How School Districts Have Made Equity Into a Big Business

In the ongoing effort to influence and indoctrinate school staff and, by extension, the young minds of the students they are tasked with educating, school districts have spent millions of dollars on training programs designed to steep teachers in wokeism. The professionals conducting these sessions are on the front lines of the movement to infuse progressive ideology into K-12 classrooms in public learning institutions and are paid using taxpayer funding. In essence, Americans are paying the government to transform their little ones into far-left activists starting at an early age.

Equity Has Become Lucrative

Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia has paid nearly half a million dollars to Performance Fact, a California-based education consultancy that works with schools to improve their operations. One of their areas of expertise is “Equity-centered Strategic Planning,” which is related to the diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI) framework that has been adopted in public and private organizations.

During a September 2022 retreat, Performance Fact’s CEO, Mutiu Fagbayi, conducted a seminar on equity. According to a Powerpoint presentation obtained by The College Fix, the training discusses, among other ideas, the difference between “equality” and “equity,” noting that the former means resources are “distributed evenly, irrespective of individual needs or assets,” while the latter “[i]ncorporates the idea of need” and dictates that the “distribution of resources and support is purposefully unequal.” This follows the progressive tradition of reinventing the definitions of certain words. The proper definition of “equity” includes an absence of favoritism.

The equity/equality dichotomy is one of the foundational tenets of wokeism. It applies to various areas of intersectionality but is most commonly used in conversations about racial disparities. Progressive ideas on these matters are being presented to members of school staff, who then use them in the classrooms to influence children.

In June 2021, the Dover-Sherborn Public Schools hired the NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools to perform an “equity audit” of the district to ensure that it was adequately adhering to the narrative. According to the Dover School Reports:

“As the District strives to foster a school community free from bias and discrimination and to ensure a sense of belonging and equitable outcome for all students, the audit will examine all aspects of the school system, including culture and climate, achievement data, policies, community engagement, and hiring practices, among others.”

The objectives of this audit included understanding “how a diverse range of students and families experience Dover-Sherborn Public Schools” and to “identify opportunity gaps and root causes of inequities related to race, language, sexuality, disability status, religion, etc.”

Taxpayers footed the $75,000 bill for this initiative.

The Bensalem Township (PA) School District paid a consulting fee of $110,650 to conduct a similar equity review for its schools in 2021. “The review, published by the district in May, provides 97 pages of analysis of the district’s operations. Underlying the premise of the review’s recommendations are ideas relating to the controversial tenets of critical theory associated with individuals like Ibram X. Kendi,” according to Broad and Liberty.

Progressive Ideology Is Big Business

(Photo by Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images)

DEI consulting has become a fast-growing field in the public and private sectors, with a myriad of organizations hiring individuals and firms to help them wokify their workforce. After the murder of George Floyd, this industry exploded exponentially.

But in the realm of education, firms offering equity consulting services have been able to make a pretty penny ostensibly to help ensure that staff and students are not discriminated against. It appears to be a noble endeavor on the surface; nobody wishes to see people being treated unfairly because of their skin color or other immutable characteristic. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is more pernicious than it seems.

Through these trainings, progressives have successfully brought ideas inspired by critical race theory and gender ideology to the classroom and effectively created an environment full of the trappings of far-leftist thought. In this way, they have cultivated a culture in the school system that is influencing the minds of children largely without their parents’ knowledge. It was not until the COVID-19 pandemic that adults learned about what educators were teaching their kids. But even the ensuing backlash has not stopped the far-left’s agenda in this regard. But by then, the genie was well and truly out of the bottle.