When schools focus on diversity, minority students learn less
Washington Examiner
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It has long been clear that the education establishment’s obsession with identity politics pushes noxious notions into impressionable young minds. It is now also clear, from a new study, that the obsession also thwarts real learning. The identity politics regime in education must end.
The Heritage Foundation reported this month that 48% of school districts with at least 15,000 students have a chief diversity officer and that there was a consistent correlation between this and measurable “learning loss during the pandemic by black and Hispanic students” that significantly outpaced learning loss by the same demographics in districts without such diversity officers.
UNIVERSITY DEI OFFICES NOT BEING ‘INCLUSIVE’ OF JEWISH STUDENTS
The districts employing chief diversity officers also were more likely to trammel parental rights because they “were significantly more likely to have policies that keep the ‘gender transitioning’ of students secret from parents.”
There’s a logical cause and effect in these findings. Districts focused on “diversity” are ones that tend to devalue traditional education in favor of pushing a left-wing social agenda in the classroom. There’s only so much time in a day, and it is used up when teachers are “directly talking about identity, diversity, injustice, and activism” or are holding “clarifying conversations about anti-bias issues” with 4-year-olds. It means less time for traditional reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Obsession with “diversity … exacerbated the magnitude of racial achievement gaps,” Heritage reported. “This evidence is consistent with the view that chief diversity officers primarily serve to articulate and enforce ideological orthodoxies opposed by majorities of parents rather than to assist with student learning or closing minority achievement gaps.”
This was not a biased study to serve Heritage’s conservative ideology. Heritage only analyzed numbers already gathered by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. The research showed that “extra decline in math achievement for black students in districts with CDOs was roughly one-quarter as large as the decline in learning for all students during that period.”
Learning loss among black and Hispanic students also exceeded the learning loss of white students. Could it be that if educators repeatedly tell minority students that they are victims and hold them to lower standards, those students become less inclined to overcome adversity? As Heritage surmised, such an emphasis “deprives students of agency and undermines the motivation of both minority students and the staff who serve them.”
Chief diversity officers are not the only sources of “woke” identity politics hindering learning. The two big education unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, push these toxic notions on their teachers and schools. They even oppose metal detectors in schools, as if school safety is less important than the goal of “destigmatizing” gangs because of their assumed racial identities or immigration status.
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The NEA pushes nonsense such as its “belief that intersectionality — the understanding of how a person’s identities combine and compound to create unique discriminatory experiences — must be recognized within leadership, schools, and communities to advance the Association’s racial and social justice work.” That is the union’s own language, not that of a critic.
Schools and school districts should stop wasting money and time on divisive ideology and return to teaching the basics. It is clear that they are failing students with indoctrination rather than lifting them up with real education.