Diversity, Equity, & Collusion - Lowering Standards to Achieve 'Equitable' Outcomes
'Disparate Impact' is the “Grand Dogma” of Our Time
This post started out as a Schooling Delaware Note simply sharing a recent story of Oregon’s Board of Education voting to maintain a pause on high school graduation standards, comparing it to a recent Delaware change to the Bar exam signed off by Delaware's Supreme Court lowering the standards of the Delaware Bar Exam!1
The Board of Bar Examiners review was informed by recommendations from a Diversity Committee made up of judicial officials and practitioners in Delaware.
October 22, 2023 | Oregon Live
requirement for high school graduation was sensible: “read and comprehend a variety of text, write clearly and accurately,” and “apply mathematics in a variety of settings.”2
This is another example of what happens when the runaway train of ‘equity' & academic failure is not stopped.
Thomas Sowell calls “Disparate Impact3” ideology the “Grand Dogma” of our time.
Dogma -A principal or set of principals laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. It is something that is unquestionally believed despite insuuficient supporting evidence
The above is a clip of Sowell played on The Genius of Thomas Sowell podcast. The entire episode can be heard below:
Heather Mac Donald, a contributing editor of City Journal, & New York Times best selling author, writes about how “Disparate Impact” ideology adversely effects so many of the Americans it was intended to help.
Mac Donald’s newest book, When Race Trumps Merit, delves into “how the pursuit of equity sacrifices excellence, destroys beauty, and threatens lives”. 4
Below are excerpts from the pages of this book.
Much of this manifests in the form of hiring a six-figure salary position of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) director/office, as nearly every Delaware school has done.
Such is the case of former DEI director Dr. Tabia Lee. Dr. Lee had best of intentions when she was hired to head the DEI department at Silicon Valley’s De Anza College in 2021. Who WOULDN'T want Diversity and Inclusion? It is the Equity wherein deception lies.
Dr. Lee is also a founder member of
, an excellent publication promoting perseverance, Individual Liberties, and self-worth presenting some amazing contributors.“Anything short of lockstep adherence to critical social justice was impermissible.”
Dr. Lee details her observation in her article titled DEI Colleagues: Your Anti-Semitism is Showing.
These people found odious and unacceptable my efforts to bring people together to identify common definitions of the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), to think critically about and to better understand the ideologies that emergent institutional understandings of anti-racism were rooted in, and to bring about a campus culture that was more inclusive of the diverse population of students that it serves. For these efforts, I was branded a “White supremacist,” a “right-wing extremist,” a “dirty Zionist,” and called “the wrong kind of Black” among many other things. However, while ideological extremists did manage to successfully strip me of my livelihood, instead of silencing my voice, they have only amplified it and I am thankful to serve as a Senior Fellow with Do No Harm Medicine seeking to raise awareness about the CSJ ideologies that are corrupting the medical field and the education of medical students in too many institutions.
This is a clip from the October 27, 2023 episode of the Chris Stigall podcast.
It is a fascinating 26 minute interview with Dr. Tabia Lee, which I hope you can see fit to find the time to listen to.
Brief summary of the episode:
Everything you've heard about "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion" as well as much of the Civil Rights era is challenged in today's show by our guest who says it is long past time to break the cycle and understand the cultural hijacking that's taken place in the country. Much of it masked in race and racism. Dr. Tabia Lee sounds the alarm on the destructive, divisive, Marxist theology behind "DEI" and it should serve as a warning to anyone who sends their kids to a school district or college with a "DEI Director." You need to know what it really is, and Dr. Lee knows because she was one.I have transcribed a critical section of the interview above. It is not just parents with children in school who are affected.
…but what is being said, is that sometimes, [well] not sometimes [but] too often, there is a default perspective being pushed, and people aren't being transparent about it.....When your District brought that DEI person on, if they said "this person's role is going to be to de-center whiteness in the district and that means that we're going to elevate the voices of, you know, BIPOC5", and they use all these words that they've invented and inversions of words too and that's going to be their role. Those are...the terms that should be making you say, oh, hey, something's off here.
