A Parent Letter on the La Canada Schools' DEI Initiative
written by LCUSD Parent Mark M. Kassabian
The following is a letter written by a La Canada Unified School District (LCUSD) parent to the LCUSD Governing Board in advance of their regularly scheduled meeting on April 27, 2021 when the Board was asked to adopt the district’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Framework and Commitment Statement and Definitions documents. A video archive of the April 27, 2021 meeting can be viewed on YouTube here (advance to the 1h59m55s mark to fast forward to the discussion of the DEI items).
I am publishing the letter here because it articulated the concerns of a large number of parents in the district and many people have asked to read the letter in its entirety.
–Sugi–
April 26, 2021
Dear LCUSD Governing Board:
I’m not a natural activist, but the COVID school closures compelled me to act. You might recall that last year I wrote to you, and then started submitting comments at board meetings to encourage LCUSD to be more aggressive about reopening for in-person school.
Until then I don’t think I had ever publicly commented on LCUSD policy. I could have been described as “fat, dumb and happy.” My family moved here specifically for the schools. We were very pleased with the district, its dedicated teachers, attentive staff and conscientious administrators. La Canada reminded me of the Pasadena private-school community of my youth; full of good people, dedicated to their children, and with healthy priorities. Put plainly, we loved it here. But the school closures shocked me out of my complacency.
I had heard about the district’s DEI initiative. I thought it was a waste of resources and, frankly, silly; but I did not pay it much attention. It was when I was working through LCUSD materials about school reopening that I saw documents, reports, resources and recommendations about LCUSD’s DEI initiative. They disturbed me.
I was even more disturbed when I saw what was happening across our country. First slowly, and then at speed, the most influential, the most powerful and the most dominant institutions in America adopted, then pressed, and now impose a novel worldview under the label diversity, equity and inclusion. But the word “worldview” is insufficient to describe what has emerged, isn’t it? What we are seeing in America is an effort to redefine objective reality, to create a new world where nothing is immutable, everything is subject to the will, and the will is limited only by power.
The mechanism of this redefinition it to evaluate every human interaction and connection against an ever-evolving ideology of sex, race and politics. This is a totalizing effort, where everything in culture, civilization and society is sexualized, racialized and politicized. I see in the DEI initiative the seeds of this totalizing force. I’ve already seen it in my children’s classrooms. I don’t like it. For the first time, our schools will not be teaching our children what they need to know, they will be teaching them what they need to think.
Moving forward with the DEI initiative - whether or not you intend it - would politicize, racialize, and sexualize every interaction among students, faculty, and parents, and divide our community into antagonistic camps. We, together, have a magnificent thing in our La Canada schools. It has been built up over generations. Imposing a DEI regime will wreck it. As it is, our schools have crucial things to address immediately: First, to put all of our efforts into full reopening for in-person classes; and second, to put all our efforts into curing our children’s learning losses caused by the state and county’s closure orders.
It’s up to you. Despite what we saw first seeping, and what we see now flooding across the country, it need not come to our schools. Nothing in life is inevitable, things only happen because people make them happen. What happens in our district depends on the individual decision of each of the five of you. Please do the right thing and stop this.
The Proposed DEI Commitment Statement and Definitions, and DEI Framework
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
George Orwell - Politics and the English Language
For reasons unexplained, the DEI initiative cannot function with words as they are. LCUSD’s proposed DEI initiative can only work if the words underlying the acronym, Diversity, Inclusion and Equity, are created anew. But what are we to make of public school officials redefining words as official policy? I think it should concern anyone, it certainly does me.
Diversity: (noun) The condition of having differences or being different.
Inclusion: (noun) The state of being a part of a whole.
Equity: (noun) Fairness and impartiality.
LCUSD’s DEI initiative, and the DEI documents appearing for a second reading at this Tuesday’s board meeting, propose to redefine these words. We’re all aware that words’ meanings can change and shift organically, typically over generations. But why does the district feel compelled to create these new definitions by decree? Evidently the words’ actual definitions can’t convey sufficient meaning to accomplish what DEI proponents intend to do to our schools.
The deliberate redefinition of words by those in authority has an unhappy history, particularly over the last century. Unsurprisingly, a work of fiction best illustrates the purpose, function, and consequences of rulers remaking language:
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.1
George Orwell considered the manipulation of language in his novel 1984 to be so central to totalitarianism that he included an academic discussion of Newspeak as an appendix to the novel. He posited that if those in power can control how people use words, they can control how people would think.
