Parents may be interested to know, and many likely do not, that a popular school program masquerading as a reading aid might be teaching your children to interpret the news from a leftist point of view.

A little-known EdTech startup company called Newsela was founded by Matthew Gross and Dan Cogan-Drew in 2013, although some sources trace it back to 2012. Newsela supports Common Core’s reading and “English Language Arts” standards, hence the “ela” portion of its name. The fact that it was financed by Silicon Valley money — Zuckerberg Investment Ventures for one — is no surprise. Toss in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as donors and you’ve come full circle, since Gates was a key player in the development of Common Core.

Newsela rewrites and repackages articles from mainstream publications like the New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press (AP), PBS, and others, to correlate with five different K-12 reading levels. PJ Media reported in 2016 that “the creators of Newsela found an opportunity to profit from the Common Core standards by adapting news to the classroom and selling it to schools as ‘Common Core-aligned.’” It provides modified versions of newspaper articles as reading exercises, “coupled with four-question quizzes to test students’ comprehension.”

The platform also enables “differentiated instruction” or “differentiated learning,” the education fad that promotes “a range of different avenues” for teaching children, even in the same classroom. As far back as 1997, Phyllis Schlafly picked up on the folly of differentiated instruction when she wrote about its use in a so-called Gifted and Talented program. What she described was anything but a challenging curriculum for bright students, but instead was an exercise in “analysis” and “abstraction.” One section employed “guided imagery” for the purpose of collecting information about each student. Phyllis rhetorically asked: “For what purpose will the teacher ‘chart’ this imagery information about each student?” She then answered the question with more questions: “To scan it into the child’s computer profile? To follow up with psychiatric sessions with the school counselor? Is this how public schools are helping our best and brightest students?”

According to one online source, differentiated learning can take many forms; e.g., in “small work groups,” but to the casual observer, it’s more about students “teaching each other” and doing whatever they want in the name of “learning.” It’s also about teachers tailoring instruction for students according to their race, gender, family economic status, etc., which signals that they are not all equal and therefore can’t be taught the same subjects in the same manner. In any case, Newsela’s format apparently fits with differentiation.

Biased content

“While [Newsela] may seem a useful teaching tool,” observed PJ Media, “not everyone thinks of it favorably.” Indeed, parents have complained over the years about the platform’s leftist point of view, and some have charged that the articles are not well written and contain factual errors.” But as the articles were originally the work of professional media, the political bias reflects that of the original sources as well as that of Newsela.

Examples abound of rewrites that move left-leaning views even farther left. In one example, PJ Media compared an actual excerpt from the AP with the Newsela rewrite as shown below.

Opening paragraphs, AP:

• In the course of a 17-year experiment on more than 1 million plants, scientists put future global warming to a real world test — growing California flowers and grasslands with extra heat, carbon dioxide and nitrogen to mimic a not-so-distant, hotter future.


• The results, simulating a post-2050 world, aren’t pretty. And they contradict those who insist that because plants like carbon dioxide — the main heat-trapping gas spewed by the burning of fossil fuels — climate change isn’t so bad, and will result in a greener Earth.

Opening paragraphs, Newsela 580L (5^th grade level):

• Scientists in California know it will be even hotter in many years. They want to know what will happen to plants. They are growing many different plants. They are using extra heat, carbon dioxide and nitrogen.


• They hope the elements will create an environment that is like the world in the year 2050. The scientists want to see how the plants react. So far, the future does not look good.


• The scientists have been doing this for 17 years. They are creating the changes that come from global warming. The scientists say it is like having a time machine to look ahead.

The AP article presented global warming as a given, but 5^th graders were fed a still more partisan version by Newsela instead of an impartial report, albeit not very well written and arguably at a less than 5^th grade reading level.

In another example, a Newsela slide deck of Women’s History Month Lessons sheds more light on the platform’s bias. In viewing women leaders in the 1800s, for example, the presentation appears to ensure that the main takeaway is the overall subservience of women during that time, but also that some women were more subservient than others.

