Obama Encouraging Schools to Teach Quran for Extra Credit-Reported as Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
President Obama is encouraging schools to teach the Quran for extra credit even though it’s not legal for them to talk about the Bible, God or the American flag.
The Truth:
There’s no record of President Obama encouraging schools to teach the Quran for extra credit.
That rumor has been circulating in opinion sections and editorials for years, but there’s never been any evidence or source material provided to support the claim.
The earliest version of the claim that Obama had encouraged schools to teach the Quran for extra credit appeared in an op-ed published by the Washington Times in February 2015. The opinion piece, which appeared under the headline, “Return to Judeo-Christianity Needed Now” includes this often-repeated paragraph:
Now President Obama is encouraging schools to teach the Quran for extra credit, while at the same time, they cannot even talk about the Bible, God, pray, or salute the American Flag.
The op-ed doesn’t provide a source or link to anything that backs up the claim that Obama is encouraging schools to teach the Quran for extra credit.
The article does cite the story of a Marine father who was thrown out of a school in La Plata, Maryland, for protesting a homework assignment that his daughter was given about the history of Islam (click here for our report on that one). And we previously investigated another similar report, that Obama had ordered a Nationwide Muslim Outreach Program, and found that one to be false as well.
However, while those stories are often referenced in claims about studying the Quran for extra credit, that tidbit doesn’t appear in either of them.
Given that nothing has been provided to back up the claim that Obama is encouraging the schools to study the Quran for extra credit, we’re calling this one fiction.