Here’s What Happens When You Question DEI Initiatives

How many times have we seen this play out. Someone questions the need or effectiveness (or sanity) of some DEI initiative and immediately they are branded a right-wing hater and condemned as a would-be racist/transphobe, etc. That’s exactly what happened to a group of three moms in Newton, Massachusetts when they questioned an equity push at their local school.

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.

Multilevel classes is another form of detracking ostensibly intended to reduce the achievement gap. The argument always made in favor of these ideas is that including the struggling students with the most advanced students in the same room will help everyone and cost the advanced students nothing. But it never works out that way. In fact the opposite is probably true.

The three moms heard from other parents who were also concerned but too afraid to speak up for fear of being called a racist. Nevertheless, the continued to gather momentum and to push back on the proposals. In 2022 they launched a petition to give parents more control over such changes and it gathered 300 signatures. But it also led to a backlash framing all of them as right-wing haters.

The mothers and their allies found themselves portrayed online and in public as dog-whistling bigots doing the bidding of right-wing national groups.

Social media comments painted their side as “racism cloaked as academic excellence” and “right-wing activism cloaked as parental concern.”

The three moms behind this were all Democrats, one of them a Bernie Sanders voter. But the backlash didn’t care about the truth only about advancing their agenda. At a public meeting their plan for an advisory committee went down 9-0 and they were denounced by speakers who assumed they were right-wing extremists.

But jump forward a few years and now there are teachers and parents complaining about the multilevel classes created to improve equity.

“I’ve heard about multilevel classes from many, many parents over the last three years, and the feedback has been consistently negative,” School Committee member Rajeev Parlikar said at a November meeting. “I actually have not heard from a single parent who thought their child benefited from being in a multilevel class.”

After taking a beating they didn’t deserve, Vanessa Calagna and the other two moms have watched as a new petition has been launched to undo the changes. It has picked up 400 signatures so far.

“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.

Calagna says it might have been more effective to keep their opposition to a single narrow issue instead of bringing up DEI, but she says she and the other moms felt obligated to bring up the larger issue because every time they asked about some new police the answer was always a reference to the school district’s “Statement of Values and Commitment to Racial Equity.” “That was untouchable,” Calagna said. And because it was untouchable anything pushed using it as a foundation was also untouchable including multilevel classes.

She also had a personal reason for questioning DEI. She works as a counselor for young girls and has seen what DEI has done to them. “Our kids internalize helplessness, fear, shame, and guilt from the learning initiatives designed to increase DEI,” she said.

This tracks with a debate I’ve written about before. Why do liberal girls (and boys) tend to have worse mental health problems than conservative boys and girls? The answer could be because the socialization of liberals involves a tendency to catastrophize things from global warming to transgender activism. As Matt Yglesias put it, progressives “valorize depressive affect as a sign of political commitment.”

DEI seems like just another street leading off this same broad avenue of progressive depression and despair. It’s a message about a permanent state of conflict between oppressors and the oppressed in which members of other racial groups (specifically white people) are part of a system of white supremacy sometimes aided by traitors from other groups. This is not a message that is going to improve mental health or create real friendships across cultural lines. But again, the proponents don’t care about the truth so much as they do about using the cudgel of racism to wield control over everyone and everything.