What are BIPOC? What are LatinXes? You know, what are PhilippinXes and all these X-ending words, you know, a mess and as I mentioned to some people, I say, you know, it's 'garbage in garbage out'. We're giving our children garbage and we're telling them, in teaching them to hate groups of people; to view themselves as victims; as oppressors; to hate Jewish people; to hate Zionists: to hate America - in American society, and that's not okay.
Some legislators in some places like my home state, they're trying to make it a high school graduation requirement for students to take a "ethnic studies class" and to get fully indoctrinated by these toxic ideologies. And that's a big concern as parents, you know, some of us, we kind of stood on the sidelines and we said like okay, you know, "that's like some weird California stuff" or "that's not happening here". I think now we're seeing it is happening - larger and more widespread than we thought.
And even if you don't have kids in schools, because some people said "my kids are out, like we're all good, right? We don't have to worry about it." Yes, we do. This is who's training our future medical professionals. This is who's training our Scientists. This is who's training, you know, all of our students who are getting inducted into these ideologies and we've just kind of passively let it happen without pushing back, without questioning, without asking, you know, our districts "what do you mean when you say 'DEI' policy?" What philosophy is that rooted in? Are you guys talking about a classical approach? You know, where we're focusing on equality of opportunity or are you talking about a critical social justice of approach?
What we're really talking about is equality of outcomes and every meaning of the word. So those are the things that we need to start asking, and I hope my work and my research gives people the language because a lot of this has really advanced through because their using terms that sound on it's face right. "Who doesn't want to be anti-racist" for example. Of course I'm not a racist...
And so the words sound like things you would instinctively agree with, but what they mean and what the philosophy that it's rooted in is something very dangerous. It's demotivating for the very students it purports to help. You can see that even in the test scores which are still flatling everywhere, and actually have worsened where we see these DEI officers installed...there was a piece by the Heritage Foundation recently where they outlined the presence of DEI chief diversity officers6 for, not just black students and latino students, but white students, all students, was depressed and went down when the people were hired on and brought in...and that's what they were supposed to be there to do! To 'Close the Achievement Gap'
What is changing with the exam?
The exam will now be offered in both July and, starting next year, in February.
The "cut" or passing score of the exam will be reduced from 145 to 143.
The essay portion of the exam will require applicants to write four essays instead of eight and the areas of law applicants could be tested on will be reduced from 14 to ten.
What other changes are coming?
The clerkship requirement will be reduced from 21 weeks to 12 weeks.
The number of so-called checklist activities that require potential Delaware attorneys to observe certain legal proceedings will be reduced from a mandatory list of 25 to a requirement of 18 out of 30 potential items.
The total application fee for those applying late to take the bar exam will be reduced from $1,400 to $900 for law school graduates and from $1,600 to $1,000 for attorneys already admitted elsewhere.
Little did I realize it back then, but a shining example of traditional, Booker T. Washington endorsed merit based system is the USA 1992 Dream Team!7
A prestigious example of hard work, dedication, and perseverance, has since been eroded by dreams of ‘equity’ or ‘equal outcomes for all’
This team brought together the absolute best basketball players in America to represent the USA in the Olympics. This team comprised of the hardest working, most dedicated, immensely talented players that the United States had to offer. They dominated the world stage, and showed great pride in representing the United States of America.
That dominance came at a price. A price paid in “equal outcomes", diminishing the merit of those players. There is a reason those players exemplified success - and it was not due to lowering the standards - contrary to that, it was due to those players raising theirs.
The World Olympics are where each country offer their best athletes for competition. There has been much talk of barring NBA players from competing in the Olympics. Why? Because of their dominance on the court!!8
Because of Team USA's dominance, some have argued that NBA players should not be allowed to compete in the Olympics. The U.S. had always used college players, until the team failed to win a gold medal in 1988. The following year, FIBA allowed NBA players to participate in international games.
For the 30th anniversary of the single greatest basketball team to have ever been assembled, a new five-part documentary, "Dream Team: Birth of a Modern Athlete,9" has been produced and will “explore the cultural impact” of that team and features rare archival footage.
