A new report revealed on Wednesday that K-12 school districts with a chief diversity officer [CDO] are associated with greater pandemic learning loss by Black and Hispanic students than other districts during COVID and have secretive transgender policies.
According to the Heritage Foundation report, 48% of school districts with at least 15,000 students had a CDO.
Although the purpose of a CDO in a K–12 school district is to reduce achievement gaps for minority students and address their learning needs, the Heritage Foundation found that large school districts with CDOs suffered greater pandemic learning losses among Black and Hispanic students.
Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Jay Green told FOX News Digital that the federal government provided schools with an additional $190 billion to prevent learning loss during the pandemic.
He added that one of the things school districts spent that money on was hiring chief diversity officers. The investment did not appear to pay off.
"It is now the case that 48% of all school districts with at least 15,000 students has a Chief Diversity Officer, up from 39% two years ago," Green said in a statement. "Rather than stemming learning loss, we found that black and Hispanic students in districts with Chief Diversity Officers experienced greater declines in their math achievement during the pandemic than minority students in districts without a Chief Diversity Officer."
"While these diversity staff were not academically successful, they were associated with the spread of policies to keep secret from parents information about their own child’s gender issues, including changes in names, pronouns, and bathroom usage," Green continued. "In school districts with Chief Diversity Officers, 40% had these gender-secrets policies compared to 17% in districts without those officials."
Furthermore, Blacks and Hispanics experienced larger declines in math achievement and those declines on average exceeded the rate of decline among White students.
Not only did the Heritage Foundation discover that Black and Hispanics suffer greater learning loss than White students, CDOs efforts were geared toward more political activity.
More specifically, districts with CDOs were significantly more likely to have policies to keep children’s gender confusion or dysphoria secret from parents. The Heritage Foundation reported that such a practice showed that CDOs tend to push "ideological orthodoxies opposed by majorities of parents instead of assisting with student learning or closing minority achievement gaps."
School districts passing parental notification policies have been a recent trend. The policy would require staff to inform parents if a student identified as transgender. At least a half dozen districts across California have passed that policy.
The Heritage Foundation report concluded the evidence on learning loss during the pandemic showed that CDOs are not serving their purpose of closing achievement gaps among minorities and Whites.
"CDOs not only failed to stem the magnitude of learning loss by black and Hispanic students during the pandemic, but plausibly worsened achievement gaps," the Heritage report stated.
"Rather than devoting their time to ensuring that minority students took equal advantage of all available learning tools and opportunities, it appears that CDOs were focused on pursuing very different agendas. The evidence connecting the presence of CDOs to policies to keep gender secrets from parents suggests that CDOs are more focused on promoting ideological goals than educational ones."
The COVID-19 pandemic’s toll on the learning of kids across the U.S. was revealed through national test scores released last year that show sharp declines in math and reading.
US MATH, READING TEST SCORES PLUNGE FOR STUDENTS ACROSS COUNTRY FOLLOWING COVID-19 PANDEMIC
Math scores saw their largest decreases ever, while reading scores dropped to levels not seen since 1992 for fourth and eighth graders across the country, according to the Nation’s Report Card.
The average mathematics score for fourth-grade students fell five points from 2019 to 2022. The score for eight-graders dropped eight points. Reading for both grades fell three points since 2019.
Not a single state saw improvement in their average test scores, with some recording no change at all. Schools in large urban districts also reflected the national average.
FOX News' Stephen Sorace contributed to this report.
