This was originally a response to a request for “unimpeachable sources demonstrating problems with DEI” on the Blocked and Reported Subreddit, but my post was too long and likely had too many links to be posted to Reddit. The user was attempting to get links specifically from non-right wing sources (Though I do include WSJ (6 links), Reason (1 link), and The Free Press (2 links)) and so here we have nearly 50 links that should provide sufficient evidence to prove that DEI, as it’s been implemented, sucks. I’ve separated the post into two categories. The first is mainly about lowered standards and the second is about discrimination. This post isn’t entirely comprehensive, it’s just some links I’ve collected over the last year or so as they come along. Below most links I post some quotes that I believe are relevant to why the story is posted here. Enjoy!
Lowered Standards and Kneecapping High Achievers:
Delaware lowers bar pass score, eases path for lawyer licensing [Reuters - archive link]
>The report said components of Delaware's bar licensing process "may be potential barriers to admission to the practice of law for people from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups who may nonetheless be qualified to practice in the State."
Troy School Board eliminates middle school honors math classes despite parent outrage [Detroit Free Press - archive link]
>Proponents of revising math classes and standards say it can help promote inclusion and diversity, but parents said the opposite is true, that it will actually hurt them and other minority groups by lowering expectations.
To Increase Equity, School Districts Eliminate Honors Classes [Wall Street Journal - archive link]
>A group of parents stepped to the lectern Tuesday night at a school board meeting in this middle-class, Los Angeles-area city to push back against a racial-equity initiative. The high school, they argued, should reinstate honors English classes that were eliminated because they didn’t enroll enough Black and Latino students.
FCPS withholds awards, pays $455,000 for equity contractor [Fairfax Times - archive link]
>What Yashar uncovered after days of digging is that the TJ principal, Ann Bonitatibus, and the director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, have been quietly hiding National Merit Commended Student awards from students, parents and the public. As TJ parents compare notes, they say this practice has been occurring for as long as five years, since the principal’s arrival at TJ in 2017. (In the course of reporting, I just discovered – two years later – that National Merit recognized my son, a Class of 2021 TJ graduate, as a Commended Student in September 2020, but the principal withheld that information from families, denying students scholarships and boosts to admissions.)
>Making matters worse, Fairfax Times has learned that Bonitatibus withheld the awards as school district officials signed a contract of about nine months, paying a controversial contractor, Mutiu Fagbayi, and his company Performance Fact Inc., based in Oakland, Calif., $455,000 for “equity” training that includes a controversial “Equity-centered Strategic Plan” with this goal: “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.”
In Newton, we tried an experiment in educational equity. It has failed. [Boston Globe - archive link]
>In autumn 2021, against the already-challenging backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and remote learning, the Newton Public Schools decided to carry out a complex initiative at its two high schools known as “multilevel classrooms.” Previously, most classes at Newton’s high schools were given a label: honors, advanced college prep, or college prep, with honors offering the most challenging content.
>This system of “tracked classes” had its problems. Students who began their freshman year in a particular level could find it challenging to change levels, possibly making it harder for them to eventually take more advanced courses such as AP Calculus. To make matters worse, Black, Latino, and low-income students were disproportionately represented in lower-level classes.
>The multilevel model sought to rectify this problem by mixing the levels together into a single classroom taught by a single teacher. The district’s administrators claimed this would allow easier transitions among levels for students, increase exposure to more advanced content for lower-level students, and provide beneficial interactions among students who might otherwise never meet. This was a model that had seen some success at Newton South in the English and history departments and in specialized, opt-in programs that were well-funded and well-supported.
>Three years later, some answers are becoming clear, and they are troubling. Newton South’s Faculty Council, an elected group that advocates on behalf of staff and of which I am chair, has been listening to complaints from teachers about how poorly these classes are going.
>Students — at all levels of performance, but especially our students who need the most support and for whom this model was intended to help most — aren’t having their needs met. In one of my multilevel classes, I received feedback that the lower-level students didn’t want to ask questions because they didn’t want to “look dumb,” and the higher-level students didn’t want to ask questions because they didn’t want their classmates to “feel dumb.” The result was a classroom that was far less dynamic than what I was typically able to cultivate.
The parents who dared to question Newton’s educational equity experiments [Boston Globe - archive link]
>Among the moves made in the interest of equity was an initiative by Newton’s two celebrated high schools to combine more students into “multilevel” classes. Rather than students being divided into separate classes by level, students at varying levels would learn together — even in math, science, and languages. The goal: to break the persistent pattern that white and Asian students predominated in “honors” classes while Black and Hispanic students tended to be clustered in less-challenging “college-prep” classes.
>They wanted to know whether the multilevel classes and other new policies — such as denying advanced math students the chance to skip ahead a year — hurt students academically. They also worried that the schools’ newer approaches to race and other identities emphasized differences rather than commonalities. And that equity was being defined as “equal outcomes” rather than fairness.
>“We saw something not working, and it has been proven,” Calagna says. But they had been unable to control the narrative, unable to combat labels like “racist” and “right-winger” so socially unacceptable in a place like Newton that their actual issues were little heard. Calagna found she could not convince even friends and acquaintances that no conservative conspiracy was at work.
If Everyone Gets an A, No One Gets an A [New York Times - archive link]
>Indeed, in 2016, 47 percent of high school students graduated with grades in the A range. This means that nearly half of seniors are averaging within a few numeric points of one another.
>And grades have only gone up since 2016, most notably since the pandemic, most prominently in higher-income school districts. Were this a true reflection of student achievement, it would be reason to celebrate, but the metrics have it differently. From 1998 to 2016, average high school G.P.A.s rose from 3.27 to 3.38, but average SAT scores fell from 1026 to 1002. ACT scores among the class of 2023 were the worst in over three decades. Is it any wonder, then, that 65 percent of Americans feel they are smarter than average?
