See also: Critical Race Theory
The
Pacific Educational Group (PEG) was
founded
in 1992 by Glenn Singleton, a self-described “diversity
expert” who holds a master's degree in education from Stanford
University and
has served as an adjunct professor of educational leadership at San
José State University since 2004.
Citing the “systemic racism” of “white culture” as the major cause of the
schools' “failure to educate and engage black, brown, and Native American
Indian students,” PEG promotes
the tenets of critical race theory (developed principally by Derrick
Bell) in many public elementary and high schools nationwide. According
to PEG, the existing “white”—and
therefore racist—school curricula not only fail to address the needs of minority pupils, but also impose upon those youngsters “traditional norms
of assessment” that are inappropriate for their “cultural
backgrounds.” Further,
“the system,” failing to recognize “the unique circumstances” against which
African Americans “in our society” must constantly struggle, “institutionalizes
practices that
marginalize, and perhaps criminalize, black males.” To address these problems, PEG advocates a
“systemic transformation” of the nation's educational apparatus.
In 2005 Glenn Singleton co-authored Courageous
Conversations About Race:
A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in
Schools.
This book
later became
the basis of PEG's “Courageous Conversations” program
of instruction, which was designed to improve black and Hispanic students' academic
performance by first raising classroom teachers' awareness of the “ubiquity
of white privilege and racism,” and then training them to purge those elements from their schools.
In its training sessions, PEG claims that “white talk” is “verbal, impersonal,
intellectual and task-oriented,” while “color commentary” is
“nonverbal, personal, emotional and process-oriented” (i.e., not conducive to arriving at correct answers in an educational setting); that African Americans are commonly loud and need to have that trait accommodated in the schools; that
white teachers are culpable for the underperformance of minority
students, even
though the racial achievement gap
is equally present in classes taught by minority teachers;
and that it would be “racist” to
assign any responsibility for minority underperformance to the students
themselves.
Singleton
claims that PEG has introduced these worldviews to “hundreds”
of schools in the U.S., in the form of “diversity training”
programs founded on the Courageous Conversations model. In exchange
for this instruction, PEG routinely charges hundreds of thousands of dollars to the
school systems that commission it. One noteworthy client is the
Seattle
school system, which first invited PEG to help the district's
teachers become more racially sensitive in 2002. There, PEG has taught
that
racism is an exclusively white trait; that
“individualism”
(as promoted by independent classroom assignments) is a form of “cultural
racism” that benefits whites over blacks; and that “future time
orientation” (i.e., planning ahead) is a white characteristic that
minorities cannot be expected to display.
In 2006 the Cherry
Creek school system, located in a suburb of Denver, likewise hired PEG for a
six-figure sum to run a diversity-training initiative. A Rocky
Mountain News
editorial
observed that this program “promotes a world view in which American
society is relentlessly oppressive”; where “individuals, even
today, remain at the mercy of their racial origins”; and where
“enlightened whites ... speak in the chastened, cringing language
of someone who has emerged from a re-education camp.”
From
2007-2012, the Rochester, New York school system paid PEG more than
$200,000 to hold a series of diversity-training seminars. According
to one Rochester school board member, “It makes people feel
ashamed, mainly whites. It’s like we can’t help people of color
because we’re living with the sins and actions of people many, many
years ago.”
In 2007 California’s
Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jack O’Connell, hired PEG
to address the racial achievement gap between black and white students in his
state. After completing the PEG training, O'Connell concluded
that
the existing gap was “absolutely, positively” due to the fact that “we're
all guilty” of having “institutionalized lower expectations”
for young blacks.
Other school systems that
have signed PEG to six-figure diversity-training contracts include those of Arlington, Virginia;
Greenwich,
Connecticut;
Ann
Arbor, Michigan;
and Madison, Wisconsin. University
of Wisconsin philosophy professor Harry
Brighouse said
the following about PEG's Courageous Conversations program in Madison:
“It’s a kind of involuntary therapy session—the kind of thing
that my friends who used to be in obscure Maoist organizations report
having gone through regularly.... It is all about the racism inherent
in the schools, and particularly in the attitudes of
teachers.”
In
2011,
Russlyn Ali, President Barack Obama’s Assistant Secretary for the
Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education, accepted an
award
from PEG at a Courageous
Conversations
conference in
San Francisco.
For additional information on PEG, click here.