Dear Colleagues:
We have a big announcement from the Center for Education Policy. We are helping the transition to education freedom across the river in Virginia!
  
Our very own Dr. Lindsey Burke, Director of the Center for Education Policy, will serve on Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin’s transition team. “She will focus on education and help to outline an agenda to ensure K-12 schools are accountable to families,” read a statement from Heritage. Here’s what Lindsey had to say:
  
“I am honored to serve on the transition team and look forward to advancing policies that make Virginia's education system responsive and accountable to parents, putting them in charge. It's not the education bureaucracy but parents and students who should be in the driver's seat.”
  
Heritage Foundation President Kay James will serve as co-chairman of the gubernatorial transition team. Read more about the Heritage Foundation’s role in empowering Virginia families here <[link removed]>.
  
Also in Virginia, Lieutenant Governor-elect Winsome Sears shared strong, promising words <[link removed]> espousing the funding of students, not government-run institutions.
  
Looking to the Future
  
Writing for the Daily Signal <[link removed]> this week, Jonathan Butcher explained that an article in The Atlantic should serve as a warning for conservatives. Lawmakers should carefully consider proposals that reject critical race theory next spring during their legislative sessions and not try to ban books or limit the topics of conversation in K-12 classrooms. 
  
Jonathan explains: "Legislators should be careful to protect students from such biased actions as privilege walks <[link removed]>, mandatory affinity groups, and school assignments advocating the 1619 Project’s factually inaccurate and politically skewed lessons on U.S. history. These applications of critical race theory generally require teachers and students to profess belief in the theory’s main precepts—resulting in illegal compelled speech.
  
"But lawmakers should resist the temptation to limit what is taught in the classroom and ban books," Jonathan says. Read on <[link removed]>.
  
No, Universal Pre-K and Child Care Subsidies Won’t Pay for Themselves.
  
The Build Back Better spending package is still up in the air, which means terrible early childhood policies are still on the table. In the Daily Signal <[link removed]>, I objectively dissect the unfounded claim that such programs will be more than pay for themselves with the tax dollars paid by mothers who will be able to join the formal labor force. The punchline:
  
Estimates seem to coalesce around the conclusion that there exists a positive impact on maternal labor force participation, but the magnitude of the effect is very small, certainly too small cover the costs of such programs.
  
I add that the goal should be for families to have “a wide variety of flexible childcare options, and those choices shouldn’t be artificially expensive or inaccessible due to regulation and government subsidies… All of the evidence points to a desire for less government intervention in the lives of their children, not more.”
Does your School District have a Chief Diversity Officers?
  
Jay Greene joined The Daily Signal Podcast <[link removed]> to discuss his recent report exposing the prevalence of Chief Diversity Officers in K-12 education. Some highlights:
  
We looked at whether having a chief diversity officer was associated with closing achievement gaps. We found that was not the case. In fact, school districts with chief diversity officers have wider achievement gaps that are growing wider over time. And this is true even when we control statistically for a number of observed characteristics in those districts.
  
What are they really doing? We believe what they’re really doing is articulating and enforcing an ideological orthodoxy. That is, they are defining what are appropriate and inappropriate thoughts to be conveyed in school.
  
And that helps provide political organization to, really, a minority set of activists within school districts who are eager to promote their agenda. And they get strength from a chief diversity officer advocating on their behalf.
  
Check out our new interactive webpage <[link removed]> that allows you to search for any district in the US with at least 15,000 students to see if it has a CDO and how the achievement gaps for that district compare to national averages.  This web site empowers parents and community members around the country with information they could use to mobilize and make changes in their local school district.
Sincerely,
John Schoof

 
Research Associate and Project Coordinator
Center for Education Policy


Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity
The Heritage Foundation

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