By Scott Davison
Parents learn early on that children use emotional pleas to get what they want. Wise parents learn to tune out the constant begging for ice cream or another 10 minutes before bedtime because we know what is best for our children.
Elected officials are even more adept at tuning out emotion, as they regularly hear heartfelt pleas and angry rants from citizens demanding funding or new laws.
Unless you’re on the board of trustees of the Carlsbad Unified School District, that is. On July 19, CUSD’s board approved a Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Plan after six months of debate, during which district staff never provided any evidence to support the DEI Plan.
What was provided was a parade of passionate parents, students and outside activists who shamed and insulted certain trustees for not supporting the plan. They were consistently outnumbered by rational voices asking for transparency and evidence, but those don’t make for good content on the evening news.
If you’re unfamiliar with DEI plans, they’ve been popular for over a decade with corporations looking to avoid lawsuits for discrimination by implementing “mandatory diversity trainings.”
Achieving diversity is irrelevant – they just need to show they intend to increase diversity to absolve themselves of liability. In the wake of the George Floyd riots, DEI programs spread through academia, and we now spend approximately $9.4 billion globally each year on DEI programs.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said, “One of the greatest mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” Indeed, everyone agrees with the intention of increasing diversity, equity and inclusion.
But the results are in, and Friedman was right. The University of Michigan recently admitted that it spent $85 million on its DEI Program and has almost nothing to show for it. The Harvard Business Review published a report indicating that DEI programs often decrease diversity. Corporations, universities and even states are now abandoning DEI as wasteful, divisive and ineffective.
Except for Carlsbad Unified, of course. Acknowledging this lack of evidence, Trustee Ray Pearson announced that he would be voting “no” on the DEI Plan, recounting a recent visit with the Poway Unified School District (which CUSD’s DEI Plan was hastily copied from) only to find that after three years, they had no measurable outcomes and no way to know if marginalized groups were doing better.
Then, a few minutes later, he voted “yes.”
Why? An emotional plea, of course. This time from Trustee Elisa Williamson, who insisted (without evidence and against the recommendation of the superintendent’s staff) that reassigning one particular administrator to supervise the DEI Plan would cause it to succeed in just one year.
One cannot help but feel for this administrator, who is being taken from a new role intended to address alarming increases in post-pandemic behavioral problems and tasked instead with a role he didn’t ask for or agree to. One also cannot help but feel bad for our teachers, who need help, thought it was arriving, and had the rug pulled out from under them at the last second.
Williamson then made another emotional plea – to the audience – that she is “deeply concerned that when we disparage others because of their political, social or religious views, this plan cannot succeed.”
She is no doubt referring to Superintendent Benjamin Churchill, who in May released an emotionally charged statement on the CUSD website “condemning” the religious beliefs of one of his employees, an assistant principal at Carlsbad High School, shared at the employee’s church.
The superintendent’s statement also misrepresented the assistant principal’s beliefs and created a wave of anti-religious bigotry throughout Carlsbad which offended and silenced many in our faith community who share those beliefs or, unlike the superintendent, believe in including those with diverse views.
Williamson is correct, however. The DEI Plan cannot succeed when the district leader is proudly intolerant of the diverse views of thousands of his staff, students and families. The board ignored countless public requests to add a “viewpoint diversity” goal to the DEI Plan, effectively endorsing the Superintendent’s behavior and emboldening others to be less inclusive.
In 2024 Carlsbad can elect two new trustees to replace Pearson and Williamson. I’ll make an initial suggestion – let’s find some parents who are wise enough to vote on evidence instead of emotion.
Scott Davison is the Director of the Carlsbad Education Alliance, a coalition of parents, teachers and students committed to transparency, accountability and academic excellence in Carlsbad schools. He can be reached at [email protected] or www.opencusd.org.
