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Norman Shaw MacQueen
Norman Shaw MacQueen has called for violence, expressed hatred of Zionists and Zionism, and spread hatred of Israel and America. He has also engaged in anti-Israel activism in his role as an educator.
MacQueen’s anti-Israel posts and activism occurred in the wake of a series of Hamas terror attacks and war crimes against Israeli civilians, including mass murder, torture, rape, beheadings and kidnappings, which were executed on October 7, 2023. The terror attacks left approximately 1,200 Israelis dead, hundreds kidnapped and thousands wounded.
As of September 2023, MacQueen was listed on the website of Mitchell Elementary School (Mitchell) as a seventh- and eighth-grade teacher. As of the same date, MacQueen’s LinkedIn profile said he had been working as a seventh- and eighth-grade social studies teacher at Mitchell, part of the since 2015.
MacQueen’s LinkedIn also said his role as a classroom teacher included “curriculum development.” He was elected as staff representative to his school’s administration and was a member of his school’s advisory council.
In November 2023, after Hamas terrorists murdered nearly 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, SDP offered teachers an anti-Israel professional development course. The curriculum claimed that Israel was carrying out the “colonization of Palestine” and that Israel’s war against Hamas was a “genocide in Gaza and the West Bank.”
The course was titled: “Decolonizing the Curriculum: Brief History of Palestine and the Creation of Israel: Contextualizing the Current Conflict and Genocide.” A summary on the SDP portal said teachers would be “better equipped to have conversations and facilitate lessons with their students” about Israel. The course was listed as "Subject(s): Social Studies/History." After local news sites publicized the course, SDP removed it from the portal.
SDP continued to come under pressure from activist groups to teach anti-Israel material in K-12 classrooms, including groups representing teachers and parents. Two such groups were the Racial Justice Organizing Committee (RJOC) and the Philadelphia Educators for Palestine (PEFP), led by SDP high school teacher Keziah Ridgeway.
RJOC organized anti-Israel “teach-ins” in late 2023 and throughout 2024. RJOC also provided “Educator Lesson Plans” for teachers, listing as a resource the Teach Palestine Project, a pro-terror and anti-Israel teaching resource. In May 2024, PEFP called on SDP to meet six demands. Among them were: “to unequivocally condemn the ongoing genocide waged on the Palestinian people” and “to release a ceasefire resolution [with regard to Israel’s war against Hamas terrorists].”
SDP had been under investigation by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights since April 2024. In May 2024, a group of over 200 parents filed a complaint against the district. The complaint alleged there was “persistent harassment and bullying of Jewish students” and “inflammatory anti-Jewish and anti-Israel messages on social media and even in the classroom” by teachers and administrators at schools across Philadelphia.
As of September 2024, MacQueen’s LinkedIn said he was the lead organizer and founding member of the anti-Israel group Racial Justice Organizing Committee (RJOC), as well as the co-founder of Blossoms by MacQueen, LLC.
Also as of September 2024, MacQueen’s LinkedIn said he graduated from Temple University (Temple) with a master’s degree in urban education and leadership in 2018. Temple is located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
As of the same date, MacQueen’s LinkedIn said he was located in Wilmington, Delaware.
