June 17, 2022

Depending on your viewpoint, you may need to breathe a sigh of relief or exasperation regarding the next statement: In general, very little has really been accomplished as a result of recent DEIJ plans at schools, and it looks to stay that way unless schools can forge a path between curriculum, pedagogy, and compromise to create truly impactful programs.

The likely outcome is that DEIJ work, despite its relative attention and extrinsic celebrations on websites and school materials, will go the way of PBL (project-based learning):  a program with great potential, relegated to being a bad date for the standards-driven scope and sequence heavy curriculum that has embedded itself into American K-12 education over the past 30 years. Schools realized at the dawn of the pandemic that this lack of progress on PBL, as well as SEL, left them exposed to a poorly conceived offspring of PBL, project-oriented assessment, and at the time of George Floyd, to a similar offspring of SEL, context-poor advisory support with discrete workshops. The traditional curriculum remained largely untouched. To better understand these scenarios, let’s review the history of American curricular ideologies in our education system.

The American education system has…