The slides go on to review the changes that have occurred over time for women, but the implication is that women’s prospects today remain negative. It assumes all students agree that the emphasis for women should range from “reproductive justice to indigenous rights to economic empowerment — and beyond.” The exercise then encourages students to pick an issue and “create a plan for how you will get involved and take action on [it]. You may identify organizations that are already working on this issue and explain how you plan to support, or propose an individual project around fundraising, mutual aid, political organizing, or spreading information, or other. Note whether your plan reflects any of the strategies you read about in the readings, and why you feel those strategies will be effective, given the results of previous efforts.... Once you’ve written up your plan and explanation, it’s time to take action!”

Parent and teacher reviews

Common Sense Media posted parent reviews of Newsela as well as those of teachers, which were mixed at best. While some were supportive, many were negative. One suburban Colorado mom described the AP stories as “abbreviated,” with “grammatical errors and poor content.” This mom found them lacking “in any kind of robust classroom discussion” and felt they provided “a poor substitute for language arts.”

Another mom wrote: “I am thoroughly disappointed in Newsela and plan to go back to Dogo News for reliable and consistently informative content.” Yet another parent’s post read: “In theory, [Newsela] sounds great. But the political slant is out of control. Further, and this is what really bothers me, the questions are horrible. The answers in many cases do not make sense. I am working to get this garbage removed from my kid’s school.”

A high school teacher commented in part: “[Newsela’s] liberal bias is evident in EVERY article that has anything to do with politics. Liberal teachers love it because it furthers their own agenda, but I won’t assign anything from Newsela again.”

And then there was this review, posted during the Trump presidency and titled “Horrible Left Progressive Indoctrination of our kids”:

• My twin girls are both eight [years old] and are in 3rd grade. We have been reviewing their reading assignments from an organization known as Newsela.... They are trying to feed our kids an article from the Washington Post about how they must stop Global Warming from destroying humanity. It states we ‘must’ act and ‘if’ we don’t the world will end and of course it’s all Trump’s fault that he doesn’t want to protect the environment. In addition, they are making our kids answer questions about “special” kids that made a difference...they have hit every Progressive point that our kids must answer: kids filing lawsuits to stop global warming, a “safe space” for bullied kids, kids changing gun laws, kids walking out of class to protest gun violence and “laws,” plastic straws (enough said), removing Confederate statues, white supremacists, and racism. No facts to back up the left bias or any balance of a different opinion!

As PJ Media noted: “Newsela could use some healthy competition. Until then, as Common Core’s afterglow fades away, Newsela may need to find a new way to market itself.” One change the platform did make was to separate its content into two websites; with one containing only articles geared to elementary school students. There is also an upgraded version for teachers that offers additional features.

Regents Research Fund tied to Common Core

The founder and CEO of Newsela, Matthew Gross, was previously the first executive director of Regents Research Fund, a New York-based think tank embedded in the state’s education agency. In 2013, Regents was described by the online news outlet Times Union.com as “having its own agenda” and “unaccountable to the public.” Critics charged the organization with being “a team of two dozen well-paid analysts,” some of whom were earning $200,000 or more annually in 2013 and none of whom were public servants, yet they were “helping drive reforms” that affected public-school students and employees in more than 700 New York school districts.

Regents’ Research Fund fellows trained New York teachers in how to implement the state’s Common Core standards, all while being financed by — drum roll here — the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among other wealthy philanthropists. Around this time, Gross left Regents to form Newsela, which he described as “a new venture aimed at improving reading.”

Times Union.com reported that Gross praised the Regents fellows as “nationally recognized ‘thought leaders’ to help lead the implementation of ‘next-generation’ assessments and other education reforms surrounding Common Core.” Donor representatives said that financial support of the fund is made “in the spirit of improving education.”

As of this writing, both USNY Regents Research Fund and Newsela remain in business.

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