emphasizing victims and family impacts. Neither Soros nor the city Department of Education responded to requests for comment.