Eliminating Standardized Tests To Achieve Racial Equity In Post-Affirmative Action College Admissions [Forbes - archive link]
>College and university leaders say they’re committed to finding legally defensible ways to maintain racial diversity in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions in a pair of lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina that ended race-conscious admissions practices. Some institutions have taken one specific action in recent years that’s worthy of widespread replication and will help ensure that talented students of color have access to highly-selective undergraduate, graduate, and professional degree programs: they eliminated standardized entrance exam requirements.
California’s Weapons of Math Destruction: The state’s new teaching framework tries to ‘combat inequities’ and pushes ‘social justice work.’ [Wall Street Journal - archive link]
>Brian Conrad, a mathematics professor at Stanford, has created a website to debunk the framework. He writes that the California framework “selectively cites research to make points it wants to make,” and that it “contains false or misleading descriptions of many citations from the literature in neuroscience, acceleration, de-tracking, assessments, and more.” He gets so worked up that he calls a version of chapters 6 and 7 (which respectively cover kindergarten through fifth grade and sixth through eighth grades) an “embarrassment to professionalism.”
>The jargon- and acronym-laden California framework, Mr. Conrad says, “promotes a cartoon view” of how students acquire “reliable mathematical skills.” It is equivalent, he says, to supporting that children need not “learn how to spell because there are spell-checkers and spelling is not part of analytical thinking.” The five-member writing team, supervised by a 20-member oversight team, didn’t collaborate with any recognized STEM experts in industry about what training graduates will need in the workplace, Mr. Conrad says.
>“Those who claim to be champions of equity should put more effort and resources into helping all students to achieve real success in learning mathematics,” Mr. Conrad says, “rather than using illegal artificial barriers, misrepresented data and citations, or fake validations to create false optics of success.” California should stop trying to turn math into a social-science course.
Oregon again says students don’t need to prove mastery of reading, writing or math to graduate, citing harm to students of color [The Oregonian - archive link]
>Oregon high school students won’t have to prove basic mastery of reading, writing or math to graduate from high school until at least 2029, the state Board of Education decided unanimously on Thursday, extending the pause on the controversial graduation requirement that began in 2020.
>But leaders at the Oregon Department of Education and members of the state school board said requiring all students to pass one of several standardized tests or create an in-depth assignment their teacher judged as meeting state standards was a harmful hurdle for historically marginalized students, a misuse of state tests and did not translate to meaningful improvements in students’ post high school success.
Chicago Public School teachers allegedly told to pass migrant students regardless of grades: report [WGN News Segment]
More Than 80% Of Four-Year Colleges Won’t Require Standardized Tests For Fall 2023 Admissions [Forbes - archive link]
>As the college application process picks up steam for the upcoming academic year, a new survey shows that more than 80% of U.S. bachelor-degree granting institutions will not require students seeking fall 2023 admission to submit either ACT or SAT standardized exam scores.
>While many of the schools converting to test-optional admissions procedures initially did so to accommodate applicants during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the shift away from requiring standardized test scores has now become the prevailing policy across the nation even as threats from the pandemic recede.
>“An overwhelming majority of undergraduate admissions offices now make selection decisions without relying on ACT/SAT results,” said FairTest Executive Director Harry Feder in the organization’s news release. “These schools recognize that standardized test scores do not measure academic ‘merit.’ What they do assess quite accurately is family wealth, but that should not be the criteria for getting into college.”
Johns Hopkins University to return to standardized testing requirement as part of holistic admissions process [Johns Hopkins University - archive link]
>Hopkins adopted a temporary test-optional policy in 2020 due to impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, including severely limited access to testing. The submission of standardized test scores was made optional for applicants through the entering class of fall 2026.
>Over the past year, the university conducted a comprehensive review of the relevant academic research on testing and analyzed the university's three years of test-optional admissions experience and related data. With input from faculty colleagues, the review concluded that test scores, when considered in context as part of a holistic approach to admissions, serve as an important predictive metric to assess the likelihood of a student's academic success at Johns Hopkins. The review also found that the test-optional environment may have discouraged some applicants to Johns Hopkins from less-advantaged or underrepresented backgrounds from submitting test scores that would have provided an additional positive signal of their academic abilities.
Harvard and Caltech Will Require Test Scores for Admission: The universities are the latest highly selective schools to end their policies that made submitting SAT or ACT scores optional. [New York Times - archive link]
>Dropping test score requirements was widely viewed as a tool to help diversify admissions, by encouraging poor and underrepresented students who had potential but did not score well on the tests to apply. But supporters of the tests have said without scores, it became harder to identify promising students who outperformed in their environments.
>In explaining its decision to accelerate the return to testing, Harvard cited a study by Opportunity Insights, which found that test scores were a better predictor of academic success in college than high school grades and that they can help admissions officers identify highly talented students from low income groups who might otherwise had gone unnoticed.
Yale to Require Standardized Test Scores for Admissions: Officials said test-optional policies might have harmed students from lower-income families. [New York Times - archive link]
>Yale University will require standardized test scores for admission for students applying to enter for the class entering in the fall of 2025, becoming the second Ivy League university to abandon test-optional policies that had been widely embraced during the Covid pandemic.
>Yale officials said in an announcement on Thursday that the shift to test-optional policies might have unwittingly harmed students from lower-income families whose test scores could have helped their chances.
>The anti-testing movement has long said that standardized tests help fuel inequality, because many students from affluent families use tutors and coaches to bolster their scores.
