By: Diane Benjamin
Unit 5 jumped on the Equity bandwagon before looking at where they were jumping to. They hired a company called Systemic Educational Equity, LLC, I don’t have the date they were hired.
I do have some of the payments Unit 5 made to them, I’m betting their are more:
Unit 5’s payments and agendas aren’t easy to search. If you want to find more payments, they are buried in the meeting agendas: https://meetings.boardbook.org/Public/Organization/1482
This is a link to the report Unit 5 received: https://www.unit5.org/cms/lib/IL01905100/Centricity/Domain/3645/EA%20FINAL%20McLean%20SD%205.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3_FZhYLgUtxyuVEFpFtnLgzlxNA5CeuEZuZb2sYYlHZtxCgzIn9S1Xk4Q
That report is 132 pages long.
I recently did a story about this company and it’s founder: https://blnnews.com/2021/11/09/meet-dr-ivette-dubiel/
This company has been cashing in on Equity Audits. But are they worth the money?
The Urbana School District #116 Board of Education recently decided not to hire this company after comments from parents. Urbana started the “Equity” journey with a Task Force that included a broad range of members instead of hiring a consultant: https://usd116.org/equity/
Now see this document: https://whyambee.medium.com/systemic-educational-equity-and-predatory-capitalism-b047648ab975
The title sums up the findings: Systemic Educational Equity and Predatory Capitalism
It is a review of what Systemic Educational Equity, LLC produces, it is aimed at the Urbana school district. They compared 3 reports produced by Systemic Educational Equity for 3 different school systems, one of them was Unit 5. This company wants to be hired to fix the problems it claims exist, an obvious conflict of interest.
Excerpts:
That $40,000 number is why I think Unit 5 likely paid them more than what is above. The entire review document is worth reading. The Unit 5 School Board jumped at “wokeness Equity” instead of doing the hard work of looking at the district themselves or creating their own Equity Task Force.
The School Board members up for election in 2023 badly need replaced! Whoever told them to hire this company needs shown the door too.
District 87 has a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee: https://www.district87.org/domain/2157
The committee was formed in January of 2021. There are still no agendas or reports from the subcommittees. The three committees supposedly meet monthly. Evidently a FOIA is required to find out what they are up to.
Excellent reporting Diane!
Systemic LLC has smartly placed themselves between Billions of dollars of federal aid money pouring into the schools and lazy or confused school districts that just want to do something/anything to comply with the moronic ISBE’s Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leadership mandate. And they can spit these canned Equity Action Plans and Equity Audits out so fast your head will spin.
I suspect that everyone involved knows that this scam will do little to nothing to improve the decades old academic failure. But who can resist $$$$? I’ll predict that we will see reduced academic scores in a few years because of all this malarkey.
Stay tuned, more soon
These “audits” are generally a mix of virtue signaling and a form of insurance against the woke mob who would just assume label anything and anyone it disagrees with a “racist.” No one dares object or question spending on this “audit” for fear of being called same.
So glad to have read this article, “Systemic Educational Equity and Predatory Capitalism.” I actually read through most of the report, in spite of it’s length, and recognized some glaring issues with this so called report. I hope most of the teachers just ignored this report and didn’t bother wasting their time. Or, for those who did read the report I hope they recognized it for the unscholarly garbage that it is. Where’s the assessment of student’s ability to do math? Spell? Write? Read? That would be a much more insightful and useful report.
I also read through the article. A well written description of the fraud of Equity peddlers.
Equity in word is called “Fairness”.
Equity in action is – Reparations, Retribution, Revenge, Discrimination, Freedom to loot, Rioters become heroes, Violence and crime become acceptable.
Ivette Dubiel helped create Illinois’ Culturally Responsive Learning Standards with ISBE. I believe she works for ISBE as well. Antioch School District 34 also hired this grifter.