I remember how it was -- JR
State schools could give THOUSANDS of students full rides if they closed divisive DEI departments
At public universities nationwide, “diversity, equity and inclusion” officials make huge sums while spending even more pushing division and discrimination on students and faculty alike.
They claim they’re promoting disenfranchised groups, but they’re wasting money that would be better spent giving a broader range of students a high-quality education.
In a new report, I reviewed DEI spending at public universities across the country.
I focused on red and purple states since they are most likely to have the political will to reform higher education.
While DEI bureaucracies are generally largest at universities in blue states — see the $25 million the University of California, Berkeley, spends on 400 DEI staff — there’s no chance leaders such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom roll them back.
Blue states would probably allocate more money toward DEI, not less. I conservatively estimate that total DEI spending at state schools is in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year. But it’s conceivable that America’s roughly 1,600 public colleges and universities are spending more than a billion dollars a year on DEI. Each institution would have to spend just $625,000 a year.
While many schools don’t report their DEI spending or otherwise publish information that can be analyzed, those that do generally show that public universities are spending far more.
The University of Alabama drops $2 million a year on salaries for DEI staff.
Georgia Tech pays $6.7 million a year.
These staff spend additional money running DEI programs and departments.
In South Carolina, Clemson University spends $2.5 million on DEI programs, while the University of South Carolina spends $1.7 million.
Then there’s the University of Michigan, which spends $30 million a year on its DEI team.
Whatever the school, the true cost is likely much higher.
Schools often report salaries for DEI staff but not the cost of the projects they run or vice versa. Regardless, DEI administrators are extremely well paid.
Virginia Tech’s top diversity official makes $391,000, while the University of Virginia’s head DEI honcho makes nearly $375,000.
From Alabama to Kentucky to Louisiana to Ohio to Utah and beyond, DEI administrators routinely make more than $200,000.
The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education brags that 84% of DEI officials make at least $100,000, while more than a third are pulling in $200,000-plus.
A 2021 survey found the average public university employs 45 DEI staff.
That fact alone indicates such schools are likely spending millions of dollars a year on politicized personnel.
Imagine how far that money could go if it went toward helping students instead of hammering ideology into their heads.
The salary of Virginia Tech’s top diversity official would fund nearly 13 full-ride scholarships, based on in-state tuition rates.
At Utah State University, getting rid of the DEI czar would pay for 14½ full rides.
And if the salaries and funding for all DEI staff and programs at public universities were spent on scholarships, huge numbers of students could benefit.
At the University of Michigan, 241 DEI staff are hogging resources that could pay the way for more than 1,700 students.
With so much money at stake, universities should focus on giving more students a better education at an affordable price, not politicized indoctrination at a higher price.
And by dismantling DEI from top to bottom, state leaders can help ensure no student gets indoctrinated at any price.
That’s the most important reason DEI deserves to be driven from campus.
It exists to stifle debate, pit people against each other and control the next generation’s political views.
The taxpayers who fund public colleges and universities (as well as private schools through federally backed student loans) think they’re helping today’s students become tomorrow’s leaders.
Instead, they’re paying hundreds of millions a year — at least — toward the intellectual and moral collapse of higher education and the eventual collapse of our society.
Surely it’s better to fund students instead of the DEI bureaucracies designed to corrupt them.
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Ontario Families Deserve More School Choice
From 1914 to 1925, if you wanted a Model T Ford, you could only get it in black. The company’s founder, Henry Ford, even famously said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it’s black.”
At first glance this sounds restrictive, until we remember that customers still had plenty of other options. Not only could they buy a car from one of Ford’s competitors, but they could also use a horse and buggy or buy one of the earlier models produced by Ford.
Thus, far from limiting the choices available to customers, painting all Model Ts black was part of a concerted effort to mass produce cars and make them affordable. Had customers chosen not to buy the Model T, Ford would no doubt have changed his business model.
However, imagine that the government rather than the private sector had handled both manufacturing and the selling of vehicles. Rather than responding to market pressures, the government would likely keep producing the same vehicle for everyone regardless of what people wanted. In this case, painting all cars black would quickly become a visible reminder that the government does a terrible job of providing people with genuine choices.
Sadly, this is exactly how the government-run public school system operates today. In Ontario, the government builds the schools, selects the curriculum, and sets the catchment area that determines where students will attend. If parents don’t like their neighbourhood school, they must either move to a different neighbourhood or pay out-of-pocket for their children’s independent school tuition.
While some school boards claim to provide parents with school choice, the choices are often more illusory than real. For example, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) has a limited number of specialty schools in arts, science, math, technology and athletics. Of course, these schools were always oversubscribed, which meant that the TDSB had to create waitlists.
