Parents, students, faculty, and staff long silent on issues of education and the creeping influence of identity politics into their schools and curriculum are beginning to speak out. They are beginning to challenge the wisdom of handing students over to an unaccountable bureaucracy committed to turning out junior activists as opposed to burgeoning scholars.
The educational bureaucracies from the state level down to local school boards, including community college boards of trustees, are rushing to implement administrative regulations and board policies, as well as approve curricular changes, that will normalize antiracist and gender identity politics in our education systems for years and perhaps generations to come. The sudden rush to augment and cement these ideas in ways that will be practically impossible to dislodge from our institutions should give us pause to ask: “Why now and why so intensely?
As “flyover country”—as it is disparagingly referred to by the coastal progressive elites—begins to wake up to the fact that education at all levels has been embracing an ideology steeped in racial and social division, the political and cultural leaders of these movements, who have used them to attain considerable administrative and political power, are desperate to enshrine them.
A primary goal of the recent rush to make these administrative policies permanent is to ensure that institutions hire the right instructors or that skeptical instructors will be forced to bow down and pay homage. The basic idea is to embed race and intersectionality so deeply into the “culture” of education that the only way to get rid of it is to dismantle the institutions themselves, something the masters of education don’t believe flyover country is willing or able to do.
So, for all of flyover country that has yet to wake up, here is what our educational institutions look like presently, from our view:
School mission and vision statements no longer emphasize education as the primary goal. Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE) have replaced education or student learning as the greatest possible good. Creating students that are antiracist activists is more important than teaching students how to think critically and form their own opinions about the world. Grading equitably is more important than helping students master subject matter. Offices and vice presidents of DIE rank ahead and get more funding than offices of instruction or student services. Every dollar allocated, every decision made, and every grade given is viewed through a lens of how it best serves the activist agenda.
This “work” has been going on for a number of years even decades at this point, but as middle America begins to push back, the sense of urgency to institutionalize this agenda has increased, especially here in California. While California may seem like an unassailable bastion of social justice ideology and politics, cracks have started to appear even here.
