{"id":295716,"date":"2024-09-29T07:07:37","date_gmt":"2024-09-29T07:07:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=295716"},"modified":"2024-09-30T07:48:49","modified_gmt":"2024-09-30T07:48:49","slug":"parent-group-demands-federal-probe-into-ny-school-districts-race-based-hiring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=295716","title":{"rendered":"Parent group demands federal probe into NY school district’s ‘race-based’ hiring"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kristina Watrobski \u2013 KFOX.com Sept 26, 2024<\/strong><\/h1>\n

A parents’ rights group is calling for a federal investigation into a New York school district over its “race-based” approach to hiring and retaining teachers.<\/p>\n

Parents Defending Education (PDE) sent a letter to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last week outlining its concerns. The parents’ rights group claims the Rochester City School District (RCSD) is violating Title VII by updating its “equity policy” to “implement quotas for hiring diverse educators and staff.”<\/p>\n

PDE points to the district’s Racial Equity Advocacy Leadership (REAL) Team Plan as evidence for its claim, as well as a November 2022 school board presentation titled “Staff Diversity & Staffing Update: ‘Building a workforce our students need.'”<\/p>\n

The November 2022 presentation<\/a> explained that students benefit from having teachers with “a variety of different backgrounds, races, and ethic groups.” It noted that, at the time, students of color represented 86% of the RCSD student population, while 25% of teachers were considered teachers of color.<\/p>\n

One of RCSD’s teacher recruitment goals at the time was to “increase [the] number of teachers of color who are bilingual,” according to the presentation. A strategy included in the presentation was to ensure some “trained recruitment ambassadors” were graduates of HBCUs, otherwise known as historically Black colleges and universities.<\/p>\n

RCSD’s REAL Team Plan <\/a>outlined similar priorities to those in the November 2022 presentation. The team’s mission statement was described as “work toward ensuring that staffing of the RCSD will reflect the racial composition of the student population,” and one of its goals included “recruit and retain significantly greater numbers of qualified, appropriately credentialed, underrepresented race and class-conscious staff of color: African American, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American.”<\/p>\n

One of the REAL Team Plan’s marked “measurable outcomes & benchmark due dates” was a 10% “year-over-year improvement in number of staff of color hired.” An included strategy to accomplish the outcome was using “characteristics of race and class conscious teachers” to attract “mission-driven teachers.”<\/p>\n

Therefore, the Rochester City School District\u2019s imposed hiring and recruitment process underscore that not all candidates are weighed the same through the hiring process \u2014 and that this exclusion would be based on an individual\u2019s race,” PDE’s letter reads.<\/p>\n

PDE Vice President Caroline Moore told Crisis in the Classroom (CITC) she finds the practices “appalling.”<\/p>\n

“Under the guise of ‘mission-driven’ educators, the district is willfully casting teachers aside who are qualified and replacing them with teachers who fit the bill of political race quotas, no matter their credentials,” Moore said. “The mission of a public school is to educate students, not foster an environment where students and teachers are pit against one another because of race and politics.”<\/p>\n

However, some studies back up goals similar to RCSD’s. A 2017 study<\/a> by the Brookings Institution found that having a teacher force reflective of a district’s student demographics can positively impact test scores, attendance and behavior in the short term.<\/p>\n

“For instance, they find that a disadvantaged Black male\u2019s exposure to at least one Black teacher in elementary school reduces his probability of dropping out of high school by nearly 40%,” a summary of the study reads.<\/p>\n

RCSD declined to comment when reached by CITC. A spokesperson for theU.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could not confirm whether an investigation into the district will be opened.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Race is still a factor when hiring teachers in Rochester, New York<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Race"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=295716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":295717,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295716\/revisions\/295717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=295716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=295716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=295716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}