How Equality and Inclusion Ideology Sweeps Schools and Harms American Youth

I taught English at a private high school in New Jersey for seven years. I loved the school’s emphasis on resilience and growth. I loved my colleagues, who encouraged and cared for our students, including my own children who attended the school. And I felt fortunate to be part of such a vibrant learning community. All of this changed in 2014.

• Written by Dana Stangel-Plowe*

I taught English at a private high school in New Jersey for seven years. I loved the school’s emphasis on resilience and growth. I loved my colleagues, who encouraged and cared for our students, including my own children who attended the school. And I felt fortunate to be part of such a vibrant learning community. All of this changed in 2014.

A young dean, recently returned from an education conference hosted by the National Association of Independent Schools, led the staff through what we now recognize as a “privilege walk,” where participants were forced to step forward or backward based on their identities.

Soon, the school hired a DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) officer who privately admitted that her job was to “transform” the school. The oppressor-victim ideology quickly appeared everywhere: in weekly programs for students, in staff training, and in the offered learning modules.

In my department, the “dead white men” were explicitly excluded from the core curriculum.

Colleagues debated whether an emphasis on “logical” thinking was overly Western compared to other ways of thinking. By my final year, the institutional transformation was complete.

The teaching staff was informed that the ideology’s central axiom—the pervasive presence of systemic oppression—was no longer to be questioned.

The cost of the ideological takeover was undeniable. My teenage students self-censored. In class, they stopped engaging authentically with the material and with each other, fearing they might hurt their classmates or be labeled intolerant. I repeatedly expressed concerns to the school. Many colleagues agreed with me, but only behind closed doors. The administration completely ignored me.

So I decided to resign publicly, out of a sense of duty to my students and to the school itself. I was terrified. I lost many friends, both near and far.

Even long after my resignation, my children were excluded from alumni events. I had no idea what would follow.

So what did I achieve? I wish I could say K–12 education has improved, but in reality it has worsened.

After my public resignation, I connected with education reformers who shared my concerns. I started working in advocacy, where I met hundreds of parents and educators who saw the harm of this new orthodoxy in schools. I now understand that the problem was not isolated to my school but systemic. The organization I work for recently published a groundbreaking report explaining the institutional nature of the problem.

As we described in the report, the harmful ideology reproduces itself systemically through a chain that extends from teacher colleges and unions directly into K–12 classrooms, reinforced by state accreditation and licensing rules, school boards, and curriculum.

What we are witnessing is a fundamental restructuring of the teacher’s role. I have seen many well-meaning teachers, as well as some parents, adopt mild forms of the ideology when it is presented as “equity.”

This language seems to promote fairness and reduce bias but hides the underlying political drivers that suppress alternative views and, in its most extreme forms, call for the dismantling of America and its institutions.

In my left-leaning profession, I know most teachers are not radical activists. Yet their good intentions make them vulnerable to the path of least resistance opened by those who are. In a dominated system, the politicization of education becomes the air teachers breathe.

They often reproduce the ideology without recognizing what it is: politics. It may sound abstract to say ideology fuels hostility toward anyone labeled an oppressor, but it is very real.

At my school, the most radical and often younger teachers aggressively pushed this new approach. They pressured the school to simplify complex issues, such as racial or gender inequalities, into moral binaries and to treat disputed conclusions as definitive truths.

Then, Thursdays meant student gatherings. The administration brought in outside activist speakers and organized identity-focused sessions aimed at reprogramming group identity in our community. Week after week, I saw my students discouraged from assumptions that, deliberately, cast someone—themselves or a classmate beside them—as the villain.

Children are especially vulnerable to absorbing this dogma as truth, which is the goal for radical activists. These were real debate sessions. Visible incidents of anti-Semitism—swastikas on the field and in the bathroom—were dealt with perfunctorily; they were not a concern because, supposedly, Jews had so much power at the school. According to the identity hierarchy, Israel and Jews are oppressors, despite the history of persecution. This was not open to discussion.

It was tragic to watch teenagers gain confidence in their newly acquired moral certainty while failing to develop curiosity or humility.

A student openly condemned the Jewish slaves in the story of Exodus as oppressors because they caused the death of the Egyptians. It is hard to imagine anyone condemning slaves—or subjugated peoples—from any other period of history because they escaped their captors.

In my current work, I see even more extreme versions prevailing nationally.

Organized activists from the Democratic Socialists of America and other political groups openly infiltrate the classroom through political and union organizing, partnerships with school districts, and curricula that often focus on Israel while omitting key historical facts and competing perspectives in favor of their biased political narrative.

No school—private, public, rural, suburban, urban—is immune to this orthodoxy.

Education is supposed to be the foundation of our political life. It is supposed to equip children with the knowledge, skills, and intellectual habits that democratic life requires. Yet we are failing on a massive scale, and this failure has consequences far beyond the classroom. It is time to stop whispering and sound the alarm.

Source: New York Post

*Dana Stangel-Plowe, a lawyer and educator, is Director of Programs at the North American Values Institute (NAVI).