>But recent research has questioned whether test-optional policies may actually hurt the very students they were meant to help.
>In January, Opportunity Insights, a group of economists based at Harvard, published a study that found that test scores could help identify lower-income students and students from underrepresented populations who would thrive in college. High scores from less privileged students can signal high potential.
>Yale, in New Haven, Conn., said that test scores were particularly valuable in evaluating students who attend high schools with fewer academic resources or college preparatory courses.
>Jeremiah Quinlan, the dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, said in a statement that the university had determined that test scores, while imperfect, were predictive of academic success in college.
>“Simply put,” he said, “students with higher scores have been more likely to have higher Yale G.P.A.s, and test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s performance in Yale courses in every model we have constructed.”
Brown University Will Reinstate Standardized Tests for Admission [New York Times - archive link]
>In its announcement, Brown said that test results were a clear indicator of future success.
>“Our analysis made clear that SAT and ACT scores are among the key indicators that help predict a student’s ability to succeed and thrive in Brown’s demanding academic environment,” the Providence, R.I., university said in a statement.
>Brown also echoed concerns expressed by both Dartmouth and Yale that suspending test requirements had the unintended effect of harming prospective students from low-income families.
>The committee at Brown that was charged with reviewing admissions policies was concerned that some students from less-advantaged backgrounds with lower scores had chosen not to submit scores under the test-optional policy, even when submitting them could have actually increased their chances of being admitted.
Some California high schools remove honors classes due to ‘equity’ issues [Baron News - archive link]
>High schools throughout California are removing honors classes at the upperclassmen level—and some at the junior level—in the name of equity between students of different races, specifically for Black and Hispanic students.
>Some schools making this shift include Patrick Henry High School (PHHS), Culver City High School (CCHS) and more, each with slightly different plans of how to alter classes. Though the change was meant as a positive initiative, which has been in effect since earlier this school year, parents’ protests and public uproar have underscored serious issues with the “one-size-fits-all” approach to education.
>Notably, PHHS is rated with an equity score of six out of 10. Due to honors classes allegedly not recruiting enough Black and Hispanic students, noted Irwin, she believed honors classes were “stratifying,” causing gaps between racial classes and creating a stigma surrounding non-honors classes. PHHS was reported to reverse the decision, but only for a couple of classes, leaving several classes that have been converted to regular.
>Following suit was CCHS, which removed honors English classes in fall 2022, along with Troy High School for the 2024-25 school year, with a possibility of several other schools considering the same policy.
>Immediately after the decision, many parents and students demanded for further information or even a reversal, stating the policy had severe shortcomings. For parents, they believed their children were no longer academically challenged and a lack of honors credit could negatively affect their chances at college admissions. In a petition led by Tracy Owens from Troy School District, the top problems she mentioned also included negative effects for students with learning disabilities, as they will have to keep up with former honors students, as well as struggles for teachers who need to adjust methods for different types of students.
Behind-scenes NHS problems leave new doctors without jobs [BBC - archive link]
>Medical students have also had to cope with a change in the way their regions are allocated. As part of the process, they have to list each foundation school in order of preference.
>Previously people were allocated according to merit - with each student ranked according to how they had performed during their studies and in an application test.
>But this year that has changed and has been done randomly. The logic behind it was that the previous system was stressful for students and was particularly unfair on those from deprived backgrounds and ethnic minorities. They tended to perform less well, and therefore were more likely to be posted to regions they did not favour, according to the UK Foundation Programme.
>However, overall it has resulted in more students not ending up with one of their top five choices - more than 730 compared to just over 430 last year.
Cambridge schools are divided over middle school algebra [Boston Globe - archive link]
>Cambridge Public Schools no longer offers advanced math in middle school, something that could hinder his son Isaac from reaching more advanced classes, like calculus, in high school. So Udengaard is pulling his child, a rising sixth grader, out of the district, weighing whether to homeschool or send him to private school, where he can take algebra 1 in middle school.
>Udengaard is one of dozens of parents who recently have publicly voiced frustration with a years-old decision made by Cambridge to remove advanced math classes in grades six to eight. The district’s aim was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and their more affluent peers. But some families and educators argue the decision has had the opposite effect, limiting advanced math to students whose parents can afford to pay for private lessons, like the popular after-school program Russian Math, or find other options for their kids, like Udengaard is doing.
>In Cambridge, district leaders — between 2017 and 2019 — gradually ended a policy of tracking middle schoolers into either “accelerated” or “grade-level” math, a change meant to improve outcomes for all. District leaders were alarmed by stark disparities in who was taking advanced math: Students in those classes were overwhelmingly white and Asian, while the grade level math classes were full of Black and Latino students. Achievement gaps were stubbornly wide — and still are.
>Critics say limiting advanced math has been counterproductive. “Not providing access means that the only people who will have access are the people who have outside means,” said Ross Benson, a math teacher who has taught advanced classes at Cambridge Rindge and Latin for 17 years, in an interview.
Why Seattle Public Schools is closing its highly capable cohort program [Seattle Times - archive link]
>Katie McAllister’s son spoke in full sentences when he was 18 months old, recited the Gettysburg Address at age 2 and learned to read at age 4. By 5, he was sitting in the corner of his classroom reading “Harry Potter” books.
>So when his kindergarten teacher suggested McAllister consider one of Seattle Public Schools’ highly capable cohort schools — programs and sometimes entire schools reserved for kids who can skip ahead — McAllister jumped at the opportunity.
>“It was a real lifesaver,” said McAllister, whose son has ADHD and spent five years at Decatur Elementary. “I don’t know what would’ve happened if he was in a neighborhood school” — one that doesn’t offer a program for highly capable kids — “because he can be really frustrating (to the teachers around him) if he’s not challenged.”