Unfortunately, TDSB trustees voted in 2022 to use a lottery system to decide which students could attend these schools. Not only does this make it harder for these specialty schools to keep high standards, since admission is no longer based on skills or experience, but it also overlooks the obvious urgent need in Toronto for more of these specialty schools.
This demand could easily be met if the province provided education funding directly to parents and let them decide where to enroll their children. There would be no shortage of independent schools created if parents could direct their children’s education funding to the school they want. This small change would take pressure off the public schools while at the same time ensuring that students attend a school that best meets their needs.
Interestingly, TDSB trustees are becoming increasingly aware that parents want more choice. For example, TDSB is proposing to dissolve the admission boundaries for its technical high schools and commercial high schools (which essentially teach business skills) so all students in the city, not just those living in a school’s catchment area, are eligible to attend.
While this is a sensible change, it will likely lead to more demand in these schools than there are spaces available. Because government moves slowly, there won’t be a rush to build new technical and commercial high schools, even if there’s a huge demand for them.
This is a prime example of the “school choice” breadcrumbs provided by government school boards. Governments are simply not well-positioned to provide parents with genuine choice. They make changes slowly, are dominated by one-size-fits-all thinking, and are not responsive to market pressures.
We shouldn’t leave school choice in the hands of government bureaucrats. Instead, the Ford government should empower parents by letting them decide where to direct their children’s education funding. This would lead to the private sector stepping in to fill the demand. The result would be more satisfied parents and better educated students.
If Henry Ford wanted to paint all Model Ts black, that was his choice as a private businessowner. Customers could go elsewhere if they wanted a different car. Ontario parents today deserve other options than just government-run public schools. Providing affordable access to independent schools would be a good first step
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The Empire Strikes Back During National School Choice Week
National School Choice Week begins Sunday after the school choice movement’s most successful year ever and with the promise of more momentum going forward. But not everyone is celebrating.
A highly organized, well-financed coalition of two dozen national and local left-wing advocacy organizations, teachers unions, and associations of government bureaucrats have teamed up to fight back against parents who seek greater educational opportunities for their children.
In this coalition’s view, families should have the choice of any school they want, so long as it’s run by the government.
The left-wing coalition—under the anodyne-sounding name Partnership for the Future of Learning—is set to launch a disinformation campaign against school choice Monday, according to documents obtained by The Daily Signal.
The campaign includes a glossy website, talking points, shareable graphics, and ready-made messages tailored for different audiences and social media platforms.
Predictably, the Partnership for the Future of Learning is pushing tired, one-sided, and debunked propaganda meant to scare families into believing that school choice policies are destructive, unaccountable, and (of course) racist.
Instead of trusting themselves, the coalition argues, parents should trust “the experts”—the same “experts” who kept schools closed unnecessarily, causing massive learning loss; imposed draconian-yet-ineffective mask mandates; and put boys in the girls’ locker rooms and porn in the school libraries.
These “experts” also divide everyone into “oppressors” and “the oppressed” based on immutable characteristics; segregate students by race: think “individualism” and “objectivity” are white supremacy; teach that there is an infinite number of genders; keep secrets from parents about their children’s mental and emotional health; and can’t tell what a woman is.
The Left has hegemonic control over the government-run district school system. School choice is a threat to the Left’s hegemony because it shifts the locus of control over education from bureaucrats and politicians to parents.
It takes a sustained regimen of indoctrination and social engineering for people to believe some of the Left’s more outlandish orthodoxies, so it can’t afford to allow families to choose schools that teach authentic history and science, let alone traditional morality.
Perhaps that’s why leftists have no compunction about openly lying in their messaging materials. Here are just three of the more egregious examples of disinformation about school choice from the Partnership for the Future of Learning.
1. Disinformation: School choice policies are “spreading despite overwhelming evidence that they are harmful public policy” and “do not have accountability measures that would ensure all students receive an effective and inclusive education.”
Reality: The evidence on school choice is, indeed, overwhelming—overwhelmingly positive.
The coalition’s materials lemon-pick the few studies finding negative effects on student performance from private school choice programs. But the materials ignore the much larger number of studies that find positive effects on student performance as well as numerous other measures, including educational attainment, parent satisfaction, district school performance, civic values and practices, racial and ethnic integration, fiscal effects, and school safety.
The education reform organization EdChoice has compiled every high-quality study on the effects of school choice and found that 84% of the studies find statistically significant positive effects, while only 6% find any negative effects.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/19/the-empire-strikes-back-during-national-school-choice-week
******************************************************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
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