The innocuous wording “explore the cultural impact” should automatically raise a red flag, and as unfortunate as it may be, those flags are not false. This modern ‘critical theory' lens needlessly injects race into a documentary that should be about inspiration, tenacity, perseverance, and teamwork. Aside from genetic differences, race plays the least part in their success and exceptionalism in their profession.
Dr. Carol Swain is an exceptional woman who has overcame adversity.
From high school dropout and teenage mother to highly accomplished university professor and public intellectual, Dr. Carol M. Swain is passionate about empowering others to confidently raise their voices in the public square.
Carol Swain also starred in the documentaries ‘Uncle Tom’ & ‘Uncle Tom II’.
You can hear some of her story in the original ‘Uncle Tom' documentary.10
Dr. Swain, the author of Black Eye for America, has just released a new book titled ‘The Adversity of Diversity’.
I have yet to read this book, but I hope you will. I have no doubt it will be influential, inspiring, and deep rooted in fact.
A note from the author of the hit children's book series Tuttle Twins11 Author Connor Boyack:
In a state where reading proficiency for graduating seniors is far below 50%, and math skills rank even lower, the social activists masquerading as education professionals have decided that the answer is to simply remove any graduation requirement for reading, writing, or math.
What could go wrong?
But make no mistake, this is not an isolated misstep; it’s a bellwether for a concerning trend in our nation’s educational landscape. The shift away from essential academic skills in favor of identity and politics is a development that all parents should watch with vigilant eyes—because what happens in Oregon today could very well be knocking on the door of your child's school tomorrow.
At the heart of the Tuttle Twins’ mission, and in every effort we spearhead at the Libertas Institute, lies the conviction that education should be about equipping kids with the tools they need to succeed in life. Reading and writing, are not just school subjects; they are tied to the ability to think and reason, and are therefore the building blocks of independent thought and the bedrock of a free society.
Yet, as we see in Oregon, there's an unsettling trend where these cornerstones are being eroded in the name of political agendas. This policy, while cloaked in the language of equity and fairness is part of a broader shift away from actual education and toward lowering the bar instead of teaching kids how to raise themselves up to higher ways of thinking and being.
It's a scenario where politics supersedes pedagogy, and ideological conformity trumps the cultivation of intellect. And it isn't going to go away anytime soon.
The hard truth is that schools are increasingly becoming arenas for social experimentation, where the focus on identity often overshadows the universal need for literacy and numeracy. This is not equity. It's an injustice to every child, depriving them of the very skills they need to navigate, shape, and understand the world around them, and their place in it.
In the nineties, New York began requiring aspiring educators to take an exam. Thousands of people later claimed that the test was racially biased.
The $1.8-Billion Lawsuit Over a Teacher Test
October 31, 2023 | The New Yorker
in 1991, a new law went into effect that meant that Wilds-Bethea, along with other teachers across the city, had to pass yet another test: the National Teacher Examination, or N.T.E. The N.T.E., which had been administered in other states for decades, was adopted by New York after several task forces concluded that low standards for teachers were hurting student performance, and called for greater knowledge of the liberal arts among educators. The exam covered basic knowledge of social studies, science, math, literature, and writing.
The committee members were predominantly Black, although not exclusively: a few Latino educators joined, along with a substantial minority of white Russian immigrants. According to coverage from the time, the N.T.E. had earned a nickname in some circles: the Negro Teacher Eliminator. A presentation by Bob Schaeffer, from the advocacy organization FairTest, confirmed the committee’s perception that the test was racially biased. From 1993 through 1994, an average of eighty-four per cent of white test-takers passed the N.T.E., compared with forty-four per cent of Black test-takers, and forty per cent of Latino test-takers. From March, 1993, to June, 1995, the average pass rate for the last was ninety-three per cent for white test-takers, compared with fifty-three per cent and fifty per cent for Black and Latino test-takers, respectively.
…the committee voted to sue New York City and State for violating Title VII, the legal provision that prohibits race-based discrimination in the workplace…
There can be open discussion if any of the questions had any relevance to be on that test, such as “explain the meaning of Andy Warhol’s famous soup-can paintings”. but I guess that is a byproduct of the elite NYC culture.