>But now, in an effort to make the program more equitable and to better serve all students, the district is phasing out highly capable cohort schools. In their place, SPS is offering a whole-classroom model where all students are in the same classroom and the teacher individualizes learning plans for each student. Teachers won’t necessarily have additional staff in the classroom; the district is working to provide teachers with curriculum and instruction on how to make it work.
>Parents like McAllister don’t think the new model will work because teachers in neighborhood schools won’t know how to teach to gifted kids and might overlook them, causing them to turn disruptive or slowing their academic progress.
>And some teachers say the new model won’t work because they don’t have the time and resources to create individualized learning plans for every student in a classroom of 20 to 30 students.
>The district counters that the old model of cohort schools for highly capable students is highly inequitable. For decades, highly capable programs across the country, like SPS’, served a small number of Black, Latino, Indigenous, Alaskan and Pacific Islander and low-income students and taught more white and Asian students.
>In the 2022-23 school year, 52% of highly capable students at SPS were white, 16% were Asian, and 3.4% were Black.
>She said it will be difficult to teach math to a wide range of abilities. And she worries students in a whole-classroom model won’t be properly prepared for taking Advanced Placement science and math classes in high school.
>Plucker, the Johns Hopkins professor, agrees that it unfairly burdens teachers. “That is almost asking the impossible of people, that is just so hard,” Plucker said.
>Plucker said a lot of districts are moving toward this model, but he says no district has succeeded yet, and he thinks it could hold many students back.
TDSB votes to remove skill-based assessments for specialized schools, programs [Toronto Star - archive link]
>Trustees at Toronto’s public school board voted Wednesday night to approve a major overhaul of the admissions process at specialized programs and schools, replacing ability-based assessments with an interest-based application.
>During the Toronto District School Board meeting, trustees criticized and applauded the controversial change to the process, which is aimed at improving access and will impact programs that typically focus on areas such as the arts, athletics, science and math.
>In her opening remarks on the issue, Director of Education Colleen Russell-Rawlins said the policy change will “provide a fair chance for all students who have an enduring interest and passion for an area of program to be accepted.”
>“We must remember that public education is for everyone. It is our responsibility to remove barriers that prevent students from access to education and provide them the pathways to pursue their dreams and realize their full potential.”
>Currently, applicants for these programs are assessed on their ability through auditions, formal portfolios, entrance exams or report cards. Under the new policy, applications will be based on a student’s interest and they will need to demonstrate an active interest or passion in an area. If demand for a program exceeds available space, then a random selection process will be used, with priority given to those from under-served communities.
>Similarly, Nunziata, who’s the trustee for ESA, said he agrees “wholeheartedly with the equity work that needs to be done.” But, he said the policy change “sends a wrong message to all the students who work hard in their craft.”
>“To move away from recognizing talent, dedication, hard work, results and excellence, I feel, is a very misguided approach,” he said.
>Trustee Christopher Mammoliti said he fully supports the policy change because “our responsibility in public education, is to break down barriers, especially for those who we know traditionally have not received the opportunities… that have been available to others.”
Squaring Up to Defend Mathematics: America’s top scientists warn about the political erosion of education standards. [Wall Street Journal - archive link]
>The last few years have seen a proliferation of “open letters” by academics in politics and the humanities in favor of progressive causes. The hard sciences are different, and when mathematicians, physicists and engineers speak up to defend the integrity of their fields, Americans should pay attention.
>The latest example is a new public statement from hundreds of the country’s top quantitative scientists warning about the assault on math in schools. “We write to express our alarm over recent trends in K-12 mathematics education in the United States,” the statement begins. The social-justice wave of 2020 accelerated efforts to eliminate standardized testing and lower standards in math to give the appearance that achievement gaps don’t exist.
>The scientists delicately describe the politicized erosion of standards as “well-intentioned approaches to reform mathematics education.” They zero in on the California Department of Education’s proposed new math framework, which encourages math teachers to take a “justice-oriented perspective.” The signatories say the course roadmap will reduce the “availability of advanced mathematical courses to middle schoolers and beginning high schoolers” and discourage students from taking calculus.
>This is supposed to advance “equity.” But in addition to damaging America’s global competitiveness, the letter says, the decline of rigorous math in public schools “may lead to a de facto privatization” of top-tier instruction and “harm students with fewer resources.”
>The growing list of 471 signatories includes four winners of the Fields Medal in math; two winners of the Turing Award in computing; a Nobel laureate in physics and another in chemistry; 25 members of the National Academy of Sciences; and faculty at Stanford, Berkeley, CalTech, MIT and every top U.S. university for hard science.
>No doubt many if not most in this group are politically left of center. But they warn against the elevation of “trendy but shallow courses over foundational skills” like algebra and calculus. Those disciplines “are centuries old and sometimes more,” the letter says, but “arguably even more critical for today’s grand challenges than in the Sputnik era.”
>The debate over course content in history and social science has been the center of educational controversy, as progressives aim to rewrite the country’s civic contract. But the erosion of math and science education to accommodate identity politics is even more threatening to America’s prosperity and survival in a competitive world. Credit to the mathematicians for recognizing this threat, and squaring up in defense of their field.
Brooklyn School Votes to End Gifted and Talented Programs to Diversify Classrooms [NY1 (Local Cable News Channel in New York) - archive link]
>As the city grapples with how to better integrate its schools, one Brooklyn elementary school has a suggestion: Getting rid of its gifted and talented classes.
>"A test that kids sit for when they're three or four is not a measure necessarily of their academic capacity, but really a measure of the access to resources that they've had," said Kirsten Cole, co-chair of the school's Diversity and Inclusion Committee.
