Inside the Woke Indoctrination Machine

An excerpt from my Op-Ed in this weekend's Wall Street Journal

I wanted to write a very quick post to share news of my op-ed in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, which has garnered a lot of attention, not to mention over 2000 reader comments. The piece, co-authored with my friend Paul Rossi, is a summary of what we learned watching nearly 100 hours of leaked video from the National Association of Independent School’s recent People of Color Conference (PoCC). This is a project that Paul and I have been working on since late last year.

The conference, which took place in late November and early December 2021, is perhaps the leading K-12 education conference for teaching the practices of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) work, or what many call CRT. These videos exposed the playbook of DEI work, and the true motivations of its practitioners, things that I did not fully appreciate until now. What we learned was at times enlightening, often infuriating, and invariably terrifying.

What we tried to do in the op-ed (a challenge in 1000 words!) is to lay out the DEI framework, and to illustrate its danger to our schools, and to society at large. This framework is encapsulated by the five words that schools use to describe not just their work but their new missions: diversity, inclusion, belonging, equity and justice. Each of these words has a very different meaning from what schools want us to believe.

The new mission of schools is to use this framework, and other concepts that we discuss, such as microaggressions, restorative justice, calling out, intergenerational violence, healing circles and PWIs (predominantly white institutions) to transform children into activists for social justice. The true objective of these newly minted “social justice warriors” is nothing less than to tear down Western society and replace it with a collectivist one. Or as schools are teaching, to “decolonize and re-indigenize.”

I can only share the first three paragraphs for now (the full article is behind the WSJ’s paywall) but please read it if you can. After 30 days, I am allowed to share the full article and I will happily do so. I will be continuing to write about these videos in other venues since there is so much material that needs to be exposed. In fact, not only do we have video from this year’s conference but we have material from previous conferences as well, which I haven’t even yet watched.

Here’s the excerpt from our op-ed:

Last spring we exposed how two elite independent schools in New York had become corrupted by a divisive obsession with race, helping start the national movement against critical race theory. Schools apply this theory under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion programming. Until now, however, neither of us fully grasped the dangers of this ideology or the true motives of its practitioners. The goal of DEI isn’t only to teach students about slavery or encourage courageous conversations about race, it is to transform schools totally and reshape society radically.

Over the past month we have watched nearly 100 hours of leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies. The conference is NAIS’s flagship annual event for disseminating DEI practices, and more than 6,000 DEI practitioners, educators and administrators attended this year. Intended as professional development and not meant for the public, these workshops are honest, transparent and unfiltered—very different from how private schools typically communicate DEI initiatives. These leaked videos act as a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the DEI playbook.

The path to remake schools begins with the word “diversity,” which means much more than simply increasing the number of students and faculty of color—referred to in these workshops as “Bipoc,” which stands for “black, indigenous and people of color.” DEI experts urge schools to classify people by identities such as race, convince them that they are being harmed by their environment, and turn them into fervent advocates for institutional change.

The full article is behind a paywall here.

The latest episode of my podcast: Take Back Our Schools

Since I’m writing, I’ll bring your attention to the latest episode of my podcast, Take Back our Schools. In this episode, entitled Twitter Censorship and Broken Education, my cohost, Bethany Mandel, and I talk to Daniel Buck, middle school English teacher and co-founder of the website, The Chalkboard Review. We discuss Twitter’s recent censorship and deplatforming of The Chalkboard Review account as well as Daniel’s views on how to fix our education system.

Please have a listen and let me know what you think. The podcast is also available on all major podcast outlets, including Apple, Google and Spotify. 

In our next episode, likely going live later this week, our guest will be none other than Paul Rossi to talk about our Wall Street Journal op-ed. It should be a great conversation and I hope you’ll tune in.

As always, please share any ideas or suggestions. You can contact me through the website: speakupforeducation.org or email me at andrew@speakupforeducation.org. I am also on Twitter @AndrewGutmann.