So the district’s effort to redefine the words diversity, inclusion and equity is offensive in and of itself. But the redefinitions themselves give offense on a purely mechanical level. They are dreadfully written. They are jargon-filled and ungrammatical, full of run-on sentences and non-sequiturs. They are marked by posturing and cant. Our district is supposed to take education seriously. An important element of education that no one disputes is teaching how to convey thought through language. These documents do the opposite.
I fear, however, that the terrible writing has a substantive purpose. The definitions and framework documents seem designed to obscure rather than illuminate, and to conceal rather than to explain.
Where the language is understandable, it is often repugnant. Words are sometimes defined to mean their opposite. For example, the real definition of “equity” is “fairness and impartiality.” As defined in these documents, however, equity becomes a system to treat people with partiality based on “differentiated supports” and groups’ relative histories of “marginaliz[ation].” Does LCUSD really intend to define terms to mean their opposites?
Even worse is the abuse of the word “unsafe.” The DEI Framework states that students and staff have “experienced being unsafe.” Putting aside the statement’s odd grammar, the only honest response is that it is patently false. Under no reasonable definition of the word “unsafe” is this statement true. Does LCUSD truly mean that students and staff have been in actual danger? If so, in danger of what and in danger from whom? Search high and low through these documents and materials and you’ll never find an answer.
That’s because, of course, no one actually believes La Canada students are or have been unsafe. The DEI initiative uses the word “unsafe” not for what it means, but for what it does. An alarm of danger demands action. So the DEI Framework uses the word unsafe not to describe reality, but instead to compel compliance. The only word for that is “dishonest.” And where there is dishonesty - whether deliberate or passive - there can’t be trust. We’re giving you our children. We have to trust you.
So nothing written in the proposed documents has any independent meaning, and there’s its menace. Anyone can pour whatever poison he wants into these empty phrases. I don’t believe you want that to happen, and I don’t believe most parents, teachers or students want that to happen. But it will. We’ve seen what has happened in other institutions and other schools in Southern California and across the country, where every aspect of education has been racialized, sexualized and politicized. I don’t want that in our schools, and I’m confident that most parents share that view.
Please do not move forward on these documents. Please, just stop. If you must continue, then first figure out what you want to say, and then rewrite these documents using clear, declarative English sentences to say it. That way, the La Canada school community will know what you actually intend to do on our behalf.
The DEI Initiative, Its Origins, Its Basis, and Its Effects
“Well, who ya gonna believe me or your own eyes?”
Chico Marx to Margaret Dumont - Duck Soup
Watching the special meeting last week, I think that the board members and administration were sincere when they said that they had no intention of having the DEI initiative establish an ideological dominion over LCUSD. But what the board thinks will happen and what will happen, indeed what is already happening in our schools, are entirely different.
Alas I’m compelled to start with a name that I couldn’t help but notice hasn’t been mentioned for quite some time: Christina Hale-Elliot. I’ve admitted that I’m late to the DEI party, and that commenting on Ms. Hale-Elliot’s report and presentation seven months after-the- fact is like inspecting the barn door’s latch after the horse has disappeared over the horizon. But the initiative’s problems were made manifest by Ms. Hale-Elliot, and the toxins she introduced continue to poison the DEI process, the classrooms, and the community.
Looked at honestly, Hale-Elliot’s examination of LCUSD shows a very successful, high-achieving, harmonious, and healthy school district. Where her report used valid methodology, it made valuable observations and suggestions. But overall it was social-scientific malpractice. The bulk of the report was worthless at best, and poisonous at worst. The methodology for assessing parent views was terrible (the number of parents consulted was under thirty, almost all self-selected), many of the survey questions were vague, and anecdote was elevated to scientific fact. Ms. Hale-Elliot used all of these flawed elements to impose her prejudices as recommendations, without any evidence that they were necessary or helpful.
At bottom, Hale-Elliot started with her conclusion, that education needs to be remade according to a political, racialist ideology. And despite there being no basis for concluding that LCUSD needs or even wants it, she concluded that ideology must be imposed on us. If we accept that, we’ll be introducing to our community conflict and division, hatred and anger, and injury and harm, all where it didn’t exist before.2
Hale-Elliot, however, made two valuable observations. One is that, given LCUSD’s unique ethnic and demographic mix, it would likely aid instruction if faculty had more training on some of the large ethnic and religious subcultures in the district. Fairly viewed, this is a matter of effective pedagogy which doesn’t need an initiative to pursue it.3
Her other worthwhile observation is that students and staff have heard slurs and offensive comments on campus.4 This is a problem that the district should address. If a student or adult behaves cruelly or uncivilly to anyone at school, by word or deed, he or she should be disciplined. This is a question of establishing and maintaining an effective discipline system. It does not require a separate initiative or an overhaul of our school system. There is no evidence suggesting that a DEI initiative would offer any advantage over a straightforward system that disciplines and corrects people who use foul language or make cruel comments at our schools. That is common sense; the relationships among our students, parents, faculty and staff should be based in kindness. Growing a culture of kindness in our schools would reap manifold benefits.
