I hope you’ve been well. We’re busy editing the White Guilt documentary these days and it’s going great. I think it will be a powerful film that deals with how we ended up in this divisive, tribal post-October 7th world. Still much work ahead.
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I wanted to take a break and feature the clip of Condeleeza Rice that has been trending on social media lately. In it, she makes a powerful argument for school choice and points out the hypocrisy of the Left for professing to care about poor kids while keeping them locked in failing schools. However, after digesting the clip, I wondered if the picture she painted was a complete one.
Here’s the video of her remarks (text below):
So, are you for school choice or not? We already have a choice system in education. If you are of means, you will move to a district where the schools are good, and the houses are expensive like Palo Alto, California. If you go across the street from Stanford, Palo Alto High has a performance Arts Center, that looks like a smaller version of Stanford's. If you're really wealthy, you will send your kids to private schools. So who's stuck in failing neighborhood, schools? Poor kids. A lot of a minority kids.
So, how can you say you're for civil rights? How can you say, you're for the poor? When you're condemning those children to not being able to read by the time they're in third grade. They're never going to read. So if you want to say that school choice and vouchers and charter schools are destroying the public schools, fine, you write that editorial in the Washington Post, but then don't send your kids to Sidwell Friends.
Dr. Rice is not wrong here — she’s making the argument that others like my father, Jason Riley, and Thomas Sowell have made for years.
But what this argument leaves out is how much DEI ideology has impacted many schools in recent years — from poor to wealthy neighborhoods.
As many of you know, I’m originally from the Bay Area and recently returned to make the documentary, Killing America. I had been invited to film by Bay Area parents outraged to learn that for the past eight years honors classes had been gradually removed from their kids’ high schools — schools that are located in some of America’s wealthiest zip codes. While that was a significant problem, I discovered others.
The grading standards had been changed in some classrooms to erase failure — 80 to 100% was an A. There was massive grade inflation, again, to mask over failure — students could do meaningless extra credit work to lift that C on the test up to an A. (My own daughter scored 97% on a math test and was dismayed to see kids, who scored in the 70s, get 100% after turning in fluff extra credit work.) And there was evidence that liberation ideology (oppressed vs oppressors) had steeped into the classrooms — a teacher told outright lies such as the two where she said Hamas targeted primarily Israeli soldiers on October 7 and that UN had declared the existence of Israel to be “illegal.”
This is all documented in Killing America (full film below):
As a student in the middle class Bay Area schools in the late 80s and early 90s, I can tell you the quality of education I received then was far superior and rigorous.
Dr. Rice also misses the point that many schools in poor neighborhoods often receive more funding.
Recent data shows that Cesar Chavez Middle School in working class East Palo Alto receives $36,908 per pupil. La Entrada Middle School in affluent Menlo Park receives $32,240 per pupil. Cesar Chavez is backed by a $12 million foundation while La Entrada’s foundation is $2M. In addition, Cesar Chavez’s campus is undergoing a massive renovation — as you can clearly see in the Killing America documentary.
Still, the kids at Cesar Chavez can barely read and do math on grade level. If money and resources are not the issue, then what is stopping these kids from succeeding?
One of the more pernicious aspects of the DEI ideology is that it never raises the bar or demands anything of these kids as individuals. Instead, as teachers have told me, it puts the primary focus on creating “inclusive communities” and prioritizing social justice issues instead promoting academic excellence. What I can tell you is that my father got a far superior education in the 1950s and in segregated Chicago because the emphasis was on academic excellence.
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How are today’s kids going to survive in an area that has the most PhDs per capita in the world? Why are we enabling grade inflation in order to achieve equity when individual achievement can only be earned through the pursuit of excellence?
While we can point the finger at several causes, including parents most responsible for their child’s education, we cannot ignore that the infusion of DEI into the classroom has played a transformative role, and for the worse. This ideology favors equity of outcome to the point that it lowers standards to achieve its ends. And it is the smart kids — poor and rich — who pay for all of this.
If the DEI ideology, which demands uniformity and conformity, continues to march through the entire educational system there won’t be much difference between the public, charter, private, and parochial schools. What school choice will there be?
The DEI ideology has thrived under the accusation America remains a racist and systemically racist nation that is hostile to a wide swath of minorities. While there will always be discrimination of sorts, we no longer live under the America of my father’s segregated youth. The emphasis must be on creating truly diverse individuals through the pursuit of merit and that is why any battle for school choice today must include the objective of eliminating the noxious groupthink and tribalism that comes with the ideology of DEI.
I've taught history and civics to high school students for twenty-five years. I think much of Dr. Rice's analysis would have been a better criticism of our schools at the beginning of my career. Alas, as you suspect, our problems are worse and more complicated today than they were then.
Today, I each at a Catholic high school in Pennsylvania. But prior to that I taught at an elite magnet school in Virginia for seventeen years. I can tell you that DEI and gender ideology have greatly damaged our educational system at every level. The job of a teacher is to remove ignorance, help build character, and to make excellence the rising tide that lifts all boats. Instead, in the Bizarro world of DEI, the lowering of academic and behavior standards is the lowering tide that includes everyone and is supposed to make everyone feel better about themselves.
