On Wednesday, a new report was released showing that school districts with chief diversity officers (CDOs) and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) officers saw greater losses in learning capabilities during the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic than schools that do not have such positions.
According to Fox News, the report from The Heritage Foundation reveals that 48% of all school districts with 15,000 students or more had a CDO or DEI officer on campus. Despite such positions ostensibly being created in order to increase the performance of minority students, schools with these employees saw bigger losses in academic performance among black and Hispanic students than schools without them.
“It is now the case that 48% of all school districts with at least 15,000 students has a Chief Diversity Officer, up from 39% two years ago,” said Heritage’s Senior Research Fellow Jay Green in a statement. “Rather than stemming learning loss, we found that black and Hispanic students in districts with Chief Diversity Officers experienced greater declines in their math achievement during the pandemic than minority students in districts without a Chief Diversity Officer.”
Green further revealed that these losses came about despite schools receiving an additional $190 billion from the federal government during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Furthermore, the report determined that CDOs and other DEI positions were less involved with improving academic performance, and more focused on political activity and messaging. For example, schools with CDOs were more likely to implement policies that would forbid school employees from informing the parents of a child who had decided to “transition” their “gender identity,” after falsely believing themselves to be transgender.
“Rather than devoting their time to ensuring that minority students took equal advantage of all available learning tools and opportunities, it appears that CDOs were focused on pursuing very different agendas,” the report concludes. “The evidence connecting the presence of CDOs to policies to keep gender secrets from parents suggests that CDOs are more focused on promoting ideological goals than educational ones.”
Schools all across the country saw massive declines in student performance, particularly with regards to math and reading. Math scores saw the largest decreases on record, dropping by 5% from 2019 to 2022 among fourth-graders, while the scores for eighth-graders fell by 8%. Meanwhile, reading scores fell to a low not seen since 1992 among fourth- and eighth-grade students, with both groups falling by 3% since 2019.