Yup. This university changed the name but kept the same staff. I wonder what the staff will be doing…
A public university in Texas has reworked its diversity, equity and inclusion office ahead of a law that takes effect Jan. 1 banning DEI offices at public universities in the state.
The University of Texas at San Antonio has closed its Office of Inclusive Excellence and is opening the Office of Campus and Community Belonging with the same staff due to the new law, President Taylor Eighmy announced in a recent campuswide email.
You have a good ear. “Belonging” seems to be the new buzz word. For example, at Disney:
Employee Groups: The company has rebranded its “Business” Employee Resource Groups (BERGs) to “Belonging” Employee Resource Groups. The transformation, which began last year, is meant to highlight the focus on BERGs in strengthening the employee community and workplace experience. https://www.axios.com/2025/02/11/disney-dei-changes-trump-era
And more generally…
…creating the most connectedness among employees – especially those who previously felt left out or ignored. In DEI consulting, terms like “belonging” and even “DEI” itself can suffer from definition creep or ambiguity. Let’s pin down a specific definition of belonging and define its critical place in your DEI — or DEIB — strategy.
The absolute, most heinous systemic racism is in our inner-city schools. These poor children are enslaved on the plantation of corrupt unionized schools that do nothing to improve the knowledge and opportunity for these kids. We have school systems were 80% of children can’t read or do math at grade level. These children have and their parents have no CHOICE. The can’t move to a good school system Manhattan or the nice white suburbs. They can’t go to the charter school down the street because the slave masters won’t allow charter schools.
The Harlem project decisively proved that inner city children were not substandard learners because of their backgrounds or their family situation or from lack of public funding. This “experiment” split an existing (physical) school in half and randomly assigned 50% of students to the charter school side of the building and left 50% in the public school side of the building. The charter school was only given the amount of money per student that was being spent on every school child in New York. This money covered teachers, janitors, principal, etc. Each year, the charter school kids tested farther and farther above those left on the plantation. Their graduation rate and college acceptance rates were miles above that of the public school down the hall. The evidence was incontrovertible, yet, did NY decide to expand the charter school program? Does every child have a feasible choice for a better school? No! That my friends is true racism.
Washington DC spends more per student than any other city. My privileged white sister would never let her children go to those horrible schools. They were and are dreadful. Congress has lots of control over DC and the racist, horrible Republics forced charter schools on the city long ago. The lines to apply and get in were like a Taylor Swift concert. Parents and children cried when they did not win a lottery spot. These schools were highly coveted…while they existed. Guess who terminated the charter school system in DC. Racist republicans? Nope, Barak Obama. The local communities were devastated. Why would Obama do that? What could he possibly have against better schools. Hmmm, the corrupt influence of teacher unions? Don’t get me wrong, I love teachers. Teachers made great impacts on my life outside of education, but they also gave me a great education, even though I lived in a small city of about 25k people. But a union only as one goal, to better their members. Unions don’t try to figure out how to make a better car or better educate children, they figure out how to get more benefits for their members. That is okay, that is their job, but never pretend the teacher unions care about the kids. On a side note, I think private sector unions are fine, they and the company owners duke it out and come to an economic conclusion that keeps both in business. But a union that can vote for the people that pay them more money, with no economic balance? That I am against.
The E in DE&I is Equity, not Equality. Big difference. Equity means equal results, not equal opportunity. Equity means you get selected over more qualified candidates to create “justice”. Equal opportunity means you fix the school system and guarantee a minimum standard of competence and education that gives kids an equal shot in the future. Equity means you look at a black doctor and wonder if she got into med school because she was highly qualified or because she had a certain skin color. If you are that doctor, do you want your patients thinking that?
Who here wants “DE&I” on their favorite sports team. If you don’t want it, you might be a big hypocrite. Don’t we need more Asians and Jews, and Hispanics on the Celtics? If not, why not? Why is that any different?
Let’s have a conversation. No need to call me nasty names or think you really know what is in my head. Let’s discuss the facts, the logic, the reality. I have proposed a solution, start at the beginning with great education. You tell me what a better solution is.