I use the word kindness deliberately. As discussed above, words and their meaning are important. I’ll return to the word kindness at the end of this letter, what it really means, and how DEI will kill it.
The malignancies Hale-Elliot injected into the district’s DEI process outlasted her; they grew and festered. At last Monday’s meeting the board appeared to have been sincerely surprised by parents’ concerns about DEI importing critical race theory into our schools. As I pointed out, however, the district’s own DEI resources page had around two dozen articles and links, almost all of which were steeped in critical theory. For example, the first article’s title was “There Are No Apolitical Classrooms.” The page has been taken down, but most of the linked articles I reviewed were dedicated to the proposition that our classrooms, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, were to be workshops forging the tools that will tear down our culture and society, and that a utopia would magically spring from their ruins.
So although it’s all well and good that the district has removed the DEI resources page from its website, those materials were deliberately selected and included by someone. It wasn’t accidental. So whatever the board’s intention, the DEI initiative itself has told the LCUSD community that its purpose is to impose an ideological regime in our schools. That being the case, why should parents believe that your intentions will control what will happen in classrooms?
We have ample, concrete evidence that our classrooms are becoming what you have said you do not want. DEI is already displacing academics. Our family had the experience last year of a teacher spending weeks teaching students about racial stereotyping and prejudice to the exclusion of the actual academic subject. This teacher was a very effective and skilled instructor, was kind and generous to students, and was exactly the type of conscientious educator we want in our LCUSD classrooms. Nevertheless, our child was inadequately instructed in that academic subject last year (remote learning certainly didn’t help), and this year’s teacher in the subject has had to spend time and resources on remedial work.
More concerning was another class where the teacher spent around three days on a curriculum of “unpacking identity.” It involved students “assembling” their identities with the aid of a list of “Common Identity Characteristics.” Those included “Physical Gender,” “Gender Identity,” “Sexual Orientation,” “ Religion,” and “Race.” It concluded with each student preparing a “Diagram of Self.”5 So these children were taught, as fact, a specific understanding that who they are - their self - is an assembly of interchangeable elements of identities.
This is wrong. It is not any business of the La Canada Middle School to catechize children in a newly-prescribed definition of what makes them human. Does the district really intend to have its middle-school students taught a novel (and, in my view, destructive) metaphysics of personhood, not as a philosophy to consider and compare among others as an academic exercise, but as a factual truth?
Can anyone honestly predict the consequences of this, and does anyone genuinely believe it will take us somewhere good?
If You Don’t Act To Stop This Now, Where Will It Take Us?
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?W.B. Yeats - The Second Coming
Our district doesn't need a DEI regime; all the facts and evidence show that we have solid, well-performing schools, with a healthy community, engaged students, and effective faculty. The crucial areas where the district must apply its resources are first, to put all efforts into full reopening for in-person classes; and second, to cure our children’s learning losses caused by the state and county’s closure orders. Our focus needs to be on education, not indoctrination.
Parents are already removing their children from the district because of what they’ve seen, and what they see coming. We know at least four families who are not continuing at the upper school due, in part, to classroom politicization. We know several who have left the district altogether. At least a half-dozen families we know are seriously considering leaving. There are certainly many more.
The Hale-Elliot report made much of her observation that there is a “culture of fear and/or silence” in the La Canada school community. Hale-Elliot never explained whether that was a direct quotation, how many people said something similar, or whether it was said at all. She implied, however, that the district needed to implement her recommendations to counter that fear. But the actual context of her statement belied her implication. What she actually said was that people were reluctant to discuss issues of race. So for all the cant we are hearing about “safety” and “fear” the Board must acknowledge the fear’s source. I have spoken with at least a dozen parents who oppose the DEI initiative but will not speak publicly. They have a genuine fear that, if they identify themselves, DEI proponents will publicly accuse them of racism. Such an accusation, though grossly unfair, would destroy their businesses and careers. They’ve seen it happen over and over again to other people. That is the sick anti-culture that is spreading across our country. We must fight its spread in La Canada.
