Inside America’s Collapsing Public Schools: How A Relentless DEI Campaign Is Making Kids Dumber

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores show that American students recently earned their lowest marks in decades in reading and math. Despite the precipitous decline in academic performance, donor organizations are still pouring millions into pushing ethnic studies programs and woke teacher trainings. 

Nicole Nealy, the president of watchdog group Parents Defending Education, spoke to Daily Wire podcast Morning Wire this week about the left-wing effort to effectively indoctrinate students and neglect academics. 

Recent NAEP scores, according to Nealy, showed the lowest reading marks in the test’s history for eighth graders.

“These scores are really showing and highlighting that our children are not performing well,” she said. “They’re not thriving; they don’t have the skills to succeed in a global economy.”

Parents are sending their kids to school for seven or eight hours a day and rightly expect them to master the basics, like reading, writing, mathematics, and science, Nealy explained.

But that’s not what’s happening. 

“They’re spending hours and hours learning about grievances, talking about ‘big feelings,’ being told that they’re victims because of the color of their skin — that’s time that they can’t get back,” she said. “It’s absolutely astonishing that this is not considered like a flashing red light for everybody.”

“You look at the amount of money that has been poured into the U.S. education system since the founding of the Department of Education in 1980 — it’s approximately $3 trillion that has been siphoned out of state and local taxes. And the price per pupil that public schools are spending on students is through the roof, yet our achievement keeps falling off a cliff,” Nealy said. “Clearly, there is a failure of the system, and there’s a real need to reimagine what and how our education is delivered to our youngest.

The Push For ‘Ethnic Studies’ 

One main issue is the push for public schools to teach so-called ethnic studies, which can sound benign but is anything but that. 

“What it means is it actually wants to teach students how to be little social justice warriors,” Nealy explained. “It wants to encourage activism, and it views the world through that ‘oppressor-oppressed matrix.’ And so we’re seeing children who are learning things about white supremacy culture, settler colonialism — things that really set children up from a very, very young age to hate each other and put each other into groups based on collective identity, which is terrifying, because, as we know, children are impressionable and those lessons that started at a young age  … we now see those reverberating in college campuses.”

Districts are obtaining ethnic studies courses from liberal colleges and universities, Nealy said. 

“We’re seeing a lot of those courses actually come out of universities: University of California, Berkeley, unsurprisingly, is one of the big drivers of this,” she said. “So you can be an ethnic studies major in college, but then they’re also creating and selling and shopping this curriculum to school districts around the country. 

Nealy said these schools are “making money off of this,” and the curriculum is often outrageous. “The kinds of classes that are being sent out, I mean, you look at in CUNY, their courses are about ‘No justice, No peace,’” she said, adding that there was also a course related to “drag pedagogy.” 

Parents Defending Education found that lots of funding for these courses comes from “marquee foundations that have been around in America for 100 years, like the Mellon Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation,” Nealy said. 

These groups are giving “hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars to these universities to create and then disseminate this information,” she said. “And so the fact that there is this whole ecosystem behind the scenes that is pushing this as well is something that we found absolutely astonishing.”

DEI Metastasizing  

According to Nealy, California is where the push for ethnic studies really started, but it is quickly metastasizing eastward. 

“Minnesota, under Gov. Tim Walz, has adopted this and is trying to codify this, much like what we saw in California,” she explained. “The initial iterations that were put forward by the really radical extremist part of this — the liberated ethnic studies contingent, is pushing very hard in Minnesota.”

The first iteration of their ethnic studies curriculum, Nealy said, didn’t even mention the Holocaust when it talked about European history. “You sort of see these administrators’ thumbs on the scale about whose story should be told and whose story shouldn’t be told.”

“But we’re even seeing it in red states,” she continued. “In Texas, there’s ethnic studies with a focus on ‘Latinx’ and ‘Chicanx’ studies. We’re seeing it in Vermont. So it is definitely making its way eastward.”

These programs, Nealy stressed, are extremely divisive. “It’s not actually teaching people to get along well with each other, or telling the uplifting stories of some of the people who have faced adversity and moved through,” she said. “It’s very much a victim-villain mindset and mentality, which is something that when you teach to a child at a young age — I mean, as we’re seeing on college campuses, these students feel it’s their moral duty to get out and be activists on the front line.”

“I think what we’re seeing is these studies in practice turn our children into little human soldiers,” she continued. “And that’s something that I think most parents don’t want, because most of these kids — you look at the NAEP scores, our reading, our writing for children is abysmal in this country.”

“And so you have children who are marching to oppose settler colonialism and can’t spell the word colonial,” Nealy said. “And so what our schools are doing with the finite time they have with our children is something that is deeply appalling and should really concern every parent.”

“We tell families, this is very much a case of the ‘price of liberty is eternal vigilance,’” Nealy said. “When your school, when your state says that they’re going to introduce or expand social studies programming, this is the kind of thing that people should be looking out for.”

Teacher Trainings And Unions Out Of Whack 

Despite declining scores, which were already bad before COVID, teacher trainings are still not geared toward improving academic outcomes, Nealy said. 

“I think many of us assume that these professional development days are days that our teachers are learning how to be better educators. But my organization has FOIAed, and we’ve come across a lot of teacher training materials. We have teachers who send us these things,” she explained. “Often, the teachers are being taught things like the critical race theory, the gender theory. We got something from Eau Claire schools in Wisconsin a couple of years ago that talked about parental exclusion policies; that parents don’t have a right to know their child’s gender identity, that information must be earned.”

“When our teachers are being taught those things, they’re not actually taught what their responsibilities are under the law as an educator,” she continued. “They’re not taught how to be a better teacher. They’re being taught a lot of ideology.”

Teacher unions, too, are focusing on social justice and politics and not academics. “You look at the teacher unions, at their national conferences they hold every year, they’re voting on abortion on demand, they’re voting on Medicare for all, they’re voting on freeing Palestine, and support for Ukraine. They’re not voting on, you know, should students actually be well prepared for classes. It’s just a laundry list of demands.”

“From beginning to end, the education system has been fully captured,” Nealy added. 

Ray Of Hope Under Trump 

Nealy said that the Department of Education (DOE) has really mishandled grants. For example, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have been tied to funding in the past.

It’s a good move, in Nealy’s view, to have accountability at a more local level for educational pushes. 

Notably, President Donald Trump is moving to abolish the DOE. 

“These are not helping keep our children safe, and so for a state legislator to be the one where the buck stops, for a local school official to be the one the buck stops with — those people know, if my constituents are mad, I’m going to be voted out of office,” Nealy said. “Whereas in Washington, the deep state education bureaucrats who are there for their entire careers, they don’t care, they’re never going to have to take that hit. I think to have things be at a lower level is a much, much better thing.” 

“I’m excited because we now finally have an administration that really wants to focus on solutions and moving forward and giving children and families what they need,” she continued.

“Even just the mere idea of thinking about families as stakeholders in this, as opposed to just the special interest groups and the activists who want their money, their handouts, and their contracts from the federal, state, and local governments, is something that is just an absolute sea change,” Nealy added.