How Embedded Is DEI in Ontario Education?
It's everywhere.
My last Substack discussed the cost of DEI in the Thames Valley District School Board. If you missed it, catch it here. After discussing it with educator friends, I began to wonder if the public understands how deeply embedded DEI is within education. Sure, people might assume there are policies and a few staff members dedicated to it, but does it go much further?
You bet it does! Let’s take a look, so you know just how much your children are being influenced by DEI, which has been proven to not have any positive benefits, only negative ones, and costs society a lot of money.1 In other words, your taxes are being wasted. Here we go.
First, we have it on the Ontario Education website. I’ll post some pics of a few areas.
How much of your taxpayer dollars are being spent on this? A policy proven not only to not work, but have the opposite effect and reduce merit. Remember, this is supported by the current provincial government, the Conservatives and DEI Doug Ford. The Liberals and NDP support it too. Let’s go deeper and look at the Equity, Leadership & Accountability Unit.
Nine employees. That looks expensive! Let’s check out the Governance - Operations & Board Supports Unit.
Nine more employees. That’s twenty so far. Taxpayer costs are really starting to add up for a program that has been proven to have no benefit. It’s beginning to sound like a make work project at taxpayer expense.
Every one of the 76 school boards in Ontario must implement these policies. Assuming a conservative estimate of one full-time equivalent (FTE) staff member per board dedicated to equity and inclusive education, we're looking at at least 76 people, though likely more due to the scale of larger boards. The TVDSB alone has at least five.
This expenditure is on a feel-good project that not only accomplishes nothing but achieves the opposite of the intended DEI outcomes. This initiative began in 2009 under a Liberal government and has only expanded under the Conservative government, led by "DEI Doug" Ford.
So, a vast amount of taxpayer money is spent to achieve the opposite of desired outcomes! Keep this in mind next time you're at the grocery store, filling up your car, or paying your rent or mortgage, or otherwise struggling to make ends meet.
You might think this is just a government and school board agenda, but it's not. Take the Ontario Principal's Council (OPC), for instance.
How embedded is DEI in the OPC? Its tentacles reach deeply. If you click on the link provided in the caption of the pic above, then scroll down a little, on the right-hand side you’ll see OPC Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Framework. Here you can read a six-page document on how the OPC supports DEI with its school administrators, spreading DEI into all provincial schools. Here are some tidbits, though I recommend you read the whole document to get a more fulsome understanding of what the OPC is doing with its DEI program.
Reading this document, you'll understand the reception you might get if you discuss DEI with your child's school principal. While equal access is noble, the pursuit of equal outcomes is problematic. Equity here means adjusting resources and opportunities based on identity rather than merit, which raises significant ethical and practical issues.
So that’s the Ontario Principal’s Council. You see what they’re doing with DEI. The OPC is not funded directly by the provincial government. It’s funded by the salaries of its members. Do they have the choice of opting out of DEI, even though they have dues collected from them to pay for it? Nope! Otherwise, I would have!
Now you’re starting to get a sense of the pervasiveness of the problem. What about teachers' unions? The largest, the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (ETFO), is all in on DEI.
Here’s ETFO’s equity statement.
These are the people teaching your kids.2 Do you see anything about merit? Effort? Responsibility?
What about teacher’s colleges, you ask? Let’s look at Althouse, a teacher’s college at Western University in London, Ontario.
See how it asks ‘what makes us different …?’ See how Althouse ‘engages with a curriculum designed for equity, diversity and inclusion’? That part’s not different. That part is the same in all the Ontario teacher’s colleges. How much harm can this be, teaching upcoming teachers to learn through a DEI program? Teaching about identity politics and never giving the opposing argument? How does that affect people when they eventually teach young, impressionable children?
Now, what about the Ontario College of Teachers? If a teacher felt that DEI wasn’t the right path for students, she could go to her college for support, right? Teachers can stand up against this and present evidence about the failures of DEI, right?
If you click ‘About the College’ on the OCT website, this is what comes up.
You have probably heard in the news of teachers being disciplined for going against DEI policies. Or maybe you’ve heard of students protesting against DEI policies in the news. Now you know why they aren’t being successful. The tentacles of the anti-merit anti-responsibility program known as DEI reach everywhere.
But resources, you think! Surely the teacher resources are unbiased, show all sides of an argument, teach students not what to think, but how to think!
If you’ve reached this far in the article and believe that … Resources are approved by the board to get on their vendor’s list from which textbooks are purchased. So texts are pre-approved by boards, filled with DEI materials and agendas. Yes, teachers often find their own materials. However, the younger the teacher, the more likely she will rely on board-approved resources, for teaching is a demanding job and there’s lots to do and not enough time in the day to do it. So a young teacher will board any ship in a storm. The same can be said of more experienced teachers whose lives are super busy or chaotic, for whatever reason. Anything to help with the burden.
I’ll show you just one example, though there are many. The Ophea Educator Resource is a suite of educational materials and tools provided by Ophea (Ontario Physical and Health Education Association) for teachers, educators, and schools in Ontario. Ophea is dedicated to supporting the implementation of Health and Physical Education (H&PE) curriculum across various grade levels. Almost every teacher that teaches physical education or health uses it. Let’s have a look at some of the information provided to teachers at one of their OPHEA seminars. Here’s the description of the purpose of the webinar, one that was recently held at TVDSB.
Below is one of the questions asked of teachers signing up for the webinar.
Finally, you would think in retirement, that educators would be free of the DEI tentacles. Nope. RTOERO is one of the health insurers that is very popular among retired educators. The tentacles of anti-merit stretch even there.
As you can see, the DEI tentacles run deep. However, its negative effects have been exposed. Many companies have banned DEI, and many countries around the world are beginning to abandon it. DEI initiatives risk undermining merit by prioritizing diversity quotas over individual competence and achievement. If DEI prioritizes diversity quotas over merit, it will lead to a decline in overall competence and achievement within organizations. It’s already happened. Now we need to reverse it.
So what are you going to do about this problem? Can you afford not to act?
Doug Ford, the Conservative premier of Ontario, has just called an election. The Conservatives have strengthened the DEI practices in education. The Liberals and NDP also support DEI initiatives. You can email your MPP as well as the party headquarters of each party and tell them that if they don’t remove DEI from public education, you won’t vote for them.
You can access the list of MPPs from the Ontario government before DEI Doug dissolved it here. To find what electoral district you’re in, click here and enter your postal code. You might have difficulty finding what candidates are running until Feb 13, because the candidate nominations close at 2 pm (Eastern Time) on that date. The election is Feb 27th.
You can find a list of the available parties in Ontario here and look at their websites. A few of them have great policies on the removal of DEI. The Conservatives do not. Neither do the Liberals or NDP. But don’t take my word for it. Have a look yourself!
Can you afford not to take action against DEI in education? Can your children?
Now, don’t start thinking that all teachers are proponents of DEI policies. Many are not. But it does mean you need to talk to your child’s teacher to see where she stands on these issues. Your child’s principal and vice-principal may not be supporters of DEI either. They’re seeing first hand what happens when you hire by identity group instead of merit. That said, they’re unlikely to talk about it, unless they’re retired. Like me! :)
Many teachers are avoiding Health class as a personal revolt against these evils, except of course the single, childless, and envious, who are raging over their plight. The pushers of this woke religion think they are of a higher intellect, but they have not, as of yet, needed protection themselves, from these dark forces. DEI is destined to backfire.
Teachers and administrators should be chosen for their skills and dedication not what they identify as. DEI focuses too much on labels creating more division than inclusion! This program needs to be cancelled.