In combating DEI, Donald Trump is doing the right thing. In that sentence I just wrote, I almost choked writing the six final words. But it is what I believe. A stopped clock is right twice a day.
— John McWhorter, a Columbia University associate professor and New York Times opinion writer
If many diversity, equity, and inclusion practices are in fact dying, there is considerable evidence that we should not mourn their passing. But serious inequities do exist, and in politics, you can’t beat something with nothing. In her first school visit as U.S. secretary of education—to Ian Rowe’s Vertex charter school in the Bronx borough of New York City—Linda McMahon signaled she wants to replace DEI with individual student agency, enabled by strong families and schools. I see that as good news for anyone who cares about inequality and wants to counter racism.
Vertex founder Rowe literally wrote the book on the power of student agency. As he lays out in Agency—The Four Point Plan for All Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative, students need, more than anything, the personal conviction of their own potential supported by the consistent guidance and moral direction of social institutions.
My experience and my work as a researcher make me agree with McMahon that Rowe is on to something. For a university professor, I have oddball views on race and class, initially shaped in blue-collar Baltimore. When I was 13, my dad dropped me off to work at our family business, an industrial bakery in a low-income Black neighborhood that had been a low-income Sicilian neighborhood a generation before, when my family lived there. Years on the factory floor taught me that if I had been born Black in Baltimore like my supervisor and most co-workers, I would have had a far higher probability of living poor and dying young.
As economist Melissa S. Kearney shows empirically in The Two-Parent Privilege, the rise of single-parent homes—which for complex reasons expanded among Blacks more quickly and Asians more slowly than among whites and Hispanics—does much to explain racial gaps in student achievement and downstream, wealth creation. Family structure is associated with later life outcomes for all major racial and ethnic groups in the United States and even in countries with strong welfare states and high levels of income equality like Denmark.
I could see this firsthand in Baltimore among people I worked alongside and respected. My supervisor, an expert dough mixer and good leader who never had us do any job he wouldn’t do, had biological children living in five different households. He tried, but in the real world, it’s hard to parent in multiple homes. By the time I left the family business, I could see two of his sons starting to go astray, with some substance abuse and no long-term plans, in a community where early mistakes can be unforgiving.
Again, as Kearney details, family structure has the same kinds of impacts no matter one’s race or ethnicity. Yet, in part reflecting the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, African American communities were affected by the shift toward one-parent families before whites and to a greater degree than whites.
Unsafe schools and communities and stressed families are terrible burdens on children growing up, but so far as I can tell, few DEI practices address those grievous situations.
Schools can help make up some of resources typically missing in single-parent households, yet there again, the opportunities were not equal for me and my supervisor’s sons. I attended mediocre public schools in the suburban county adjacent to Baltimore. But my school, though in no way outstanding, was still safer and faced fewer challenges than schools in my part of the city, which was being drained of middle-class families.
Unsafe schools and communities and stressed families are terrible burdens on children growing up, but so far as I can tell, few DEI practices address those grievous situations. Instead, DEI influencers feed upper-class virtue signaling, as my progressive friend Musa al-Gharbi has detailed. DEI-related policies like freezing police budgets and “de-policing” certain neighborhoods (while still protecting downtown business districts) were associated with a near doubling of homicide rates among Black males in the 2014 to 2020 period, as political scientist Wilfred Reilly and I have argued. Even DEI practices like diversity training fail to improve intergroup relations or diversify leadership, as al-Gharbi shows in his review of two decades of research, concluding that such trainings are often empty gestures.
We should replace DEI with better things. When McMahon visited Vertex, she shone a spotlight on Rowe, the son of Jamaican immigrants, who argues that many common DEI approaches such as those developed by Tema Okun teach minority students they are victims of white supremacy. That in turn robs them of the personal agency to succeed, and instead, ironically, places their fates in the hands of others. Further, one unfortunate line of thought in the DEI canon has derided certain pathways to success, sometimes casting hard work, objectivity, or the nuclear family as “whiteness” to be “dismantled.”
In his book, the conservative Rowe, who holds two Ivy League degrees, also criticizes unrealistic approaches of other conservatives. Calls for students to simply make better choices fail to “acknowledge the necessity of local, character-forming institutions to help young people build agency,” institutions like families, schools, and houses of worship.
Were Rowe writing now, I suspect he would add to his criticisms that not teaching vital parts of U.S. history from Harriet Tubman to the Tuskegee Airmen, which has already happened in some classrooms, may send the message that important African American historical figures who showed agency under oppression do not count in our common national story.
Rowe aims for the Vertex Partnership Academies charter school to be a character-forming institution, teaching the knowledge to succeed academically and the U.S. history connecting young people to our national story. Vertex also teaches the “success sequence”: If kids graduate from high school, get a full-time job, get married, and have kids in that order, statistically, they have a 97% chance of avoiding poverty. That was true in the 1990s when some in the Clinton administration began to talk about it and remains true in the 21st century, as sociologists Wendy Wang and Brad Wilcox show statistically.
This is knowledge young people need and want, which schools rarely teach, and most social scientists avoid.
Like John McWhorter, I have serious disagreements with the president who appointed Linda McMahon. But if the secretary can gradually, sensibly replace DEI paradigms with those stressing agency, it could revolutionize American education—and America.
