To complete yearly merit reporting, I used to have to write two mini-essays on how I promoted DEI goals in the past year. Now I have to write three. A new one was added this year. This is just my own merit reporting. Three DEI essays for only me.
This, of course, is one of many activities that require oaths of loyalty to DEI. I have to write a DEI statement when requesting permission to hire. We are no longer allowed to ask candidates to provide DEI statements. But nobody took away my obligation to write one for every single position. I have to write a DEI statement whenever I propose to convert a temporary instructorship into a permanent one, open a new course, add a general education designation to a course, support a colleague’s promotion. I could go on and on.
I was recently reproached by a reader for not caring about some anti-DEI measure in Florida. I want to give that person the benefit of the doubt. They probably don’t know what we have to deal with pretty much daily. This can’t be eradicated peace-meal. There’s too much of it. You ban the requirement for candidates to provide DEI oaths, and it all comes back from the side of the hirer where you can’t have a search committee without a DEI apparatchik on it. None of this is covered in the press because it’s assumed as a default. Any challenge to this default is screamed down as an outrage.
Clarissa's Blog 
The Narrative is a jealous goddess and demands her sacrifices.
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“Three DEI essays for only me”
One time I’ll say it…. thank god for AI.
DEI is an interesting example of ideology crashing into the brick wall of reality and insisting that reality is all wrong.
You’d think it can’t last long but then alchemy was taken seriously for a couple thousand years with nothing but a track record of failure.
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Yes, I’ll use AI. And still, I have a physical reaction of recoil towards this. Because it’s a lie. It’s all fake.
One good thing is that my second term as chair ends very soon. After that, I’ll only be responsible for myself and I’ll never again write another word of this DEI crap.
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Soooo might I once more offer the burn it all down and rebuild option for the field of Education.
Because frankly the more you speak about the rot in the university, the more convinced I am that the whole field from elementary to university needs to be put to the torch and redesigned from ground up.
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Yes, great, but by whom? Who will be designing, teaching, researching, running all of the journals, reviewing books, and so on and on? There are many, many people doing this work and they are all very far left. Where do you find new ones who aren’t?
There is no happy pill or momentary solution. This will take decades to unravel and rebuild. Just like it took decades to get to this point.
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I had my response 3/4ths finished this morning just as a client called and then here I am about 8 hours later to rewrite it.
So first off, your right there is no happy pill or momentary solution. Your also right in that this has taken decades to get this bad and will take decades to get repaired.
Further more you are once more correct in that many, many people in the field are die-hard leftist.
Yet the point remains, this needs to be fixed, and the best way is to burn it down and rebuild.
So how do we do this. My two cent very, very rough draft idea is as follows.
First education needs to be separated from the Federal Government. While I would prefer it be left to the counties, state level control is an acceptable solution for the moment. But it cannot be left to federal control. It was never meant to be and should be removed as step one.
Fixing high-school and lower-school is relatively simple. There is historical precedence we can use. The issue is the pipeline of new teachers. The colleges are producing leftists and pushing them out. They get hired and then spread their rot. So if any real changes are to be made, the colleges will need to be worked on 2nd. 1st is removing the Fed.
I’ll be honest, here I am not sure what to do. I know the outcome I would like, and generally that is enough to work my way back to figuring out how to get there, but in this case the rot is so deep that there are so very few uninfected that outside of a mass purge including the removal of their licenses to teach or work in the field of education, I am stuck at this stage.
I suppose step 3 would be defund the colleges. No more student aid, no more grants, no more just about everything. By doing this it will hopefully force the colleges into getting rid of a lot of the less functional parts in order to survive.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I am quite sure a lot of colleges would either collapse outright or cut out the muscle and bone rather than the fat. But I would consider this gang green treatment. Sometimes you have to remove fingers, or limbs to save the rest of the body.
With the funding cut off, and the college leadership under pressure, the next stage would be state auditors. Their job would be to audit any classes that have to do with licensing teachers. They would search the books, lessons, etc. for examples of DIE, feminism, or communism and if they were found in the lessons, that staff member would be disbarred by the state.
Once the pipeline gets a bit clearer you can mass clear the lower levels. Historically before the 1960s, many teachers weren’t actual teachers. They were elderly women who were hired to give them an income. They were given books to teach the classes out of.
Was it ideal. No. But did it work. Yes. Poorly, very poorly, but it did work.
A purge can take place in high-schools, and lower-schools. Teachers found to push leftism can be removed and their licenses stripped. From there older retired teachers can be called back temporally, and volunteer temp teachers can be called up using the old books until more teachers arrive to take their place.
The administrative staff of the schools will need to be a priority. For two reasons. First the bloat desperately needs to be reduced. Second is the property tax fraud.
So apparently across the country the schools are given money from bonds. These bonds are paid off by our property taxes. That would be the school line at the bottom of your property tax stmt. That is what is supposed to happen. Apparently there has been wide-scale fraud taking place. The schools are taking the loans, not paying them back, and then the next year the property taxes have to pay for the 1st loan, interest on it, and now a 2nd loan for the new year. Each year the required taxes going up as more and more loans are not being paid. They were caught outright in Texas, and apparently its been happening in many states over the last decade plus.
But yea that is just a very rough sketch of how this could potentially work. A lot of it would require the state government to do their jobs, but that’s why its called a rough draft.
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There is an easy fix to the teacher-college problem: end the college credentialing requirement.
Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when our graduating 8th graders were performing at levels undreamed-of by our current 12th graders, credentialling for teachers was anything from passing the teacher test and getting a license (couple of hours at most to take an exam and be interviewed by a school board– there’s a wonderful account of this in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books), or a few-weeks-long training program ending in a credential (Gene Stratton Porter describes this process in one or more of her books).
My mother says she learned 99% of the actually useful teaching stuff not in grad school, but in her student teaching year.
I see no reason we couldn’t strip the teacher credentialling process down to: pass a literacy/numeracy/subject exam, pass a rigorous background check, and do a year of student teaching. Essentially: prove you know the stuff you’re going to teach, and then do a short apprenticeship for classroom management.
This would make teaching easier to get into, and, more importantly, easier to get OUT of, for people who tried it and were not suited to it (loading people up with student debt before they ever step into a classroom traps them there).
And, you know, kill the NEA. No govt. employees should have unions.
-ethyl
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That sounds extremely useful. It also might have the additional effect of being a sounding board as to which school boards were actually doing their jobs, and which were filled with people who simply wanted the position for prestige.
Thus letting the community know which boards needed to be replaced or not, and thus fixing another layer of the rot.
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The funniest thing is that I couldn’t teach Spanish in a school because I don’t have a teacher license. In spite of being insanely qualified and having spent a lifetime teaching. We have a huge shortage of foreign language teachers in IL and MO but you can’t access these jobs without going through the stupid teacher education program.
So yes. Or rather YES. This insanity is helping absolutely no one whatsoever.
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