Institute for Curriculum Services to Expand Israel Education Professional Development

With $600,000 Jim Joseph Foundation grant, ICS will reach more public and private school teachers

San Francisco, CA — The Institute for Curriculum Services (ICS), a national nonprofit initiative of the San Francisco-based Jewish Community Relations Council and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, has received a $600,000 grant from the Jim Joseph Foundation. The grant will allow ICS to offer significantly more professional development on Judaism and the Arab-Israeli conflict in order to support teachers in meeting their curricular mandates. By working with social studies textbook publishers, developing curricular resources, and training middle and high school social studies teachers around the country, ICS’s work improves the quality of education for the millions of public and private school students learning about Jewish subjects each year in the United States.

“This investment from the Jim Joseph Foundation directly supports ICS’s National Professional Development Scale-up Initiative to reach and resource more educators,” says Aliza Craimer Elias, Director of the Institute for Curricular Services. “In particular, ICS will dramatically increase its ongoing offerings to educators and will begin hosting four regional Summer Institutes each year to provide in-depth education on the Arab-Israeli conflict and peace process.”

Three new regional trainers will be hired to help quadruple ICS’s professional development offerings to pre-service and in-service K-12 teachers. The new trainers will allow ICS to expand its presence at educator conferences, schools of education, school districts, and universities and other institutions of higher learning.

“The Institute for Curriculum Services builds deep and lasting relationships with teachers in American classrooms and, ultimately, improves the accuracy and balance of their instruction about Jews, Judaism, and Israel,” says Al Levitt, President and Chair of the Jim Joseph Foundation, which previously invested in ICS in 2010. “This is an especially critical moment filled with heightened rhetoric and tensions, and the Foundation looks forward to this new partnership with ICS as it broadens its outreach.”

The Foundation grant includes an opportunity for matching funds for the initiative to reach its full potential, which would engage over 5,000 educators and potentially hundreds of thousands of high school students, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Scaling up ICS’s professional development activities for social studies teachers nationwide will enable ICS to increase awareness about the importance of a scholarly historical approach – grounded in primary source documents – to teaching about Jews, Judaism, and Israel. Its Common Core-aligned curricula include fact sheets of essential information, lesson plans, primary source documents, maps, and recommended resources. More information about ICS is available at www.icsresources.org.

###