I remember how it was -- JR
Thursday, October 05, 2023
School Districts With DEI Officers See Worse Black, Hispanic Learning Loss and Secretive Transgender Policies
Administrators focused on diversity, equity and inclusion have ballooned in public school districts across the country, but their presence doesn’t translate to educational improvement for black and Hispanic students, nor to the inclusion of parents in decisions about their kids’ health and well-being.
According to a new report from The Heritage Foundation, the percentage of large school districts with a chief diversity officer rose from 39% to 48% from 2021 to 2023, while school districts with a chief diversity officer experienced a decline in minority student performance and a greater likelihood of secretive transgender policies. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“Taxpayers provided $190 billion in extra funding to schools so that they could prevent learning loss during the pandemic,” Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at Heritage’s Center for Education Policy, told The Daily Signal. “Schools then decided to use a bunch of that money to hire chief diversity officers, who actually exacerbated learning loss among black and Hispanic students, rather than prevent it.”
“We found that black and Hispanic students in districts that had hired chief diversity officers lost an additional 4.5 percentile points on their math achievement tests relative to districts that did not have a chief diversity officer,” he added.
“While chief diversity officers were academically counterproductive, they appear to have accomplished ideological goals,” Greene noted. “In particular, we found that school districts with chief diversity officers were significantly more likely to have adopted policies to keep gender transition secret from parents by withholding information about their own children changing names, pronouns, or bathroom use.”
The report, “Equity Elementary Extended: The Growth and Effects of ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ Staff in Public Schools,” provided first exclusively to The Daily Signal, analyzes the 555 school districts across the U.S. with enrollments of at least 15,000 students. The report identifies which school districts employ a chief diversity officer or an administrator with an equivalent title and role, and compares those districts with data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University showing how well students performed in standardized math tests.
It also compares those districts with a list of school districts with policies requiring that information about students’ changes in names, pronouns, or bathroom usage remain secret from parents. The parental rights group Parents Defending Education maintains that list.
Of the 555 school districts with at least 15,000 students, 265 (or 48%) employed a chief diversity officer as of August. In 2021, only 214 (39%) of those school districts employed such an officer. While 13 school districts appeared to have eliminated this kind of DEI officer, 64 districts had hired one.
In school districts that employed a DEI officer, black students were 4.5 percentile points more likely to have lower math scores between 2019 and 2022. This represents about a third of the average learning loss in math for all students in this time. Even when taking the math learning loss of white students into account, the black students’ learning loss still translates to 2.7 percentile points, according to the report.
Hispanic students in a school district with a DEI officer fared even worse, according to the report. Between 2019 and 2022, these students experienced a learning loss of 4.8 percentile points worse than students in districts without a DEI officer. Adjusting for the change in white achievement in those same districts shrinks the number to 3.2 percentile points.
In other words, at least according to math scores measured by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, the employment of DEI officers correlates with larger racial performance gaps between white students and black and Hispanic students.
Yet DEI officers also translated to a higher likelihood of policies keeping parents in the dark when their children claim to “identify” as transgender, the study also finds.
Forty percent of school districts with a chief diversity officer had policies directing teachers and staff not to notify parents if their children claim to identify as a gender opposite their biological sex at school, while only 17.2% of districts without a chief diversity officer had such policies.
Even narrowing the comparison to districts within the same states, a district with a DEI officer is 15.7% more likely to have a gender-secrets policy than non-DEI districts in the same state, the study finds. Some states have banned such policies, so an analysis of districts within each state helps illustrate the facts on the ground. The impact of larger, liberal states such as California does not account for the greater likelihood of DEI districts having a gender-secrets policy.
DEI staffs also dominate universities, and that trend may trickle down to K-12 schools.
A previous Heritage Foundation report measured the size of DEI bureaucracies at the 65 universities that in 2021 were members of one of the Power 5 athletic conferences (the Big Ten, the Big 12, the Pac-12, the Southeastern Conference, and the Atlantic Coast Conference), finding that the average university listed more than 45 people as having formal responsibility for promoting DEI goals.