A few years ago, a study was done on 20 years of charter schools in Michigan. It found, state wide, generally no advantage to charters. On average, students of charters did slightly worse, on standardized tests, than public school students.
The one exception was students in poor neighborhoods, who tended to do better in charters, than public schools. That exception would fit with the Harlem and DC examples you cite.
But charters are not a “one size fits all” fix for the US education system.
Exactly! If a charter school is doing poorly, you can go back to public school. But if a public school is horrible, shouldn’t you have a choice to go to a charter school?
If you want good infrastructure, from roadways and good water to EDUCATION, the best tactic is to prevent the rich and powerful from escaping to their own enclaves.
Suddenly, potholes get filled, airport lounges have space and seats, and education becomes a TOP PRIORITY FOR ALL.
As regular readers by now expect from me, let me point all you all to education in the land whose primary resources are rocks, swampy cold woodlands, and CHILDREN.
Charter schools don’t have to be privately funded. There are states where the money follows the learner, they can spend it in public or private schools. That seems ok to me.
11) Finnish children do better in school than American students simply because the poverty rate is so much lower.
Fiction. The poverty rate in Finland is certainly lower, but what makes the difference in education is equity combined with quality. Instead of highlighting individual performance and competition of students in Finland the focus is on schools’ ability to provide equally good education for different learners. Basic education is completely free including instruction, school materials, school meals, health care, dental care, special needs education and remedial teaching. One Finnish specialty is the free hot lunch served to everyone every day. Hungry students cannot learn well. (Source)
Our inner-city schools do NOT combine equity and quality! What is preventing that? Certainly not money. Wiki: In 2007, The D.C. schools were performing poorly despite having the advantage of the third highest spending per student in the U.S.
I was living in the DC area when Michele Rhee was appointed chancellor to fix the broken school system in 2007. I was truly happy at the prospect of fixing the schools for children I did not know. I cherish education and want everyone to have a good education. Rhee came to some agreements with the unions, and gave raises for student achievement instead of just show up to work.
Unfortunately, within a few years, the teacher unions raised $2 million to elect a new mayor that promised to get rid of her. They won. All she wanted to do was make it better for the kids. She wanted to replace the 2% lowest performing teachers, like any company might do. Nope, that was a bridge too far.
I don’t know what funding systems other states use. In Michigan, the state funding follows the student. If one or two charters open in an area, and many students transfer to the charter, the public school is way underfunded and underutilized, and closes. But many charters fail to make their financial objectives, and close in a few years. So the charter is gone, but so is the public school.
Religious schools where they spend half the day on catechism and the other half studiously avoiding evolution, science, and similar?
The U.S. Supreme Court will take up a potentially momentous case about religious charter schools, involving issues that could radically alter the character of American education, both in terms of school choice and state funding of public education.
The court on Jan. 24 granted review of two related appeals stemming from the [effort to establish a state-funded Catholic virtual charter school] in Oklahoma. That state’s supreme court [last year ruled] that the proposed St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School—which would be sponsored and controlled by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and Diocese of Tulsa but would receive state per-pupil charter school funding—would violate both the state and federal constitutions.
The U.S. Supreme Court set briefing deadlines that indicate the case will be scheduled for arguments in late April, with a decision expected by late June or early July.
It’s interesting to me that this issue comes up in regard to a diocese wanting taxpayer funding for a Catholic school, yet there are Jewish taxpayer supported schools in New York in the Orthodox communities which have done the same thing for years.
Yes, Hasidic yeshivas in New York receive significant taxpayer funding, which covers services like transportation, textbooks, and special education needs. This funding is channeled through local school districts and adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars annually. While these schools are not public, they receive public money for mandated services.
Show me a Catholic schools where children have lower “reading at grade level” and “math at grade level” scores than Baltimore, DC, LA or NYC schools. Parents are not tricked by Catholic schools, they know what theology and ideology is being taught. As parents learned when watching Zoom classes during COVID, the same is not true for all public schools.