Inside The Movement Dumbing Down American Schools

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Learn more about what our people do at chevron.com/america The decline in education is one of the worst kept secrets of our time. It caused American students to fall so far behind past generations and what will it take to turn the ship around. In this episode, we sit down with Lance Azumi, the author of a brand new book on how DEI is destroying American education. Lance breaks down the answers to some of the toughest questions facing the education industry today. I'm executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howell. This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Time is given to us by God not government but its ability to endure rests with the people. We're seeing our God-given rights tested, threatened, and violated right now and we must stop it before it's too late. Our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom are fighting some of the most critical legal battles of our generation, upholding biological truth, defending free speech, preserving religious liberty. But they depend on friends like you to keep up this work. Your gift today powers the very legal battles that are defining freedom's future. Visit joinadf.com/wire or text wire to 83848 to give today. That's joinadf.com/wire or text wire to 83848. Joining us now is Lance Azumi, Senior Director at the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. Thanks for coming on. Thanks very much, John. I appreciate you having me on the show. You've written a new book that really caught our attention and we wanted to talk to you about its findings. This is a particularly interesting topic that we've been following for years now. What is the subject of your book and what are sort of your top line findings? Well, the book is called The Great Equity Epidemic and it's about how DEI is destroying American education. And I think one of the most important things for people to understand is that equity is not equality. People think that they're the same thing. But equality is really about equality of opportunity and everybody gets the same chance to excel based upon their own merits, their hard work, their efforts, their talents. Equity, however, is very different whereas equality allows people to have different results based upon their efforts and their talents. Equity forces an artificial sameness of results. You have equal outcomes for people regardless of their merit, regardless of their hard work or their effort. And so what that does is it allows the social justice left to be able to dumb down education. It allows them to indoctrinate kids and it allows them to politicize the classroom by indoctrinating also staff and teachers as well. Yeah, the dumbing down of the education system, this is something I'm an educator, Georgia also comes from an education background, something we're particularly passionate about. From your research, is this an overblown concern that people have or is this a legitimate concern that we are actually seeing standards lowered? No, I think it's absolutely what's happening in the classroom. And this is one of the things that we want to show is that this is not just some ivory tower punditry. We actually go in and we interview students and teachers, counselors, college professors, school board members to find out what's really going on in the schools. And for example, chapter one in my book, I interview a student named Josh and he tells me how all the classes in his high school, which is considered a good high school in his area, have been dumbed down. And so therefore he was telling me that in a science class, for example, the teacher actually told the students not to take any notes because note taking is boring in his math class. The grades were inflated through something called equity grading where you basically eliminate the low grades and you reduce the bar for attaining the high grades. So everybody seems like they're achieving well in that class. When actually all you're doing is you're giving them A's and B's for knowledge that they don't really possess. Also too, he said that he had honors writing class where in the entire semester, he only had to do 11 pages of writing for an honors writing class. So it's, I mean, and this again, it's supposedly a good school, you know, suburban neighborhood. And you know, this is what's happening across the country. Should I be outraged or jealous that I did not have to, I had to write so much more. I'm so upset about this. So he's, you've seen, part of your, this is interesting to me, your methodology. Of course, you've talked to individual employees, students, and I'm sure you've crunched the numbers big, you know, nationwide, state wide, but also maybe internationally. I mean, are you seeing that our competitiveness is really hampered by this? Well, we certainly is. I mean, when you look, for example, at the recent pizza exam, that's a very respective international examination that's given in math and reading. And you find that, you know, the United States, I mean, not only have our scores, for example, in math and science, cratered over the last number of years. But when you, because it's an international test, given to countries around the world, that you can look at, for example, how is the United States doing in comparison to China, for example? And what we found, unfortunately, is that in mathematics, if you look at scores for 15 year olds, we are actually five years behind China when it comes to math performance. There are three years behind them when it comes to science performance. So it's this dumbing down of education in America because of DEI, especially this equity epidemic is really having a huge impact, not only on student knowledge, but also on our ability to compete against our adversaries in this 20th, 21st century economy. What about private schools? Does the pizza look at a broad range of students, or are they only looking at public school students? No, we also look at private school as well. And one of the things that we wanted to do is to show that, you know, whereas you're having a lot of this DEI indoctrination going on in the public schools, there are alternatives, for example, we profile a private school in Washington, D.C., where the headmistress of that school told me that she would receive, for example, she had an African American young man who was enrolled in her school, and who was very much affected by the DEI indoctrination that he had received in a previous public school. Now that young man had white parents, it turns out, because he was adopted. And he actually, because of that instruction, harbored very ill feelings against his parents simply because they were white. And it was only when he was enrolled in this private Christian school in Washington, D.C., that the head of this school, who happens to be Chinese, you know, said that, look, you know, America isn't perfect, but, you know, God creates us in the same image, and that, you know, you should not be looking at your parents, you know, based upon this, you know, artificial dichotomy of black versus white. I understand our public school scores have been going down for decades, but historically, at least our more elite private schools were competitive with some of the higher performing nations worldwide. Although, I mean, just in the past five years, five to ten years, they have also imbibed a lot of the equity agenda. And I'm curious, if some of our more prestige prep schools are seeing dips in their performance, or are they still holding on to those top slots? Well, I think that, you know, what you are seeing, and you can kind of infer this by where those elite schools