You mentioned some of the educational gimmicks now in vogue (even at allegedly "elite" schools). Let me share some other specifics for subscribers:
* The lowering of the percentage needed to secure a high grade. This has happened virtually everywhere. When I was a kid attending Fairfax County Public Schools outside of Washington an "A" meant one had to have a 94% average. Well, that is now a 90 or much lower in many cases.
* There are "minimum grades" that teachers are required to give all students. Usually this means a minimum grade for the quarter. For example, at my current employer a 70% is needed to pass... but teachers are not permitted to give a student a grade lower than 60% for the quarter (or, comically, 65% if it is the first quarter). So one child who earned a 22% average was given 65% by the school. The rationale is that kids will "lose hope" and "give up" if they fail so badly their first quarter. But in fact, this operates in reverse because slackers know they have a 60% or 65% banked even if they do literally nothing.
* Teachers are usually required to "round up" their grades. For example, if a 90% is an "A" what this really means is that an 89.5% is an "A." And guess what, when schools make such policies official, parents immediately begin to demand that teachers "round to the rounded grade." I can't make such nonsense up.
* The proliferation of extra credit assignments is mind-boggling. I am appalled, but not surprised, by your daughter's experience of kids with grades in the 70s winding up with As. Either formally or informally, teachers are required to offer extra credit assignments. And woe to the teacher who has any significant number of students fail their course--that's the teacher's fault nowadays. The solution of course is to offer even more extra credit. However, this is never as effective in helping the lowest-performing students because they rarely bother with extra credit assignments. Why would they when they know they will be permitted to play ball and then be socially promoted at the end of the school year?
I could say far more and I haven't even talked about behavior standards. But the public needs to understand that the lowering of standards described above is occurring at every level. Our educational institutions are committing malpractice and parents and teachers need to fight back.
Thank you for discussing this extremely disturbing trend.
Eli, this is an excellent analysis of the gaping hole in Condoleeza Rice's analysis. Clearly, DEI is a toxic ideology that does the most damage to students from what they call marginalized communities. Ironic that a doctrine that supposedly stands for victims against oppressors is itself leaving a trail of victims as collateral damage.
Eli,
I've taught history and civics to high school students for twenty-five years. I think much of Dr. Rice's analysis would have been a better criticism of our schools at the beginning of my career. Alas, as you suspect, our problems are worse and more complicated today than they were then.
Today, I each at a Catholic high school in Pennsylvania. But prior to that I taught at an elite magnet school in Virginia for seventeen years. I can tell you that DEI and gender ideology have greatly damaged our educational system at every level. The job of a teacher is to remove ignorance, help build character, and to make excellence the rising tide that lifts all boats. Instead, in the Bizarro world of DEI, the lowering of academic and behavior standards is the lowering tide that includes everyone and is supposed to make everyone feel better about themselves.
You mentioned some of the educational gimmicks now in vogue (even at allegedly "elite" schools). Let me share some other specifics for subscribers:
* The lowering of the percentage needed to secure a high grade. This has happened virtually everywhere. When I was a kid attending Fairfax County Public Schools outside of Washington an "A" meant one had to have a 94% average. Well, that is now a 90 or much lower in many cases.
* There are "minimum grades" that teachers are required to give all students. Usually this means a minimum grade for the quarter. For example, at my current employer a 70% is needed to pass... but teachers are not permitted to give a student a grade lower than 60% for the quarter (or, comically, 65% if it is the first quarter). So one child who earned a 22% average was given 65% by the school. The rationale is that kids will "lose hope" and "give up" if they fail so badly their first quarter. But in fact, this operates in reverse because slackers know they have a 60% or 65% banked even if they do literally nothing.
* Teachers are usually required to "round up" their grades. For example, if a 90% is an "A" what this really means is that an 89.5% is an "A." And guess what, when schools make such policies official, parents immediately begin to demand that teachers "round to the rounded grade." I can't make such nonsense up.
* The proliferation of extra credit assignments is mind-boggling. I am appalled, but not surprised, by your daughter's experience of kids with grades in the 70s winding up with As. Either formally or informally, teachers are required to offer extra credit assignments. And woe to the teacher who has any significant number of students fail their course--that's the teacher's fault nowadays. The solution of course is to offer even more extra credit. However, this is never as effective in helping the lowest-performing students because they rarely bother with extra credit assignments. Why would they when they know they will be permitted to play ball and then be socially promoted at the end of the school year?
I could say far more and I haven't even talked about behavior standards. But the public needs to understand that the lowering of standards described above is occurring at every level. Our educational institutions are committing malpractice and parents and teachers need to fight back.
Thank you for discussing this extremely disturbing trend.
Matt McGuire
Eli, this is an excellent analysis of the gaping hole in Condoleeza Rice's analysis. Clearly, DEI is a toxic ideology that does the most damage to students from what they call marginalized communities. Ironic that a doctrine that supposedly stands for victims against oppressors is itself leaving a trail of victims as collateral damage.