DEI staff outnumbered professors at the average university’s history department (by a factor of 1.4 to 1). The average university had 3.4 employees working to promote DEI for every 100 tenured or tenure-track faculty members.
The more recent study suggests that the growing impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion officers translates to less racial equality and the exclusion of parents from decisions about their own children. The study urges parents, school districts, and state legislators to reexamine the effectiveness of chief diversity officers and consider eliminating their roles in public schools.
****************************************************
‘Groundbreaking Legal Victory’: Court Rules School Cannot Trans Kids Without Parental Consent
A Waukesha County Circuit Court ruled Tuesday in favor of Wisconsin parents, deciding that a Wisconsin school district “abrogated” parents’ rights when it decided to socially “affirm” their daughter as a transgender boy against their wishes.
Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, two sets of Wisconsin parents had sued Kettle Moraine School District, accusing the district of violating their parental rights by “adopting a policy to allow, facilitate, and affirm a minor student’s request to transition to a different gender identity at school without parental consent and even over the parents’ objection.”
Circuit Court Judge Michael Maxwell granted the parents’ motion for summary judgment Monday, ruling on the merits of the case without a trial. His ruling and order, which the clerk filed Tuesday, said that the case dealt with “whether a school district can supplant a parent’s right to control the healthcare and medical decisions for their children.”
“The well established case law in that regard is clear,” he ruled. “Kettle Moraine can not.”
The judge concluded: “The current policy of handling these issues on a case-by-case basis without either notifying the parents or by disregarding the parents’ wishes is not permissible and violates fundamental parental rights.”
Maxwell ruled in favor of the parents and issued an order preventing Kettle Moraine School District from “allowing or requiring staff to refer to students using a name or pronouns at odds with the student’s biological sex, while at school, without express parental consent.”
The parents’ lawsuit, filed in the Waukesha County Circuit Court in November 2021, alleged that Kettle Moraine School District violated the constitutionally protected rights of one set of parents when it allegedly pushed their 12-year-old daughter toward a significant life decision she was not prepared to make by socially affirming her claimed gender identity against her parents’ wishes.
Another set of parents mentioned in the suit expressed concerns that the district would push their two children toward gender transition in the same fashion.
“I am so grateful the Court has found that this policy harms children and undermines the rights of parents to direct the upbringing of their children,” Tammy, the mother of one of the children named in the lawsuit, told The Daily Signal. (She asked that her last name be withheld to protect the family’s privacy.)
“Our daughter experienced increased anxiety and depression and her school responded to this by disregarding our parental guidance,” she explained. “Since leaving the school and allowing our daughter time to work through her mental health concerns, she has been able to healthily thrive and grow. Parents should be concerned when school districts disregard their concerns and override the voice and role of parents.”
T.F.-v.-Kettle-Moraine-School-District-DecisionDownload
That 12-year-old girl began experiencing “rapid onset gender dysphoria” as well as “significant anxiety and depression” in December 2020, attorneys from ADF and the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty said in a May 2021 letter to members of the school district.
Her parents temporarily withdrew her from Kettle Moraine Middle School so she could attend a mental health center and process what was going on, but the center allegedly affirmed to her that she was actually a boy and encouraged her to transition. So in early January, according to the letter, she told her parents that she wanted to use a boy name and boy pronouns at school.
The girl’s parents decided that “immediately transitioning would not be in their daughter’s best interest,” the letter said, and they told their daughter that they wanted her to explore the cause of her feelings before taking such a significant step. They also asked the staff at the school to continue using her legal name and female pronouns.
“But the District refused to honor their request,” the attorneys wrote, and the parents “were told that, pursuant to District policy, school staff would be required to address their daughter using a male name and pronouns if that’s what she wanted.”