>P.S. 9's school leadership team voted to send the proposal, which would phase out the program starting in 2020, to the district superintendent for his consideration.
>The school, in Prospect Heights, is diverse. Cole said black students are underrepresented in gifted and talented classes.
Racism, Sexism, Discrimination, and DEI:
Maryland racial equity officer pledged to 'burn it all down' in name of 'Black liberation' [KHQA (Local ABC and CBS News Affiliate for Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa) - archive link]
>Kayla Aliese Carter, who designs College Park, Maryland’s racial equity plans, set an image as her X account header that reads “I can’t wait for society to collapse so MY ideology can rise from the ashes!”
>“I hate when White children stare at me,” the official posted in 2021. “Its literally terrifying so I just stare back until they stop.”
Parents angered by segregation experiment at local elementary school [News 4 San Antonio - archive link]
>The Lininger's say teachers told students children in the fair-haired group were not as intelligent. That group was purposely given a game with pieces missing so they could not play. Later they were made to clean up after the other children.
‘How to Serve White Victims’ [Wall Street Journal - archive link]
>One PowerPoint panel lists the session’s “Key Takeaways.” Among them: “White people are not entitled to harm you”; “When interacting with white victims, speak up for yourself or for your coworkers”; and “If a white victim continues to harm you, ask that they be transferred.” The slide also asserts that “white victims are entitled to the same compassion and practices as all victims,” but the rest of the slide is at odds with that message. It’s unclear how white crime victims “harm” government employees. Another panel from the training asserts that “White Supremacy Culture” is characterized by “Perfectionism,” “Objectivity,” “Sense of Urgency” and “Individualism.” Perhaps it’s harmful to expect government employees to respond to crimes objectively and urgently.
Men obstructed from entering female-dominated occupations [Linkoping University - archive link] [Link to study - archive link]
>“We see that there are obstructions to men entering certain parts of the labour market. In the application process, we don’t see any discrimination against women who want to get into male-dominated occupations. But we find considerable discrimination against men in female-dominated occupations”, says Mark Granberg, doctoral student in economics at Linköping University.
Monoclonal Antibodies Shortage Has Critics Saying There's Racial Discrimination In Who's Getting Treatment [CBS News - archive link]
>With record numbers of COVID cases in our area, hospitals are being flooded with requests for antibody treatments that were saving lives, but many patients are being turned away. Who is still being greenlighted for monoclonal antibodies, and why? CBS2's Carolyn Gusoff reports. Matthew Storms, battling a third bout of COVID-19 with pneumonia, says he was turned away by two Long Island hospitals. "If I don't meet the criteria, then who does?" Storms said. "The doctor just shut me down and said this is criteria: You're not of age, which is 65, and you're not a minority." New York state prioritizes treatment based on age and risk factors including people from certain racial and ethnic minority groups.
Harvard Rated Asian-American Applicants Lower on Personality Traits, Suit Says [New York Times - archive link]
>Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found.
Berkeley Weeded Out Job Applicants Who Didn't Propose Specific Plans To Advance Diversity [Reason - archive link]
>Berkeley's diversity rubric shows just how much specificity was expected. Three aspects of the applicants' diversity statements were graded on a five-point scale: knowledge of diversity, experience in advancing diversity, and a plan for advancing diversity in the future. The highest possible score was thus a 15. Discounting the importance of diversity, failing to specifically discuss gender and race, and making only vague statements (such as "the field of History definitely needs more women") were listed as the kinds of things that would earn the lowest possible score.
As Calls for Action Crescendo, de Blasio Takes On Segregated Schools [New York Times - archive link]
>There are eight specialized schools that admit students based on their performance on a test. While the number of students they serve is relatively small, they take on outsize importance because they are among the most prestigious schools in the city — like Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx High School of Science — and because their demographics deviate so starkly from the system over all.
>Black and Hispanic students make up nearly 70 percent of the city’s public school students, but they received just 10 percent of offers for seats at specialized schools this fall. Both white and Asian students, on the other hand, are overrepresented. About 27 percent of the offers went to white students, who make up 15 percent of the school system; 52 percent went to Asian students, who make up 16 percent.
>“Correct me if I’m wrong, but they’re saying these schools are too Asian, so there must be something wrong,” Mr. Kim said. “Am I the only one who looks at that and says, ‘I don’t understand how that’s even legal?’”
Asian Groups See Bias in Plan to Diversify New York’s Elite Schools [New York Times - archive link]
>A new plan to change the way students are admitted to New York’s elite public high schools is infuriating members of some Asian communities who feel they will be pushed aside in the drive to admit more than a handful of black and Latino students.
>Soo Kim, president of the Stuyvesant Alumni Association, said that while the schools are often described as elite, the children who attend them exist worlds away from the lives of the 1 percent. Many of the students — and indeed, many of the Asian students — who attend specialized schools are poor. Many of them go to years of test prep in order to earn scores good enough to gain admission.
As Fury Erupts Over Campus Antisemitism, Conservatives Seize the Moment [New York Times - archive link]
>The validation they have sought seemed to finally arrive this fall, as campuses convulsed with protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and hostile, sometimes violent, rhetoric toward Jews. It came to a head last week on Capitol Hill, as the presidents of three elite universities struggled to answer a question about whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate school rules, and Republicans asserted that outbreaks of campus antisemitism were a symptom of the radical ideas they had long warned about. On Saturday, amid the fallout, one of those presidents, M. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned.
>“For a long time i said that antisemitism, particularly on the american left, was not as bad as people claimed,” wrote Sam Altman, head of the artificial intelligence firm OpenAI and a major Democratic donor, on X. “i’d like to just state that i was totally wrong.”
