Inside The Movement Dumbing Down American Schools

American students are falling further behind their peers around the world, and one education researcher says DEI policies are making the problem worse. Lance Izumi, senior director at the Pacific Research Institute and author of "The Great Equity Epidemic," joins John Bickley and Georgia Howe to discuss how equity-based grading, lowered academic standards, and ideological training are reshaping classrooms across the country. Izumi shares accounts from students, teachers, and parents, including allegations of inflated grades, reduced coursework, and racial divisions in staff training. He also explains why eliminating DEI at the state level may not be enough, and why parents and local school boards will play a critical role in restoring academic standards. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.- - -Ep. 3185- - -Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3- - -Today's Sponsors:Alliance Defending Freedom -Visit https://JoinADF.com/WIRE or text WIRE to 83848 to make an impact for freedom today. - - -Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacymorning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

November 8, 202617:19

In brief

Episode summary

Lance Azumi, author of The Great Equity Epidemic, discusses how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives are lowering academic standards and politicizing classrooms across the United States. The conversation covers the distinction between equality of opportunity and equity of outcomes, the decline of student performance on international exams compared to adversaries, and potential local solutions through community vigilance and school board involvement.

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Freedom 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. Whites are always viewed as being the oppressors and that it's up to whites to atone for all of this, and they carry the sins of whatever happened in the past. The decline in education is one of the worst kept secrets of our time. What 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 Howe. This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Freedom 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. So 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 just 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. I think the 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. Everybody gets the same chance to excel based upon their own merits, their hard work, their efforts, their talents.

Uh 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 um 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 wanted 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 interviewed 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 is in supposedly a good school in a 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. Um so 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, statewide, but also maybe internationally. I mean, are are we seeing that our our competitiveness is really um hampered by this? Oh, it certainly is. I mean, when you look, for example, at the recent PISA exam, that's a very respected 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've 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. We're 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 PISA look at a broad range of students, or are they only looking at public school students?

No, we we also look at private school as well. And one of the things that we wanted to do is to show that, you know, what whereas you're having a lot of this DEI indoctrination going on in the public schools, there are alternatives. For example, we we profile a private school in Washington DC where the headmistress of that school told me that she would receive, for example, a she had a 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 DC that the head of the 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 10 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 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've had 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 a entire book during their high school years. And so and and so these are kids who are coming from very good programs in K-12, 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 boding very ill for America and for our future. Have you seen, 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, 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 Indiana mom 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 his teacher's DEI lecturing. And so when he disagreed, the teacher got fed up and literally threw him out of class, sent him to the principal's office. And but unbeknownst to the teacher, this teacher who had been doing a lot of lecturing based on DEI, the mom had actually gotten permission from the superintendent to actually record what was going on in class.

Yeah. And so based upon that those recordings, the superintendent actually ordered the teacher to make a public apology to the student 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. Do you feel so you mentioned at the top, look, there's a there's the curriculum aspect of this and the and 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 they're parallel trends, and I think that what what happens, you know, again, this is not just you know, what's happening to students, it's as I mentioned earlier, it's what's happening to staff as well. I mean, we interview staff members at schools who say that when they're giving staff training, that they're also often given 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 all my other minority groups are the oppressed, and you even have in these develop professional development classes, you actually have segregation in there where all the white school staff members are put together and all the minority 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 atone 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 in the education system at all in the last couple of years? Yeah, I think that we are seeing that.

I mean, certainly you see that in some states, which have actually literally banned DEI in their states. One of the things, though, that I I I'd like to underscore, however, is that simply banning DEI is not the panacea for eliminating DEI in schools, because oftentimes first of all, they they can rebrand DEI to sound something much more innocuous. But also, too, equity, which is why we focus on equity in this book, equity is something that you can push that again, sounds more innocuous, but actually is very detrimental to the education progress, and it doesn' necessarily have to literally bring up race, you know, and so therefore, it's able to go under that DEI rating.

are. And so I think that that's something that parents and local officials need to look at when they are looking at their policies in their schools. And one of the great things is that we found that even in blue states, there have been school board members who have been elected who have recognized that these equity policies that have been been embedded in their school districts, and once they have been able to get a majority on their boards, they've been literally been able to eliminate those policies from the district even in blue states.

So is that's the solution ultimately, a district-by-district focus and community involvement? That's I think that's a that's a huge part of the solution is that people have to recognize what's going on. And again, not not be become complacent because you happen to live in a state which might have eliminated DEI because there are still things going on at the local level that you know, may pass under the radar screen. So people need to be vigilant. And also, too, we need 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 public in favor of eliminating these policies.

One of the things that Pacific Research Institute did several years ago was to conduct a national poll, and we found that far away, people want school boards to focus on improving student performance versus social justice and equity issues. And this was this was across-the-board, including demographics such as African-Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities. I think that one of the things that we also have to understand is that when we see a lot of the this DEI and social justice activism going on at colleges, that doesn't just happen because colleges are you know, have bought into it.

This is they're at the end of a pipeline of of people going from K-12 where the 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, you know, it's you can't just try and solve the DEI problem by looking at higher education. Well, absolutely crucial, affects everyone, and I'm glad that there's more attention being paid to this issue, and I'm glad you guys have done so much 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.

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