The great grift known as DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion—suffered a setback after a recently appointed school official in California was exposed as a fraud.
Studies have shown that schools with DEI departments actually suffer from increased gaps in achievement, and the Left’s push to add such positions also has come under scrutiny due to the costly salary demands and nebulous job descriptions.
Meet UC Berkeley’s new Vice Chancellor of Equity & Inclusion. “[Her] identity is Latina, first born, raised by a single mom,” and she deals with the “emotional toll” of doing DEI-BJ work and “dismantling systems of oppression” through “mindfulness breathing.”
Salary: $325,000. pic.twitter.com/ucSAnyPFAC
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) December 13, 2021
Daniel Lee, the California Department of Education’s recently appointed superintendent of equity, was likely to cast further doubt on the motives of wokesters seeking to capitalize on the trendy professional field.
After a Politico investigation revealed that he wasn’t even a resident of the state of California, Lee—a longtime friend of California school Superintendent Tony Thurmond—resigned from his newly created position, Sacramento’s ABC News 10 reported.
“Daniel Lee, a psychologist, life coach and self-help author, owns a Pennsylvania-based psychology firm and is the president of the New Jersey Psychological Association’s executive board,” reported Politico.
“He has also been serving as a deputy superintendent for the California Department of Education since July 2020, a role dedicated to the success of children of color that was originally backed by a foundation grant but is now funded by state taxpayers.”
Politico noted that Lee owns a home in Pennsylvania and recently voted there.
Lee’s biggest qualification seems to be that he was a groomsman in Thurmond’s wedding, according to the report by Politico.
California is illegally paying six figures to a “Superintendent of Equity” who lives and works as a life coach in Philadelphia. He was in the wedding of our state schools chief who hired him. pic.twitter.com/euhRBmJMRk
— Kevin Kiley (@KevinKileyCA) December 14, 2021
Addressing the California Assembly’s Education and Health Committees in October, Lee said that there was a mental health crisis in California schools among the student population.
“We have to change the climate and the space of schools,” Lee said according to Fox News 40. “We’re dealing with grief, we’re dealing with wildfires, and that’s a whole level of environmental trauma that we need to think about as we’re rolling out these projects.”
Others think that the real crisis is how Lee got appointed to the position to begin with—an appointment that may have been illegal.
“It’s good that he resigned because, apparently, this was against the law that he was hired in the first place,” said Assemblyman Kevin Kiley, R-Rocklin, the vice chairman of the Assembly Education Committee according to Fox News 40. “But we also need an investigation into exactly how he got on the taxpayer dime in the first place.”
And least one outsider complained that the appointment of Lee just furthered the inequities suffered by people of color in California’s school system.
“Irrespective of who it is, to have someone from out of state who is not familiar with California’s dynamics and politics and challenges come in and attempt to do this work only furthers the fundamental problem, which is that the California Department of Education fails to adequately monitor schools for inequities and push for enforcement,” Carl Pinkston, director of the Black Parallel School Board in Sacramento, told Politico.
