Overview:
A veteran teacher highlights how true DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—thrives in his underfunded San Diego school community.
The following is my DEI report to the Department of Education:
There’s now a webpage on the US Department of Education’s website asking for folks to report cases of DEI. Some folks are looking to embrace these anti-DEI measures. A recent oped in my area even asked teachers to help Trump dismantle DEI measures in schools.
I’m not sure who else in education is thinking about filing a report, but I think it’s time that I report some DEI myself. You see, the neighborhood public schools where I’ve taught for 27 years have loads of DEI and I’d like to report it bigly.
This DEI, however, isn’t about teachers or the staff. I mean, over 80% of US teachers are white. Not much to report there.
No, the DEI that I need to report on is about the students themselves. It’s about the families and the students at the school where I work. You wouldn’t believe this, but the kids, the families, are literally all DEI.
Let’s start with the diversity I need to report. Can you believe, for example, that 96% of my students in a historically redlined area of San Diego still aren’t white? Yes, 96% of them. My students are an amazing mixture of children of color from incredibly diverse backgrounds. In addition to all these smart Black kids that make me and their parents so proud every day, we have Mexican, Laotian, Pacific Islander, Somali, and now Haitian American communities. Each group that settles into this neighborhood seems to sort of melt into our school over a decade or more, adding a rich and vibrant cultural element.
And can you believe that it’s been that way for decades, even before I began teaching there in 1999?
That’s not to say that anti-DEI measures haven’t been taken here before. We did, for example, have a magnet program to bring white students into the Chollas-View neighborhood many years ago. In fact, many schools near us, from Johnson to King Elementary, had magnet programs about things like world cultures and science and technology before No Child Left Behind deemed the funding for them non-essential. This was an attempt at the time, and a noble one, to desegregate the public school system and provide a more equitable education here in San Diego after the civil rights movement. It was also a way to comply with laws.
Did it work? Not since I’ve been here. You know, it’s almost as if white folks just don’t want to bring their kids here to all these poorly funded schools. After all, the schools here, like mine, count on Title 1 funding. Not to create extracurricular programs, nor to spark innovation, not for art, theatre, and enrichment programs. The Title 1 funds we receive are sent only to make up for at least some of the gaps from taxes collected in much more affluent areas. Although I guess it’s best now to say schools like mine used to receive Title 1 funding, what with DOGE and McMahon dismantling the Department of Education as I type.
Of course, I have more to report than just diversity. There’s also equity we need to discuss. You see, I’ve had all these kids, all these families who were predominantly laborers, hard-working men and women, who drove our taxis and made our food. Many a parent’s mom has cleaned our city’s hotel rooms just for their child to have a shot at the American Dream. Because of the Department of Education student loans, grants, and other services protected under the DOE, many of the parents’ children here have been able to go to college. Many of them have obtained degrees, and many are in the process of making America greater. One young lady I taught, whose family immigrated here from Sudan, is now a lecturer, social worker, and she holds a master’s degree in psychology from a prestigious university. Her journey would not have been possible if Musk’s tech-bro team had closed down the loan programs the DOE oversees.
Finally, I need to report the inclusion I see on a daily basis. Let me tell you that inclusion has grown exponentially here in some schools, at least.
Despite the DOE enforcing the American with Disabilities Act, charter schools popping up around my public school wouldn’t take, nor provide services to, students with certain IEPs or special needs. I’ve heard the tales from dozens of parents over the years, and so have many other teachers. In fact, it was so common for charters to exclude students with special needs in California that a law needed to be passed, forcing charter schools to take students with special needs.
You’d have thought that the law would have changed things up, but these innovative charter schools still found a way to filter out kids with special needs. It’s quite the phenomenon nationwide, and especially in low socio-economic neighborhoods like ours. This is where helpful, innovative charter school entrepreneurs like to plant themselves for some kids, I suppose. As a result, our public school system has gotten a bit innovative, too. We now create more inclusive models for the children the charters leave behind, and we hire more special education staff.
But of course, these services, you guessed it, are costly. They are funded in part from the Department of Education. Now, they are in jeopardy. Soon, they’ll be gone. Great kids with IEPs and 504s being included in classrooms are now in danger of losing support of all kinds.
The crazy part of my report is that nobody who lives in my school community thought DEI was a problem. In fact, the amazing parents I work with constantly tell me about the benefits of DEI. It seems to me that the only ones really concerned must live elsewhere, must be worried about DEI in their neighborhoods.
I wish someone would tell them, perhaps in a report of some kind, that DEI isn’t such a bad thing after all.