The parents then had no choice but to withdraw her from the school district and to distance her from the mental health center and therapist she had been seeing, the letter said, “concerned that daily affirmation of a male identity could harm their daughter.”
Kettle Moraine School District did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Signal. But the parents’ legal teams hailed the news as a “groundbreaking legal victory” for parental rights.
“This victory represents a major win for parental rights,” Luke Berg, Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty deputy counsel, said in a statement Tuesday. “The court confirmed that parents, not educators or school faculty, have the right to decide whether a social transition is in their own child’s best interests. The decision should be a warning to the many districts across the country with similar policies to exclude parents from gender transitions at school.”
Kate Anderson, director of the ADF Center for Parental Rights, emphasized that “parents’ rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children is one of the most basic constitutional rights every parent holds dear.”
***********************************************
College Admissions Officers Use Pronouns to Give Preferences to Liberals
Why are so many of our institutions captured by people on the fringes of the cultural Left? Two new books, one by Christopher Rufo and another by Richard Hanania, offer comprehensive answers to that question.
But a recent study by two economists at West Virginia University provides a microcosmic example of how cultural leftists keep a grip on their power in universities: They discriminate in favor of their own.
No, this isn’t a study about suppressing conservative speech on campuses. This sort of discrimination is much more subtle.
The study, “Gender Identity and Access to Higher Education,” found that college admissions counselors give preferential treatment to emails from people with pronouns in their signature lines.
The authors of the study sent emails to college admissions counselors at 500 randomly selected colleges and universities in the United States. Some of the emails included pronouns in the signature line—“he/him,” “she/her,” or “xe/xem.”
Those who did received responses 4% more often than those who did not.
There was no statistical difference in the speed of replies or in the number of words included in a reply, which suggested that “the decision was whether to respond, and [pronouns] did not affect the eagerness to respond.” But admissions officers’ responses to pronoun users tended to be different than to non-users.
Responses to pronoun users were “more positive” and “friendlier,” including “heightened use of exclamation marks and emojis.” Admissions officers used exclamation marks 10.5% more often with pronoun users and used emojis 141.7% more often with pronoun users.
Pronoun non-users tended to receive “strictly factual replies.”
What follows are some representative examples of the trend. The economists sent an identical email asking about the timing and delivery of decision letters to three admissions officers. The first two emails included pronouns, the third did not.
Here are the responses:
Hi Morgan, Thanks for your message! The first item we will mail to you is your admission decision. It will be sent electronically and if admitted, also through the mail. Will you have moved by February?
Hi Morgan, How long until you move? We will send an admissions email and then a physical packet in the mail within about 3 weeks from them [sic] so it will depend on that as most communication from WVU will be via email. Warm regards,
I would say you should use whichever one you want to get your mail sent to because we’ll mail your acceptance letter, scholarship certificate, and financial aid package to that address.
It was noteworthy that the economists did not find a preference for nonbinary people (represented by “xe/xem” pronouns), but rather a fairly uniform preference for anyone who uses pronouns.
Thus, the economists concluded that the data suggest “that agents of higher education institutions hold a preference for progressively minded individuals.”
The institutions most likely to discriminate tend to be medium to large, based in cities, and have low retention rates and a large proportion of students receiving need-based financial aid.
The economists note that by giving pronoun users preferential treatment, admissions counselors make it easier for those applicants to gain admission.
In economic parlance, they “decrease the transaction costs” of the application process. Admissions officers’ preferential treatment also has the effect of promoting their institutions to pronoun users above others.
If you follow this logic one step further, the end result is that pronoun users will have an easier time getting through the application process and will tend to feel more welcome at a school than non-users will.
It may be a small effect in the grand scheme of things, but it’s only one small effect among thousands of similar effects. And just as thousands of raindrops will fill a bucket, thousands of little discriminations will fill a university with the preferred sort of student.
******************************************************
My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
******************************************************
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment