During the pandemic, Congress allocated $190 billion to schools with the goal of preventing academic setbacks. Some school districts hired chief diversity officers to close racial achievement gaps, but they actually ended up exacerbating the problem.
In a national analysis of test scores, districts that hired chief diversity officers saw greater learning loss among minorities, particularly among black and Hispanic students, compared to districts without them.
According to a report by Fox News Digital, the decline in math achievement for black and Hispanic students in districts with diversity officers was approximately 25% greater than the overall decline in learning during that time. This translates to a substantial drop of more than 4.5 percentile points on a nationally normed achievement test.
“The negative effect of chief diversity officers held true even after we controlled statistically for how wide racial achievement gaps were in districts before the pandemic as well as for the trend in those gaps during the preceding decade. Racial achievement gaps went from bad to worse in these districts during the pandemic,” says Jay P. Greene of Fox News. “Hiring a senior district official who insists that Black and Hispanic students not be held to the same standards of behavior or academic achievement as other students because of structural racism obviously undermined minority student success.”
How is it that a position that was intended to help minority students academically actually hurt them? It’s because, despite the alleged intention of these hires, they were actually more effective at pushing radical leftist race and gender ideology. “While school districts with these officers were more likely to suffer greater learning loss among minority students during the pandemic, they were also significantly more likely to adopt policies to hide information from parents about their own child’s gender issues,” writes Greene.
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“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,” he adds. “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.”
Make no mistake about it: this was a feature, not a bug, of the push for chief diversity officers. “Diversity” has become the umbrella buzzword for pushing radical ideologies on students, not helping minority students close the academic gap. Instead of learning the fundamentals of education, they’re learning such claptrap as gender being fluid and America being a racist country. There’s no reason to be surprised that the same people who claim to want to help minorities are actually hurting them and teaching them to see themselves as victims of “systemic racism.”
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