A project of Just Communities Central Coast (JCCC), the Institute for Equity in Education (IEE) is a four-and-a-half-day residential workshop that, for a registration cost of $2,150 per participant, helps teachers, counselors, administrators, parents, coaches, clerical staff, school board members, and other school and district staff throughout California’s Central Coast region address the “urgent need” to “clos[e] the achievement gap” between white students and “students of color.” “Grounded in the belief that confronting educational disparities through race-conscious, race-sensitive approaches” represents the best way “to address the root causes of [the] inequities” supposedly responsible for that gap, IEE aims to help educators “increase their understanding of how race, socio-economic class, and individual and system-wide bias affect the learning environment.”
To advance the foregoing objectives, IEE teaches educators how to: (a) “build authentic relationships with all of their students—especially across lines of difference” – i.e., differences in economic and social class, gender, gender identity/expression, immigration status, race, religion, and sexual orientation; (b) “improve their level of cultural proficiency so they can create culturally relevant educational experiences for all students”; and (c) “understand how teaching and learning are impacted” by “white privilege,” “internalized racism,” and “the history and legacy of racism in the U.S. education system.”
IEE is founded upon the premise that most white and affluent Americans harbor, in their hearts, a large measure of “implicit bias” against nonwhites and poor people. As JCCC executive director Jarrod Schwartz puts it: “From the time we are born, we are absorbing information and misinformation about the world around us and the people who live in that world…. We live in a society where we are constantly absorbing messages from the world around us, and over time, this ‘pollution’ gets into our system. It’s not our fault, but we do need to do something about it.”
The Santa Barbara Unified School District has adopted IEE curriculum elements which teach that white people “have historically held positions of dominance, privilege, and social power in Western society”; have engaged in “collusion” by “working together … intentionally or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously” to “make something happen” that benefits them while harming others; and have been endowed by American society with a large measure of “privilege” – i.e., “unearned access to resources that enhance one’s chances of getting what one needs, or [of] influencing others in order to lead a safe, fulfilling, productive life.”
Further Reading: “Institute for Equity in Education” (JustCommunities.org); “CA Schools Pushing Racist, LGBT, SJW Agenda on Children” (FlashReport.org)