“Black, Hispanic students did worse, especially in math, when their districts hired ‘chief diversity officers,'” notes Joanne Jacobs, who writes about education policy:
Hiring a “chief diversity officer” doesn’t close achievement gaps, concludes an analysis by Jay P. Greene and Madison Marino of the Heritage Foundation’s Center on Education Policy.
Black and Hispanic students had “significantly greater learning loss during the pandemic in school districts that had hired chief diversity officers than in districts without one.”
Even controlling for pre-pandemic achievement gaps, minority students lost more than their white classmates, especially in math, they found. “Racial achievement gaps went from bad to worse in these districts.”
Hiring a senior district official who insists that Black and Hispanic students not be held to the same standards of behavior or academic achievement as other students because of structural racism obviously undermined minority student success.
About half of school districts with at least 15,000 students have a chief diversity or equity officer, including 89 percent of districts with more than 100,000 students, the Heritage Foundation analysis found.
Billions of dollars in federal COVID relief money made the problem worse. As the Heritage Foundation study notes, “Federal COVID-19 money has facilitated the spread of this idea from universities into school districts.”
Diversity staff sometimes view basic educational requirements as racist — for example, they don’t think students should have to do their homework. As Jacobs observes, “If students are told that turning in work on time, respecting teachers and taking responsibility for their actions are ‘white supremacist’ expectations, that success in school won’t pay off due to ‘systematic racism’ . . . Why bother with the math homework?”
Diversity officials have attacked virtues such as planning ahead. The St. Paul, Minnesota schools cite cite the antiracist protocol “Courageous Conversation” as part of their Critical Ethnic Studies class required for graduation. That protocol has “guided school districts to deem traits such as the ability to plan ahead and ’emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology’ as attributes of ‘whiteness.’” Schools have also disparaged individualism and planning ahead as signs of “cultural racism,” under its baneful influence.
Diversity officials instill what they euphemistically call “anti-racism.” “Anti-racism” teaches students to hate their country and view it as incorrigibly racist. “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism….Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” says the best-selling book How to Be An Antiracist, used in some high-school classes. It advocates discrimination against whites, saying, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination [against whites]. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” That book is a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” gushes the leading progressive media organ Slate, which loves this odious book.
The book’s author is Ibram Kendi, whose books are read in many American classrooms. In 2020, the Fairfax County, Virginia, Schools paid Kendi $20,000 for a one-hour presentation on “anti-racism” to school staff. At the time, they were also paying bus drivers to drive entirely empty school buses.
Neighboring Arlington, Virginia, distributed hundreds of copies of Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped to students at Wakefield High School. The book contains many errors and celebrates a Marxist anti-Semite. It also peddles conspiracy theories and is dismissive about Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass.
