School districts with Chief Diversity Officers see larger racial achievement gaps

Seasoned educational commentator Larry Sand discusses Jay Greene and James Paul’s recent studies on elementary school Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. School districts employing a Chief Diversity Officer (CDO) have noticeably greater racial and economic achievement gaps than those without CDOs. What’s more, these gaps only worsen over time and cannot be controlled for by other relevant variables. Is it surprising that political proselytization hurts students and sidelines real academic solutions, asks Sand?

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.”

The authors explain that the gaps occur because CDOs “are more focused on promoting a political agenda than they are on finding effective educational interventions.” And that political agenda includes advancing policies that typically exacerbate achievement gaps, such as eliminating gifted programs and advanced math classes “while selecting English and Social Studies content for its political orthodoxy rather than educational quality.”

This article originally appeared in the California Policy Center. Read the whole thing here.

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