Imposing a DEI program would introduce conflict where there was none, and racialize and politicize every interaction among students, staff, and parents. It will wreck our district. We’ve already seen it wreck the local independent schools. On a personal note, the Pasadena independent school I attended from kindergarten through twelfth grade is now unrecognizable. It is ten times as expensive as when I attended and devotes substantial resources toward ideological indoctrination; no dissent is tolerated, and independent thought among students is punished. It is training its students to be enforcers of this new, all-encompassing ideology. This was a school that for more than fifty years I felt was like family.
It would be a tragedy to see that here. Our family came here from Pasadena to get our children the best education in mathematics, literature, grammar, writing, history, science, and languages. None of us came here to have our kids politically indoctrinated. But LCUSD proposes creating a program to teach students not what they need to know, but what they need to think.
That should help explain the alarm I felt about the “unpacking identity” exercise assigned to my kids. What it taught as fact was a new conception of what it means to be human, a novel metaphysics of personhood. It taught that what makes you a human, your “self”, is a selection of elements of identity: physical, mental, spiritual, and sexual. These elements can be mixed and matched, assembled and disassembled - subject only to will.
But I believe that conception of personhood is false. A child is not a collection of identities any more than a tree is a collection of sticks. To be human is to be an organic whole, born as an infant, raised as a child, and made into an adult. Humans are not assembled from parts in a consumer catalogue. So what I have seen this year is my children’s school trying to teach my children, as fact and using the language of DEI, a dehumanizing metaphysics of personhood.
Do you genuinely think that teaching children this new worldview will bring them joy, love or health? Do you genuinely believe that this will end in anything good? This is not a foundation on which a new civilization can be built, instead it’s a solvent to dissolve the civilization that we have. I see it bringing our children sorrow, I see it bringing our children hate, and I see it bringing our children death. So again, please, just stop.
I said earlier that I would return to the idea of kindness, and the word “kind.” As noted, one of the few worthwhile observations from the district’s DEI exercise was to focus attention on how to discourage students and staff from using slurs and cruel, foul language. The cure is for the district to encourage kindness. But pursuing DEI, emphasizing race and division, would do the opposite - it would preclude kindness. We got a taste of it at last week’s meeting. A DEI proponent submitted a comment accusing people like me of racism, and called us “haters.” That kind of language is common today across the country, but is less common here in our small city. If you install a DEI regime, we’ll see more and more of it in La Canada.
The word “kind” comes from the same ancient root as the word “kin.” Thus, the core meaning of kindness is to treat others as your kin, as your family, as your own flesh and blood.
But DEI ideology makes that impossible. It is based entirely on dividing us each from the other, dividing us by race, sex and politics. It ensures permanent conflict. It demands that we remain strangers to one another, seeing one another as foreigners, not neighbors, as enemies, not friends. It makes kinship with one another impossible, it makes kindness impossible, and it demands intolerance and hate. That is the world that is being built by DEI.
I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want my children taught that. Whether or not that happens is up to each of you. What kind of world do you want to build? Several pages back I observed that nothing in life is inevitable, things only happen because people make them happen. Each of us has moments in our lives when what we do has consequences for ourselves and for others. This is your time. By creating the DEI initiative you’ve opened a Pandora’s box, and released destructive forces. You need to close it up again.
What happens in our school district, and ultimately what happens to our children, depends on what this board collectively decides; and that depends on the individual decision of each of the five of you. Please do the right thing and stop this.
Very truly yours,
/s/Mark M. Kassabian
Mark M. Kassabian
George Orwell (1949), 1984 (Appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak.”)
A discussion of the problems with the Hale-Elliot Assessment could consume fifty pages, even without the extra-credit project of analyzing her appalling presentation at the August 11, 2020 board meeting.
Hale-Elliot suggested that the solution is to force teachers to take classes in various ethnic studies. Putting aside the lack of academic value of the typical ethnic-studies curriculum (as opposed to genuine academic fields such as [name ethnicity] language, literature, history or anthropology), forcing teachers to take a “studies” class wouldn’t prepare them for the mix of students in LCUSD, whereas an introduction to the actual mix of peoples we have here would.
I could never find any actual explanation of the incidents that were reported in the newspaper, what was said, by whom - or even whether the incidents actually occurred.
Again, this was a very good teacher; thoughtful, kind and generous to the students; and, when teaching the actual academic subject, conscientious and effective. At our request, the teacher allowed our child to opt out of the exercise with no repercussions.