The DEI scourge in K-12 education has only gotten worse since I blew the whistle on my own school

Five years ago, I blew the whistle on a school I loved.Did it make a difference? I taught high school English at an independent school in New Jersey for seven years.

I loved the school’s focus on resilience and growth.I loved my colleagues, who challenged and nurtured our students, including my own children, who attended the school.

And I felt lucky to be part of such a vibrant learning community.That all changed in 2014. A young dean, fresh from an education conference hosted by the National Association of Independent Schools, led the faculty in what we now recognize as a “privilege walk,” in which participants were forced to take a step forward or back based on their identities.

Where they end up in relation to their colleagues signals how much privilege or oppression they supposedly experience.Soon, the school hired a DEI officer, who admitted privately that her job was to “transform” the school.The oppressor–victim ideology soon appeared everywhere: weekly student programming, faculty training, and course offerings.

In my department, “dead white males” were explicitly “disinvited” from the core curriculum.Colleagues debated whether emphasizing “logical” thinking was too Western compared to other ways of thinking. By my final year, the institutional transformation was complete.

Faculty was informed that the central assumption of the ideology — the pervasiveness of systemic oppression — could no longer be debated.Colleagues began speaking openly about “deprogramming” and “de-radicalizing” students who disagreed with their orthodoxy.The cost of the ideological takeover was unmistakable.

My teenage students censored themselves.In class, they stopped engaging authentically with the material and one another, afraid of harming their classmates or being labeled a bigot. I had repeatedly raised concerns with the school.

Many colleagues agreed with me, but only behind closed doors.The administration completely ignored me. So...