Sharif El-Mekki is an adviser to Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro. He also supports school segregation, is a member of the Black Panther Party with family ties to Iran, and runs a nonprofit that has raked in nearly $20 million in donations from the government and nonprofits, including the Gates Foundation.
El-Mekki, a former middle and high school teacher and principal, founded the Center for Black Educator Development (CBED) in 2019, which defines its vision as “a world where. . . all black students are taught by high-quality, same-race teachers,” and where “all teachers demonstrate high levels of expertise in anti-racist mindsets.” CBED argues that employing black teachers to educate black students increases educational outcomes.
Since its founding, CBED has trained thousands of teachers across the U.S. in “education activism,” urging a “commitment to liberation education from the racism inherent in America’s institutions, including our schools.” A CBED information packet titled “The Anti-Racist Guide to Teacher Retention,” developed with the Pennsylvania Department of Education, defines education as “a political act” that “can upend white supremacy and a racist history of using education as an oppressive social force.”
“Every lesson plan is a political document, and every classroom interaction a political statement,” the guide reads.
El-Mekki’s nonprofit boasts more than $19.5 million in assets, boosted by funders including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which donated over $1.4 million between 2020 and 2021, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, which gave over $1.1 million in 2022, according to public tax filings. Other backers include NBC Universal, Nike, the Bezos Family Foundation, the University of Pennsylvania School of Education, and dozens more. In 2023 alone, CBED trained more than 1,700 educators. In their most recent tax filing from 2023, El-Mekki drew a salary of $233,410 from the organization.
“He started up this organization, which on paper sounds like a really wonderful endeavor, getting more black teachers in the classroom,” said Dr. Mika Hackner, a senior research associate at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, which drafted a report on El-Mekki’s extremist views and activism that she shared with The Free Press. “But if you scratch beneath the surface—not even beneath the surface, it’s on their website—he’s propagating some pretty dangerous and divisive ideas.”
El-Mekki, she added, is “bringing in segregation by a different and more socially and politically acceptable name.”
As a child, El-Mekki attended a Black Panther–inspired “freedom school,” where black students were taught by black teachers. His parents were members of the Black Panther Party, and on his nonprofit’s website, El-Mekki is seen sporting a Black Panther t-shirt.
When he was in middle school, his family relocated to Iran, a country he continues to praise to this day. Speaking on a podcast in April 2023, El-Mekki lauded the Iranian education system, stating that “Iran produces more engineers and doctors, scientists, than many other countries. To be that small, but there’s such an emphasis on education and understanding.” In that same interview, El-Mekki bashed America as “anti-black and anti-intellectual.”
El-Mekki’s late mother, Aisha El-Mekki, was a Muslim convert who moved her family to Iran because “she wanted her children to witness a country united in its efforts to make a change,” according to a biography published by the Philly Muslim Freedom Fund in 2020. The biography describes that she “loved” how former Ayatollah Khomeini “continuously stood up to the bully without any fear” and how “he called out the oppression of America and other superpowers.” Aisha El-Mekki met with Khomeini multiple times, according to the biography.
Sharif El-Mekki, in turn, has been praised by Nation of Islam leader and black nationalist Louis Farrakhan. In 2019, Farrakhan’s publication, The Final Call, profiled El-Mekki in a piece called “Leading with Equity and Justice in Education.” The Final Call has also quoted El-Mekki multiple times, referring to him as a “master educator.”
In just five years, Philadelphia native El-Mekki has become a major influencer in public education in Pennsylvania and beyond. In 2022, he served on the Education and Workforce Advisory Committee of Governor Josh Shapiro’s transition team, and last month, he testified in front of Congress on the need for more teachers of color. He has also penned various op-eds in national outlets, and gave a TEDTalk in January 2023 where he advocated for a “connection between activism and teaching black students superbly.” Neither El-Mekki nor Governor Shapiro’s office responded to requests for comment from The Free Press.
In addition to his big nonprofit donors, El-Mekki’s organization has secured at least $560,000 in contracts from 2022 to 2024 with the Philadelphia School District—the twentieth largest in the country—to run summer school programs that teach “a culturally responsive, affirming, and sustaining early-literacy curriculum” to “address educational inequalities and our nation’s racist history.” CBED is now expanding outside Pennsylvania, inking contracts with school districts in Fresno, California, San Antonio, Texas, and New York City.
CBED has also built an “e-learning” service used by over 900 students that is now expanding to include partnerships with over 20 universities, including University of Michigan, University of South Florida, and Vanderbilt. CBED also runs a “Teaching Academy” for high schoolers “based in Black pedagogy and historical frameworks,” helping “students make the connection between teaching and activism.”
El-Mekki is also part of a group that developed Pennsylvania’s “culturally relevant and sustaining education framework,” which came into effect in 2022. The following year, multiple school districts sued to stop the implementation of the framework, with one superintendent calling it “indoctrination over education.”
Hackner, of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, said El-Mekki’s teaching approach could be “unhealthy for a liberal democratic society, and for civil discourse” if it is adopted across the country.
“It’s instituting a really unhealthy educational framework where everything must be based upon this sort of extremist version of anti-racism,” she said. “I think it creates an inward-looking, insular world.”
Francesca Block is a reporter for The Free Press. Read her piece, “How U.S. Public Schools Teach Antisemitism” and follow her on X @FrancescaABlock.
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