New Trier High School Led On Woke Education. It Should Lead The Way Out. – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

February 28. It’s probably coincidence, but remarkably so.

That date eight years ago marked the beginning of the backlash against school practices and policies that, today, go widely under the label of “DEI” – diversity, equity and inclusion. It was Seminar Day at New Trier High School in north suburban Chicago.

This February 28 marks the culmination of that backlash. It’s the Department of Education’s announced deadline for schools of any kind to put a firm end to DEI.

It’s not, however, the legal aspect of the federal government’s mandate that should matter, important as that is. Instead, willing compliance with the spirit of the new policy is simply the right thing to do, and there are reasons why New Trier should lead the way. Seminar Day pioneered the misguided and divisive approach to “social justice” issues now ridiculed as “woke.” Its critics were right then and their warnings came to pass. America ultimately agreed and rejected wokeness in schools and elsewhere, contributing in no small part to November’s election results.

Seminar Day was a mandatory, all-day event with the stated goal of “understanding today’s struggle for racial civil rights.” But the problem, from its critics’ perspectives, was that the agenda was brazenly one-sided, divisive, and radically that of the political left. Understanding civil rights, according to Seminar Day’s teachings, meant force-fed dogma of propositions that are now mostly rejected, such as all whites are oppressors and all blacks victims, micro-aggressions exist everywhere, America is systemically racist and white supremacists are lurking around every corner.

Most importantly, those were held to be indisputable truths, questioning of which itself proved racism.

The backlash is described nicely in a 2022 Mother Jones column — from the left’s perspective supporting Seminar Day, that is. “The backlash was swift and intense”, wrote Mother Jones. National headlines pro and con were plentiful, including a Wall Street Journal column headlined, “It’s Racial Indoctrination Day At An Affluent Chicagoland School.”

“In retrospect,” Mother Jones wrote, “what transpired in this affluent Chicago suburb was a canary in the coal mine—a trial run for the conservative attack on public education that has since captured much of the nation.”

The canary lived.

What Mother Jones got wrong was that the backlash was “a right wing attack on public education.” Yes, Seminar Day critics were the minority at New Trier, which was and remains solidly left. Seventy-two percent of New Trier Township voted for Kamala Harris last year. But as subsequent events have shown, opposition to woke indoctrination in schools isn’t right wing. While Americans support teaching about slavery and discrimination, poll after poll show majority opposition to newer, radical social justice theories on race and gender.

Among the reasons for the backlash was the contemptible behavior of many Seminar Day supporters. That, too, was a precursor for woke conduct. As an early Seminar Day critic and New Trier parent, I described the ugliness among parents here at the time, which went well beyond the routine insult of “racism” directed at dissenters.

It wasn’t really the teachers or students who were the problem. Many of them discussed the controversy in classes evenhandedly. The school’s administration, however, lied to our faces when we made our sole request, which was to add more speakers with balanced content. Not enough time to do that, the administration falsely claimed, rejecting even widely esteemed Rev. Corey Brooks of Chicago, who had offered to speak. The administration also dissembled on the mandatory attendance requirement.

Anger about the school leaders’ unprofessional conduct is part of why the backlash against Seminar Day became steadfast and resilient, and why it went viral. Some of the program’s early critics formed New Trier Neighbors, a broader check on political indoctrination in K-12 schools. That group in turn became a national model for similar parent watchdog groups around the nation.

The Department of Education’s advisory letter from February 14 gives schools two weeks to end DEI. It’s stern. Violators face lawsuits and a cutoff of federal money. Wealthy areas like New Trier get negligible federal money but bigger amounts are meaningful to poorer districts.

New Trier, because of its notoriety from Seminar Day, is positioned to be influential in how to respond properly – by expressly and publicly announcing abandonment of what was so extreme — the intolerance and radicalism it embraced eight years ago.

Shifting to that policy would not mean entirely banning alternative, leftist viewpoints. Different ideologies should be given their due. Balance and proportion are key. Critical race theory, for example, should be taught as just that – a theory.

The advisory letter, however, is vague and perhaps overbroad, like many from the Trump Administration. A fair objection has been raised about whether it’s so broad that it constitutes viewpoint discrimination in violation of the Constitution. An interpretation that broad can and should be challenged with the goal of scoping it back to comply with the First Amendment. Already, a federal court on Friday issued a temporary restraining order blocking enforcement of related executive orders by Trump. The Trump Administration defended its orders by claiming that they only ban DEI practices that are illegal under applicable Supreme Court rulings.

The courts will have to sort that out to properly honor the First Amendment but, broadly speaking, there’s no doubt that America has sensibly turned against DEI and that the Trump Administration will end up asserting its maximum legal power to end it. Within the bounds of the First Amendment, schools should cooperate by ending DEI and returning to color blindness as the guiding principle.

In other words, let the bookends be February 28 of 2017 and 2025 on DEI’s era, and let the pages from that time gather dust.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.