>The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which advocates free speech in American society, ranks hundreds of colleges for their protection of students’ rights and open inquiry. Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania sit at the bottom.
>“The same administrators now cloaking themselves in the mantle of free speech have been all too willing to censor all kinds of unpopular stuff on their campuses,” said Alex Morey, the foundation’s director of campus rights advocacy. “It is such utter hypocrisy.”
Diversity Policies Rarely Make Companies Fairer, and They Feel Threatening to White Men [Harvard Business Review - archive link]
>Most people assume that diversity policies make companies fairer for women and minorities, though the data suggest otherwise. Even when there is clear evidence of discrimination at a company, the presence of a diversity policy leads people to discount claims of unfair treatment. In previous research, we’ve found that this is especially true for members of dominant groups and those who tend to believe that the system is generally fair.
>All this has a real effect in court. In a 2011 Supreme Court class action case, Walmart successfully used the mere presence of its anti-discrimination policy to defend itself against allegations of gender discrimination. And Walmart isn’t alone: the “diversity defense” often succeeds, making organizations less accountable for discriminatory practices.
>There’s another way the rhetoric of diversity can result in inaccurate and counterproductive beliefs. In a recent experiment, we found evidence that it not only makes white men believe that women and minorities are being treated fairly — whether that’s true or not — it also makes them more likely to believe that they themselves are being treated unfairly.
What if Diversity Training Is Doing More Harm Than Good? [New York Times - archive link]
>Over the years, social scientists who have conducted careful reviews of the evidence base for diversity training have frequently come to discouraging conclusions. Though diversity training workshops have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. The lack of evidence is “disappointing,” wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article, “considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.”
>Dr. Paluck’s team found just two large experimental studies in the previous decade that attempted to evaluate the effects of diversity training and met basic quality benchmarks. Other researchers have been similarly unimpressed. “We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade,” wrote the sociologists Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in 2018, “with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around.” (To be fair, not all of these critiques apply as sharply to voluntary diversity training.)
>Many popular contemporary D.E.I. approaches meet these criteria. They often seem geared more toward sparking a revolutionary reunderstanding of race relations than solving organizations’ specific problems. And they often blame white people — or their culture — for harming people of color. For example, the activist Tema Okun’s work cites concepts like objectivity and worship of the written word as characteristics of “white supremacy culture.” Robin DiAngelo’s “white fragility” training sessions are designed to make white participants uncomfortable. And microaggression training workshops are based on an area of academic literature that claims, without quality evidence, that common utterances like “America is a melting pot” harm the mental health of people of color. Many of these training sessions run counter to the views of most Americans — of any color — on race and equality. And they’re generating exactly the sort of backlash that research predicts.
Lawmakers, health care providers raise alarm about growing antisemitism in medical field [Jewish Insider - archive link]
>One panelist, a therapist who asked not to be identified by name out of concern about professional consequences, explained that some in the mental health space are pushing a theory known as “decolonizing therapy” in which Jews are treated as oppressors in therapeutic settings and Zionism is treated as a mental illness that patients should be told to reject.
>“It’s a complete inversion of the way therapy should work,” the therapist said. “It’s an indoctrination process.”
>The therapist also highlighted efforts to blacklist therapists who identified as or were willing to serve patients who identified as Zionists and said that professional organizations in the psychology space have been part of perpetuating these harmful ideologies, rather than combating them.
>“My fear is that it will not get better,” they said. “This ideology is becoming so widespread. Well-intentioned people believe it because they don’t know any better… I don’t think that this will go away unless we do something to stop it.”
>Raskin appeared especially taken aback by the discussion of the “decolonizing therapy” theory, describing the mentality as a “massive projection.”
>“I really did not think that this infected the medical profession and scientists and people who take, or at least purport to take, an objective and rationalist approach to knowledge and the helping professions and so on,” Raskin said. “So that’s a startling set of reports from out in the field.”
>Another panelist, a doctor and medical school faculty member who also asked to remain anonymous, said that some Jewish patients at their hospital’s fertility clinic were reluctant to file complaints about the hostility they faced from medical providers, out of fear that the staff would damage their embryos. And they said that another provider had cut off contact with a patient after the patient told the provider that she had visited Israel.
>The doctor added that providers have refused to remove Palestinian political paraphernalia even when it’s making patients uncomfortable in highly sensitive settings, such as the labor and delivery and palliative care units.
>They said administrators had refused to enforce the hospital’s rules out of fear of upsetting anti-Israel staff and dismissed complaints of discrimination, in some cases referring impacted staff to a counselor who herself had posted antisemitic content and leaked their complaints.
>The doctor said that Jewish and pro-Israel events at the hospital’s affiliated university have been canceled or faced other significant disruptions, and that highly accomplished pro-Israel faculty have left the institution.
UC Riverside’s DEI Guardians Came After Me: The university censured me after I spoke out against race taking over the faculty hiring process. [Wall Street Journal - archive link]
>The committee’s unofficial diversity, equity and inclusion guardian, Heidi Brevik-Zender, had proposed that we boost this black applicant ahead of several others and place him on our shortlist. My comments came in response to this boosting. Someone then reported them to deans and vice provosts without notice to me, triggering a university discipline machine that couldn’t be stopped.
>I had several reasons to be against giving this applicant a leg up. It was unfair to the better-qualified candidates who were jumped over. It didn’t serve the university’s interest, which is to find the best possible practitioner. And I am not persuaded that artificial boosts are in the best interests of the boosted.
>Resistance to the machine causes it to accelerate. The penalty for my words began as a demand that I resign from a search committee. A year later, those same words were enough to threaten me with a pay cut or even termination. Why the dramatic escalation? Because I didn’t bend. To the machine, that was more offensive than the original affront.
