Diversity and Social Justice Are Big Business in Education, and You’re Paying for it
“According to its most recent tax filings, the group [Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium] hauled in $2 million solely from government grants between mid-2018 and mid-2019.”
The progressive concept of “diversity, equity, and inclusion'” is newspeak for enforcing progressive political values and not including anyone who disagrees.
This is becoming an industry within education and is increasingly funded with tax dollars.
This effort has grown out of college campuses over the last decade and has now been embraced by many public schools. You may not know how lucrative this field has become and that it is fed largely by tax dollars. Your tax dollars.
Chrissy Clark and Joe Schoffstall write at the Washington Free Beacon:
Prominent Diversity Consulting Firm Funded Entirely by Taxpayer Dollars
A prominent equity consulting firm that conducts “anti-racist” trainings is funded entirely by taxpayer dollars, tax filings reveal.
The Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium (MAEC) is a self-proclaimed “social justice” nonprofit that conducts “anti-racist audits” for corporations and schools, often in partnership with far-left groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The consortium was recently awarded a lucrative contract by Maryland’s largest school district and works with educators across 15 states.
MAEC’s influence comes at the taxpayer’s expense. According to its most recent tax filings, the group hauled in $2 million solely from government grants between mid-2018 and mid-2019. It has not reported a single private donation in four years. MAEC’s reach is made possible thanks to a partnership with the Department of Education.
As mentioned above, in November, a school board in Maryland voted to pay the “Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium” a fee of almost half a million dollars to perform an “anti-racist audit” of their system.
Caitlynn Peetz reported at Bethesda Magazine:
MCPS might spend $450K on ‘anti-racist system audit’
The Montgomery County school board on Tuesday is expected to authorize Superintendent Jack Smith to spend up to $450,000 on an “anti-racist system audit,” intended to find areas in which the school district could improve inclusion and diversity.
Consultants with Bethesda-based Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium will be tasked with the one-year project if the school board approves a contract on Tuesday. The cost of the contract is “not to exceed $454,680 for Fiscal Year 2021,” the current fiscal year, according to school board documents posted online Monday afternoon.
“The anti-racist audit will provide an opportunity to both examine our systems, practices, and policies that do not create access, opportunities, and equitable outcomes for every student’s academic and social emotional well-being,” documents say. “The audit will provide the opportunity to examine not only the student experience; it presents the occasion to analyze our policies and practices that impact staff, as well.”
The Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium website describes its mission in one sentence:
MAEC’s mission is to promote excellence and equity in education to achieve social justice.
This is their theory of action:
MAEC believes that if we co-create an environment that enables clients to develop a common aim and work collaboratively to design and implement an action plan based on specific needs, and we provide technical assistance and training on effective strategies, then clients are able to develop and use equitable policies and practices to create optimal conditions for teaching and learning. Results may include: increased student access to high quality teachers and curriculum, student engagement, equitable disciplinary policies and practices, and academic achievement of low-income, racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students. We turn equity from a value into an integrated and sustainable practice.
One book recommendation by a staffer on the site says:
Right now, I am listening on Audible to How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. I love how he weaves his personal accounts into the book, drawing from his background to get his points across. Another book I’m working on was recommended by a friend: Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Kids are not in school in many parts of the country. Reading and math skills are suffering, but a left-wing grift machine is taking taxpayer funds to promote progressive politics in public schools.
Disagree with the politics, and you might be called a racist or worse.
This is not about education. It’s political indoctrination, and taxpayers are being forced to subsidize it.
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Comments
Liberals never pay for their own failed programs.
These programs are anything but a failure. The outfits running them are making money hand over fist. Generations of children are being told whites need to be made second-class citizens, or worse.
Noi, they are not failing at all.
Exactly. Whether you consider it a failure depends on what you think is the goal.
Give me a break $2M?? That is pocket change. The false climate change, green new deal fake funded stuff is like in the Billions! This is a local store robbery here.
Stuff like this eats up education budgets. The cost per student keeps increasing, but it doesn’t show up in the classroom. Budget cuts do show up in the classroom. We need our legislators to be a little more hands on with education spending. I would bet that less than half of appropriated education spending shows up in the classroom.
Speaking from experience, these race based organizations are nothing but a scam to milk taxpayers monies using racial equality as a tag line. About a decade ago a group approached the company I worked for seeking to help minority owned business to start or expand in the manufacturing industry.
The idea was to bring a project or idea to your business to help them develop a similar competing product. However, the projects never made it past the quoting stage and after about a year of us wasting our time quoting projects that never went anywhere, we told them to take a hike.
The scam was that the project was never supposed to go anywhere because the money paying the minority owned ‘business’ was taxpayer money and all you had to do to qualify for it was go out and search for a manufacturer. All the participants were doing is going to the store, buying a product off the shelf and then giving it to a manufacturer to quote and that’s all that was needed to get the grant money.
Cut off all federal, state, and local funding for Higher Education. I’m tired of paying for this cesspool. Tax them like they were a for-profit business. You’ll see the nonsense end immediately.
Yes, diversity not limited to racism. That said, social justice anywhere is injustice everywhere. Progress: one step forward, two steps backward.
Evil draws men together. – Aristotle
“MAEC’s mission is to promote excellence and equity in education to achieve social justice.”
I’ve said it for years: “Any time ‘justice’ is modified by an adjective it always means ‘hate whitey and get revenge.’ Always.”
These so-called activist / consultants are the worst of the worst of vile racists who vomit their vile racialism within their lie of ‘anti-racism.’
Starve the beast. DEFUND the SCHOOLS. Unless or until these incestuous government cabals of unionist employment schemes are defunded and forced to compete in the market for consumer dollars nothing will change.
But any suggestion of such action by politicos gets them demonized as ‘anti-education,’ deplatformed, and unelectable; ever the scam.
I want to know why the democrats have stopped burning and looting since the election
You are not alone in noticing that.
The Democrat Dem-panic play seems to have closed permanently, but little did the Dems know it is also the permanent closing of them also.
The Rona is heavily impacting current and future revenue streams for education.
K -12 parents are beginning to see what their local school districts are all about. Some pulling their kids. More will follow with a consequent higher call for education dollars to move with the child.
Same for University. Parents and Students are less and less likely to be willing to pay full freight for distance learning. How many Parents will remain willing to pay out to University who will run their Son through a kangaroo court for some random allegations about diversity/micro aggression?
IMO these programs are reaching their crest. With a willing accomplice in a Biden Admin the BS will teach it’s zenith. The progs are going to go way too far way too fast and a backlash is coming.
The liberal college sinecure that allowed nutcases to verbalize social and economic extremism without consequence accepting group praise, is collapsing.
https://i0.wp.com/www.powerlineblog.com/ed-assets/2020/12/Higher-ed-workforce.png?resize=600%2C358&ssl=1
Unfortunately that drop includes all the conservative and last of the independent, free thinkers in education.
The colleges are using the DEM-Panic as cover to ax anyone who is conservative and/or religious.
If we’ve learned nothing else, this money winds up back in the pocket of the democrat rats who create the funding.
Just look at Biden.