At PS 075 on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a teacher named Shahreen Karim organized a dance performance for a school event. Fifth graders took the stage in front of their parents. The song was "Glory" by John Legend and rapper Common — written for the movie "Selma" — and the choreography included children dropping to the ground, pretending to be shot by police.
The parents were in the audience. Some of them recorded it.
The video shows elementary school students performing movements that simulate being gunned down by law enforcement. The performance explicitly references the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by white police officer Darren Wilson — a case in which a grand jury declined to indict after the evidence contradicted the "hands up, don't shoot" narrative. The routine also incorporated imagery associated with Colin Kaepernick's national anthem protests.
Karim, who heads the school's multicultural committee, reportedly organized the performance. This is the same committee that arranged a Dabke dance for Multicultural Day in 2024. The school also operates a "Rainbow Room" — described as providing LGBTQ content — that is accessible to students from kindergarten and up, along with all-gender bathrooms.
An NYPD officer who saw the footage didn't mince words: "This is beyond inappropriate; it's outrageous. Having fifth graders pretend to be shot by police is not education; it's political indoctrination and exploitation of children." The same officer added a shorter review: "F*cking insane."
The New York City Department of Education responded by stating it would require advance parental notice for future performances. No condemnation. No disciplinary action announced. No acknowledgment that the content itself — children playacting their own murder by cops — might be the problem regardless of whether parents got a heads-up.
"Advance parental notice" is the bureaucratic equivalent of putting a warning label on propaganda. The issue isn't that parents were surprised. The issue is that a public school teacher choreographed ten-year-olds falling to the ground like shooting victims and called it education.
These are fifth graders. They are ten and eleven years old. They didn't pick this song, didn't research Ferguson, didn't arrive at a political position on policing through independent study. An adult chose this material. An adult rehearsed it with them. An adult put them on stage in front of a room full of cameras and decided this was an appropriate use of instructional time.
The Ferguson narrative the performance builds on didn't survive contact with the evidence. "Hands up, don't shoot" was investigated by Obama's own Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder — no friend to law enforcement — and found to be unsupported by the forensic record. Darren Wilson was cleared. But a decade later, a New York City public school is teaching children to re-enact the version of events that the federal government itself debunked.
PS 075 sits in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in America. The parents in that auditorium are paying some of the highest property taxes in the country. What they're getting for that money is a school that uses class time to stage political theater with their children as props.
The DOE could have said this was unacceptable. They said they'd send a permission slip next time.