D.E.I. Official at University of Michigan Is Fired Over Antisemitism Claim, Lawyer Says [New York Times - archive link]
>She was accused of saying in a conversation at a conference in March that the university was “controlled by wealthy Jews,” according to documents obtained by The New York Times through a freedom of information request. She was also accused of saying that Jewish students were “wealthy and privileged” and not in need of her office’s diversity services, and that “Jewish people have no genetic DNA that would connect them to the land of Israel,” according to the documents, which were part of a complaint from the Anti-Defamation League of Michigan.
University of Michigan Ends Required Diversity Statements [New York Times - archive link]
>Michigan’s decision may add momentum to growing efforts to restrict the use of diversity statements, which have proliferated widely in academia in recent years. Schools that employ them typically ask job applicants to discuss how they would advance diversity and equity through their scholarship, teaching or community service. In states like Michigan and California, which ban direct racial preferences in hiring, the statements have been credited with helping public universities hire more diverse faculties.
>Critics view them as a form of compelled political speech that are often used to evade legal restrictions on affirmative action. In at least some instances, job candidates have been eliminated from consideration based solely on their diversity statements.
>But a survey conducted for the committee found that more than half of Michigan faculty members believed diversity statements placed pressure on professors to express specific moral, political and social views.
University stands by ‘Problem of Whiteness’ course [CNN - archive link]
>“I am extremely concerned that UW-Madison finds it appropriate to teach a course called, ‘The Problem of Whiteness,’ with the premise that white people are racist,” Murphy said in a statement this week. He even threatened to pull funding for the state university.
>The course, taught by Professor Damon Sajnani, is part of the African Cultural Studies program at the university’s College of Letters and Science.
>“In this class, we will ask what an ethical white identity entails, what it means to be #woke, and consider the journal Race Traitor’s motto, ‘treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.’”
1 in 6 hiring managers have been told to stop hiring white men, survey finds [WSAZ (Local NBC News Affiliate for West Virginia) - archive link]
>A recent survey of 1,000 hiring managers in the United States found that one in six, or about 16%, have been told to stop hiring white men. Additionally, 14% of hiring managers said they have also been told to deprioritize hiring white women.
>The survey, published by Resume Builder and Pollfish on Wednesday, found that 52% of hiring managers believe their company practices “reverse discrimination” – passing over members of racial and gender majorities in order to meet diversity benchmarks.
>In addition, the survey found that 48% of hiring managers have been asked to prioritize diversity over qualifications, and 53% believe their job will be in danger if they don’t hire enough diverse employees.
Black Nationalist Gets $20 Million to Promote ‘Segregation’ in Public Schools [The Free Press - archive link]
>“He started up this organization, which on paper sounds like a really wonderful endeavor, getting more black teachers in the classroom,” said Dr. Mika Hackner, a senior research associate at the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, which drafted a report on El-Mekki’s extremist views and activism that she shared with The Free Press. “But if you scratch beneath the surface—not even beneath the surface, it’s on their website—he’s propagating some pretty dangerous and divisive ideas.”
>El-Mekki, she added, is “bringing in segregation by a different and more socially and politically acceptable name.”
>“It’s instituting a really unhealthy educational framework where everything must be based upon this sort of extremist version of anti-racism,” she said. “I think it creates an inward-looking, insular world.”
Uber’s Diversity Chief Put on Leave After Complaints of Insensitivity [New York Times - archive link]
>Uber has placed its longtime head of diversity, equity and inclusion on leave after workers complained that an employee event she moderated, titled “Don’t Call Me Karen,” was insensitive to people of color.
>Employees’ concerns centered on a pair of events, one last month and another last Wednesday, that were billed as “diving into the spectrum of the American white woman’s experience” and hearing from white women who work at Uber, with a focus on “the ‘Karen’ persona.” They were intended to be an “open and honest conversation about race,” according to the invitation.
>But workers instead felt that they were being lectured on the difficulties experienced by white women and why “Karen” was a derogatory term and that Ms. Lee was dismissive of their concerns, according to messages sent on Slack, a workplace messaging tool, that were viewed by The Times.
>Employees felt the event organizers were minimizing racism and the harm white people can inflict on people of color by focusing on how “Karen” is a hurtful word, according to the messages and an employee who attended the events.
Google Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men as It Addresses Wage Equity [New York Times - archive link]
>When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found, to the surprise of just about everyone, that men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.
>The study, which disproportionately led to pay raises for thousands of men, is done every year, but the latest findings arrived as Google and other companies in Silicon Valley face increasing pressure to deal with gender issues in the workplace, from sexual harassment to wage discrimination.
>But in an effort to demonstrate that Google was not skimping on wages, executives said at the meeting that the company had adjusted the pay of more employees than ever before. Ms. Barbato, who presented the findings, said that more men were underpaid was a “surprising trend that we didn’t expect.”
Portland Public Schools under fire for making race 'main criteria' in discipline policy [KATU (Local ABC News Affiliate for Oregon) - archive link]
>The largest school district in Oregon is being accused of discriminating against students based on their race through its new discipline policy.
>Portland Public Schools (PPS) introduced its "Student Support, Discipline & Safety" policy in November. Under the policy, behavioral support plans must consider a student's "trauma," "race" and "gender identity/presentation," as well as whether "social emotional learning" and "restorative justice" are appropriate for them.
>The policy further requires each PPS school to maintain a "School Climate Team," tasked with participating in "ongoing training in implicit bias, antiracism and culturally responsive practices." Additionally, it mandates that a teacher not be transferred to another location if doing so would "decrease the building’s percentage of minority teachers to less than the student minority percentage in the building" or decrease its percentage of transgender and nonbinary staff to less than 30%.