Regardless, I do feel Teachers should have been grandfathered in.
New Jersey is also lowering the bar in a bid to hire more teachers. The NJ Teachers Union pushes to eliminate the basic skills test! Like most of the country, there is a shortage of educators. Not just due to Covid, many teachers are quitting or retiring due to current state of American public education. Government run schools have been plagued with failing academic standards, harmful woke policies, Marxist ideology, non-existent disciplinary policy, and children being just ushered along without ever gaining a true education, which is required to prepare the students for life, entrepreneurship, and become a productive member of society. Lowering achievement requirements to fill the vacuum created by these regressive policies is definitely not the solution. To that, I refer you to the quote at the top of this newsletter.12
'Eliminate another barrier': Teachers' union seeks to end basic skills test requirement for aspiring educators13
November 13, 2023 | Blaze Media
Why Does DEI Make Everything Worse? | Jay Greene
A short, informative podcast on the harms of DEI
According to them, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) bureaucrats make institutions more fair and just for everyone. But, research suggests that the opposite is likely true. This has become especially obvious to Americans in the wake of Hamas’ vicious attacks on Israel. Jay Greene explains the connection.
An additional article by Jay Greene expands on this.
Chief Diversity Officers Harm the Students They Say They Help14
Key Takeaways from the article above:
In practice, these bureaucrats enforce ideological orthodoxies on matters of race and gender that are educationally harmful for minority students.
Hiring a senior district official who insists that Black and Hispanic students not be held to the same standards...obviously undermined minority student success.
School district officials should start cutting their spending. The first and most obvious expense they should eliminate is the chief diversity officer.
New York considers ditching Regents exams as HS graduation requirement15
November 13, 2023 | New York Post
“It’s dodging accountability for educating our students. They don’t think our students are educable.”
“This is a continuation of the soft bigotry of low expectations from our black and Hispanic students,” said Davids, who was part of a 2014 lawsuit challenging New York’s tenure laws that shield ineffective teachers from losing their jobs.
“Disparate impact,” a once obscure legal theory that is now transforming our world. Any traditional standard of behavior or achievement that impedes exact racial proportionality in any enterprise is now presumed racist. Medical school admissions tests, expectations of scientific accomplishment in the award of research grants, the enforcement of the criminal law—all are under assault, because they have a “disparate impact” on underrepresented minorities.
Heather Mac Donald is also the author of the 2018 book “The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture”, which argues that toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture.
Black Indigenous People Of Color
Chief Diversity Officers Harm the Students They Say They Help
October 16, 2023 | The Heritage Foundation
Among school districts with a chief diversity officer, 40% recently adopted policies not to tell parents about their own children changing names, pronouns, or the bathrooms they use, compared to only 23% among districts without one.
We don’t know whether these diversity officers directly contributed to districts adopting these policies, but we can clearly see that districts with them are more focused on advancing contentious ideological agendas than attending to student learning.
As school districts are obligated to spend the last of the $190 billion they received by the end of next year, many district officials and their fellow travelers fear that schools need to be rescued from this fiscal cliff by another injection of extra federal funds.
Rather than bleed the nation’s taxpayers further with nothing but destruction to show for it, school district officials should start cutting their spending. The first and most obvious expense they should eliminate is the chief diversity officer.
Inspiring NBA TV Dream Team Documentary
There are additional factors that also contribute to this stance, such as NBA owners wanting to ‘protect their investment'
USA Men's Basketball: Should NBA Players Be Allowed In The Olympics?
Paramount Plus Drops New 'Dream Team' Documentary
Here's the full list of unheard archival interviews:
Charles Barkley
Larry Bird
Clyde Drexler
Patrick Ewing
Dave Gavitt
Grant Hill
Magic Johnson
Michael Jordan
Christian Laettner
Karl Malone
Chris Mullin
Scottie Pippen
David Robinson
A.L. Stankovic
David Stern
John Stockton
Uncle Tom Trailer
Uncle Tom II (First 20 minutes)
Herman Cain - Master's Degree Clip
