Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon highlights one group that cashes in because of the woke movement.
A top diversity consultancy has ties to every level of the private school accreditation process, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found, creating a lucrative diet of contracts and jobs for its employees.
The Glasgow Group, whose founder Rodney Glasgow recently likened critics of “diversity work” to the Capitol rioters, consists entirely of consultants with posts at the National Association of Independent Schools and its “approved accreditors.” The association requires those accreditors to enforce social justice ideology in private schools, where members of the Glasgow Group double as full-time employees, giving the 12-person firm a say in the education of hundreds of thousands of students. As their education has been shaped by the Glasgow Group’s consultants, diversity professionals have procured more and more power—and more and more money.
Much of that money comes from the “equity audits” that schools purchase to demonstrate their compliance with accreditation standards. The audits ask schools how they are promoting social justice in the classroom and encourage them to build out their “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) bureaucracy, no matter how large it may already be. Los Angeles’s prestigious Harvard-Westlake school, for example, employed five diversity administrators as of this January, when it brought in the Glasgow Group for an audit. Following its completion, the school hired a sixth.
The growth of DEI bureaucracy has alienated parents, who say their kids’ schools have become obsessed with racial identity. That pushback has made headlines—the New York Times covered uproars at Brearley, Dalton, and Grace Episcopal—but relatively little headway. The nation’s top private schools have all gone “woke” simultaneously, transformed by a race-conscious pedagogy. Families who seek an escape hatch often can’t find one, several parents told the Free Beacon last month, because all the best schools are beholden to the same accreditors and use the same consultants.