are feeding into, so, for example, at Harvard, where you have a lot of the elite feeder schools in K-12 feeding into Harvard, and you're seeing, for example, at Harvard now, that for the first time ever, they have remedial math instruction classes, right? That's never been the case at Harvard. You have other Ivy League schools where professors are complaining that their students have literally never read an entire book during their high school years. And so these are kids who are coming. from very good programs in k twelve supposedly very good programs feeding into these elite colleges and yet are now unable to do basic math at a place like Harvard and so that's that is voting very ill for the america and for our future have you seen uh you know with comparisons among the states have you seen drastic differences or is this a across the board issue it's it's important for people to understand that this is not something that you can just point and say well this is something that's happening in california or this is something that's happening in new york some of these very blue states that's why in our book uh we actually interview people from red states to ensure that you know we get the geographical representation but also to find out what's happening in those red states so for example we interview a uh indiana ma who comes from a very red part of a very red state and she told us however that her son was actually thrown out of his history class because he disagreed in a very respectful way with uh his teacher's DEI lecturing and so when he disagreed the teacher got fed up and literally threw him out of the class sent him to the principal's office uh and but unbeknownst to the teacher this teacher who had been uh doing a lot of lecturing based on DEI uh the the mom had actually gotten permission from the superintendent to actually record what was going on in class yeah and so based upon that of those recordings the superintendent actually ordered the teacher to make a public apology to this do it and to all the parents in that class wow I wonder if that teacher ended up hanging around at that school or leaving at some point uh do you feel so you mentioned at the top look there's a there's the curriculum aspect of this and the in the standards aspect of this the dumbing down of our of our education system but there's also the indoctrination side which you were just talking about is there a reason that these have to go hand in hand you know or is that something that's just these are parallel trends uh the parallel trends and I think that what what happens you know again this is not just uh you know what's happening to students as as I mentioned a little earlier it's what's happening to staff as well I mean we interview uh staff members at schools who say that when they're giving staff training that they're all often given uh very heavily politicized training that you know it's very essentially racial Marxism where you have oppressor oppressed classes you know whites are identified as the oppressors always that uh all my other minority groups are the oppressed and you even have in these uh uh developed uh professional development classes you actually have segregation in there where all the whites uh school staff members are put together and all the minority uh school staff members are put together they're given actually different readings but all of them are connected by the fact that whites are always viewed as being the oppressors and that it's up to whites to a tone for all of this and they carry the sins of whatever happened in the past now the Trump administration obviously has made this a major focus eliminating DEI from the federal government are you seeing progress on the state level and the education system at all in the last couple of years yeah I think that we we are seeing that I mean certainly uh you see that in uh some states which have actually literally banned DEI in their states one of the things though that I like to underscore however is that simply banning DEI is not the panacea for eliminating DEI in uh schools because oftentimes first of all they uh they can rebrand DEI to sound in something much more innocuous but also to uh equity which is why we focus on equity in this book equity is something that you can push that um again sounds more innocuous but it actually is uh very detrimental to the education progress and it doesn't necessarily have to literally bring up race you know and so therefore it's able to go under that DEI radar and so I think that that's something that parents and uh local officials need to look at uh when uh they are looking at their policies in their schools and one of the great things is that we uh found that uh even in blue states there have been school board members who have been elected who have recognized that these equity policies that have been embedded in their school districts and once they have been able to get a majority on their boards they've literally been able to eliminate those policies uh from the district even in blue states so is that the solution ultimately a district by district focus and uh community involvement that's I think that's a that's a huge uh uh part of the uh solution is that people have to recognize what's going on and again not not uh the come become complacent because you happen to live in a state which might have eliminated DEI uh because there are still things going on at the local level that um you know uh may pass under the radar screen so people need to be vigilant and also to we need to need to have school board members who have the courage to be able to confront these policies recognize them for what they are and rally the the public uh in favor of uh uh eliminating these policies one of the things that uh pacific research institute did several years ago was to conduct a national poll and we found that uh far and away people want uh school boards to focus on improving student performance versus social justice and equity issues and this was yeah and this was across the board including uh demographic such as African-Americans, Hispanics and other minorities I think that one of the things that we uh also have to understand is that when we see a lot of this um DEI and social uh justice activism going on at colleges that that doesn't just happen because uh colleges are uh uh you know have bought into it this is they're at the end of a pipeline of people going from k-12 where the kids have been indoctrinated and they're on the receiving end of kids who have already become activists because of what they happened to them in their k-12 education and so um um you know it's you can't just try and solve the DEI uh problem by looking at higher education well absolutely crucial affects everyone and uh i'm glad that there's more attention being paid to this issue and i'm glad you guys have done so much a quality research on this to help inform us thank you so much for joining us thanks a lot john thanks Georgia that was Lance Azumi author of the great equity epidemic and this has been a weekend episode of Morning Wire this holiday all plans even unlimited are just $15 a month a holiday deal this good obviously deserves an enormously expensive holiday song like all i want right okay we can't afford that you know forget the music budget we're gonna stick with whatever's in the public domain give it a try at mid mobile dot com slash switch up from payment of forty five dollars for three months ninety dollars for six months or one hundred and eighty dollars for twelve month plan required fifteen dollars per month equivalent to taxes and fees extra new customer offer for initial plan term only greater than fifty gigabytes me slow when network is busy see terms