DEI MUST DIE When it comes to educational malfeasance, California, as usual, does its best to be the national leader. In fact, there are potholes galore on Equity Road in the Golden State. For starters State Superintendent of Public Instruction and Indoctrinator-in-Chief Tony Thurmond hired Daniel Lee as the state’s first “superintendent of equity.” But shortly thereafter, Politico revealed that Lee, a psychologist, life coach and self-help author, is also a Pennsylvanian, and was given a job that was never publicly posted by the California state Education Department. Apparently being buddies with Phony Tony was enough to land Lee the $180,000 a year job. When asked if others were interviewed for the job besides Lee, Thurmond replied, “I can’t recall.” If nothing else, Thurmond is living proof that cronyism is alive and well in California.
The damaging “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” racket needs to be extinguished.
Researchers extraordinaire Jay Greene and James Paul have released a series of three carefully crafted studies on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that detail many aspects of the harmful scheme. In a nutshell, the authors find DEI to be “counterproductive and politically radical.”
The part of the study that examines DEI’s effects on elementary schools is particularly damning. It looks at school districts with at least 15,000 students, of which there are 554, and finds that schools with Chief Diversity Officers (CDOs) “actually have larger gaps in achievement between black and white students, Hispanic and white students, and non-poor and poor students than districts without CDOs. And those gaps are growing wider over time. This pattern holds true even after controlling for a host of other observable characteristics of those districts.”