American High Schools Go Woke

Woke education is exploding in schools across the country. Charles Fain Lehman writes:

Nearly every top private school has promised to bring on outside help to address rampant racism. Harvard-Westlake is doing business with at least four: Blink Consulting, Jones Inclusive, the Grading for Equity Project, and the Glasgow Group. Loomis-Chaffee plans to hire a "third party facilitator" to assess the "inclusivity climate." New York-based Grace Church School is bringing in an "outside consultant" for an "independent review into the ways that racism persists at Grace," while Virginia's Episcopal High School will hire "independent outside experts" to "identify biases inherent in school structures."

Such consultancies review curricula and conduct workshops on the latest in progressive pedagogy. Grading for Equity's Joe Feldman, for example, has argued that practices such as averaging grades over a semester or grading homework unacceptably perpetuate inequality.

That sort of insight does not come cheap. In Fairfax's neighboring Loudon County, also among the richest counties in the country, taxpayers have shelled out over $400,000 to fund diversity trainings since 2018. Three-hundred-fourteen-thousand dollars of that went to the California-based consultancy the Equity Collaborative, including $90,000 in salary for an "equity leadership coach" and funding to conduct a series of focus groups.

[Charles Fain Lehman, "American High Schools Go Woke,” The Washington Free Beacon, November 30]