The best books to understand why DEI in schools is under attack

It’s hard to understand why people often don’t like well-educated leaders. When leaders in public or high-profile roles use research, evidence, and facts to guide their work, people often criticize them for acting like “know it alls.”

But great school leaders are well-read and should be interested in evidence and facts. In Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, Hofstadter argues that anti-intellectualism—hostility toward intellectualism, academic theories, and science—is a core American value that applies to politics, religion, and not just education.

Given that the current US politics deemphasizes the importance of reading, studying, and facts, this book helps us understand why many parents and communities don’t value the people who lead schools. This book will help readers understand the current conditions of our country.

As much as the current attacks on DEI may feel new or recent, the use of education and schooling to colonize and assimilate goes all the way back to the founding myths of this country and the aims of stealing land from Indigenous peoples and labor from enslaved Black communities.

This book highlights those histories across time as motivated not by personal malice or differences in cultural beliefs but by settler-colonial economic gain. Those moves were rationalized by the notion of European “civilization” as superior and enforced through violence to erase Native people, cultures, and sovereignty.

The final chapter reminds us that “the past is present” in the fights over who gets to tell the histories and what narratives get valorized or erased; the grab for land, resources, and economic power that underlies the current attacks; and in the ongoing resistance and creativity of Indigenous nations and other minoritized communities to determine their own futures.

It’s a common story on local news channels across the U.S: a suburban school board meeting is standing room only.

Parents and community members take turns stepping to the microphone to voice their discontent about something happening in their local schools—a guest speaker who presents Christopher Columbus’ beliefs about Native Americans, a new course advising approach that increases Black and Latino student enrollment in honors and Advanced Placement courses, or the adoption of a new book about growing up that happens to have LGBTQ characters.

Lewis and Diamond’s Despite the Best of Intentions presents data from a 5-year research project that helps readers understand how parents’ and educators’ deep-seated beliefs and fears get in the way of even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned equity efforts.

The book helps readers understand how resistance to DEI is not always loud and boisterous, but it is persistent and wedded to the status quo.

In 2020, Christopher Rufo launched a media campaign to discredit the rising wave of racial consciousness, honest conversations about U.S. racism, and broad political, business, and education commitments to creating a more racially equitable society. 

To do that, he lumped all attempts at making racial progress under the broad umbrella of Critical Race Theory. Unfortunately, he never provided his audience with a truthful explanation of what Critical Race Theory is all about.

Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well is an essential Critical Race Theory book. It uses historical fiction and satirical allegories to help readers understand that racism is an integral feature of American history and life and that most attempts to eradicate racism, however well-intentioned, do little to make society a better place for people who are not white.

A teacher in Idaho recently made national headlines when she resisted her district’s order to take down a sign in her classroom that read, “Everyone belongs here.” In designating the sign a political statement that did not belong in the classroom, the district turned media and political debates into real-life implications for children and teachers in classrooms across the country.

Carla Shalaby’s book, Troublemakers, never shies away from the tensions of race, gender, class, and identity as she invites us to see schooling through the eyes of young children who have already been designated “troublemakers” for their behavior.

Through engaging portraits of four children, the book helps readers see how the unquestioned structures and interactions with teachers and schools constrain the creativity, agency, and humanity of young children.

In doing so, she illuminates how deeply the everyday interactions with even our youngest students matter and offers hope for realizing education as a practice of democracy and freedom.