How DEI Becomes Discrimination: The NIH First program wasn’t supposed to involve outright preferences. Public records show how that’s worked in practice. [Wall Street Journal - archive link]
>Yet there is evidence that many universities have engaged in outright racial preferences under the aegis of DEI. Hundreds of documents that I acquired through public-records requests provide a rare paper trail of universities closely scrutinizing the race of faculty job applicants. The practice not only appears widespread; it is encouraged and funded by the federal government.
>At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a large hiring initiative targets specific racial groups—promising to hire 18 to 20 scientists “who are Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander.” Discussing a related University of New Mexico program, one professor quipped in an email, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.”
>Both initiatives are supported by the National Institutes of Health through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First. The program gives grants for DEI-focused “cluster hiring” at universities and medical schools, promising eventually to spend about a quarter-billion dollars.
>A key requirement is that recipient institutions heavily value diversity statements while selecting faculty. The creators of the program reasoned that by heavily weighing commitment to DEI, they could prompt schools to hire more minorities but without direct racial preferences. That’s the rationale behind DEI-focused “cluster hiring,” an increasingly common practice in academia. The documents—which include emails, grant proposals, progress reports and hiring records—suggest that many NIH First grant recipients restrict hiring on the basis of race or “underrepresented” status, violating NIH’s stated policies and possibly civil-rights law.
>In grant proposals, several recipients openly state their intention to restrict whom they hire by demographic category. Vanderbilt’s NIH First grant proposal states that it will “focus on the cluster hiring of faculty from minoritized racial and ethnic groups, specifically Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander scientists.” The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Texas at Dallas jointly proposed hiring 10 scholars “from underrepresented groups,” noting that the NIH First program specifically identifies racial minorities and women as underrepresented.
>A colleague responded: “For me as long as we are diversifying our departments and go with what we wrote in the proposal I am happy.” She then made clear her intention to keep one specific group out of consideration: “I don’t want to hire white men for sure, we did a very good job in the grant with the tables and numbers and that’s what we should follow in my opinion.”
>At its inception, NIH First was widely understood not to involve racial preferences. In 2020, shortly after the program was announced, Science magazine published an explanation: “Not all of the 120 new hires would need to belong to groups now underrepresented in academic medicine, which include women, black people, Hispanics, Native Americans, and those with disabilities, says Hannah Valantine, NIH’s chief diversity officer. In fact, she told the Council of Councils at its 24 January meeting, any such restriction would be illegal and also run counter to the program’s goal of attracting world-class talent.”
>Yet multiple programs have stated their intention to limit hires to those with “underrepresented” status. One job advertisement, for a First role at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, notes: “Successful candidates will be early stage investigators who are Black, Latinx, or from a disadvantaged background (as defined by NIH).”
>Some grantees even admit such preferences in documents sent to and reviewed by the NIH. A joint proposal from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the university’s Baltimore County campus states that all scientists hired through the program will meet the NIH’s definition of “underrepresented populations in science.” Drexel University’s program, which focuses on nursing and public health, provides its evaluation rubric in a progress report. Among its four criteria: “Candidate is a member of a group that is underrepresented in health research.”
>This raises questions about compliance with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race discrimination in employment. The First program’s website highlights regulations requiring that federal agencies ensure grant recipients comply with nondiscrimination law. The most basic implication is that universities can’t refuse to hire someone, or prefer one candidate over another, because of race or sex. But emails show that this has been happening.
The problem with diversity statements — and what to do about them: DEI statements have too often led to self-censorship and ideological policing. [Washington Post - archive link]
>As the United States reckoned with racial inequality during and after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, many saw Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs as a way to address the issues in higher education. As part of the trend, many schools began requiring candidates for teaching positions to submit DEI statements. In these statements, potential hires explain how they would advance diversity, equity and inclusion in their teaching and research activities. One 2021 study found that about one-third of job postings at elite universities required them.
>Now, however, some in academia are starting to express second thoughts about this practice. In April, Harvard Law School professor Randall L. Kennedy urged abolition of DEI statements, arguing that they amount to “compulsion” and “ideological litmus tests.” Not long after Mr. Kennedy’s article appeared, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the first top university to voluntarily end their use. The decision came after extensive consultations among all six of the school’s academic deans. MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, explained: “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”
>And yet as a specific policy, DEI statements advance their declared objectives at too high a cost. In fact, they stoke what Mr. Kennedy, a self-described “scholar on the left,” who formerly served as a law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, called “intense and growing resentment” among academics. Not surprisingly, 90 percent of self-described conservative faculty view the statements as political litmus tests, but so do more than 50 percent of moderates and even one-quarter of liberals, according to a survey by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan watchdog group specializing in campus free speech issues.
>Because the criteria for acceptable DEI statements are often vague, jobseekers must do the work of anticipating the ideological and political preferences of university administrators and faculty, who are disproportionately left-leaning. The MIT Communication Lab, for instance, explained that a diversity statement is an “opportunity to show that you care about the inclusion of many forms of identity in academia and in your field, including but not limited to gender, race/ethnicity, age, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, and ability status” and notes “it may be appropriate to acknowledge aspects of your own marginalized identity and/or your own privilege.” Harvard University’s Bok Center for Teaching and Learning included a list of guiding questions including, “Do you seek to identify and mitigate how inequitable and colonial social systems are reinforced in the academy by attending to and adjusting the power dynamics in your courses?”
A Racist Smear. A Tarnished Career. And the Suicide of Richard Bilkszto. [The Free Press - archive link] (I'm not going to post quotes for this one, I think it should be read in whole.)