Public-school districts across the country are prioritizing teaching applicants who are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion and other left-wing ideologies in a way that may run afoul of federal law, according to a new report from a nonprofit government watchdog.
The National Opportunity Project recently published a report which identified nearly two dozen school districts that use biased job postings, slanted application and/or interview questions, and diversity-hiring guidance to perpetuate left-wing bias among their faculties.
The report, the first to examine politically biased K–12 hiring practices, also detailed how hiring committees and interview panels use identity quotas to select for certain races, genders, and/or sexual orientations.
After contacting 74 major school districts spread across the U.S., NOP received responsive records from 69 districts. Of those, 18 provided incomplete or redacted records. In 23 school districts, NOP found substantial evidence of ideological bias that indicates favor toward progressive applicants.
“Employment policies in K-12 public schools that consider race, creed, and political ideology and are infused with biased language and decision-making processes unfairly, and sometimes illegally, skew hiring in favor of certain applicants,” the report reads.
The Spokane, Wash., school district, for one, asks interviewees what a “socially just classroom” looks like, while the Decatur, Ga., district selects for candidates who are “committed to [City School of Decatur’s] goal toward dismantling systemic racism and generating racial equity,” according to the report.
Other school districts that maintain biased hiring practices were found in Denver, Colo.; Washington, D.C.; Chicago, Ill.; Montgomery County, Md.; Loudoun County, Va.; and at least 16 other areas.
With the Supreme Court ending the 45-year precedent of affirmative action in higher education this year, K–12 hiring practices may represent the next front in the battle to roll back the progressive stranglehold on education, NOP president and co-founder Patrick Hughes told National Review.
In June, the Court ruled 6–3 that race-conscious admissions practices employed by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violated the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment. As a result, affirmative action was deemed unconstitutional across the nation’s higher-education institutions.
Although the ruling doesn’t apply to lower-level schools, K–12 administrators still run the risk of violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin, if they don’t hire a teacher for any of those reasons.
And if a district refuses to hire an applicant because of the applicant’s perceived political views, that may violate the applicant’s First Amendment rights, Hughes explained.
He noted that some public-school teachers have filed DEI/CRT-training lawsuits related to political discrimination in the past few years.
In one case, two teachers working in Springfield, Mo., sued their employer in August 2021 for mandatory anti-racism training that cast traditional “color-blind” views as bigotry. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled against the two plaintiffs in the suit, which was the first of its kind in the nation, Fox News reported. They have since appealed to their district’s appellate court.
Hughes argued that future hiring lawsuits could be stronger than the training lawsuits if hiring discrimination or bias can be proven to violate Title VII or the First Amendment.
One potential example of this type of discrimination can be found in Denver’s elementary-art-teacher job posting, which requires qualified candidates to “lead for racial and educational excellence and work to dismantle systems of oppression and inequity in our community,” per the report.
It remains to be seen whether hiring litigation of this nature will gain traction in the future, but Hughes suspects an increase in the number of lawsuits challenging public schools’ identity-politics initiatives given the current focus on education in the national political conversation.
He said the national conversation really exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic, when parents could see what their children were learning online. He added that a combination of classically liberal teachers “aging out of the system” and the “rampant” leftist activism present in teachers’ unions and on college campuses is largely responsible for younger teachers’ prioritizing indoctrination over education.
“This is sort of an endemic problem that, when the older generation retires, is going to get worse and worse in our public schools throughout the country,” Hughes said.
The NOP president also expressed concern that there could be even more alarming examples of DEI and other left-wing concepts that the report did not cover, considering 18 public-school systems denied or redacted their records. Hughes revealed that his organization might sue those schools for their records in the future.
To find a sizeable representative sample, NOP selected 74 major school districts that were located in different parts of the country and prospective 2024 swing states.