Urbana, IL is the home of the Illinois premier public university, a famed powerhouse of research and education. Yet, the town itself struggles to teach its kids to read, write, analyze. By any educational metric, the school district, USD116, is lagging compared to demographically or economically similar districts in the state. And the disadvantaged kids fare even worse, deepening the racial and socioeconomic ruts generation after generation.
To address the entrenched injustices, the district established in 2021 an Equity Task Force.
One of the key steps of the Task Force was to initiate an analysis of the causes of the persistent inequities of the outcomes. An Equity Assessment (or Audit), the Task Force documents said, “will help us identify the populations and processes that need our attention most. This assessment will give us a more comprehensive picture of our District systems as a whole, focusing on our historically underserved or underrepresented groups.” “Tackling equity issues”, they iterated, “requires an understanding of the root causes of the outcome disparities within our society.”
Understanding what works and what does not, which actions would have an impact, and which would be just vanity projects, is vital. Shall we ramp up dyslexia testing? Where shall we expand after school programs first? Shall we change the elementary math curriculum? Without addressing a myriad of such questions the district flies blind, looking for solutions to problems that don’t exist, and completely failing at solving those that do.
To gain this insight, the district turned to experts. They shunned the university next door, with its departments of Sociology and Statistics, mighty College of Education and pioneering data science research clusters. They also ignored the existing recommendations from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
The district administration decided to look for solutions in the private sector, selecting a company to do an ‘equity audit.’
The company they zeroed in on is called Systemic Educational Equity, LLC. Barely over a year in existence, it has already conducted scores of the ‘equity audits’ for various school districts across Illinois. That gave us an opportunity to glimpse what their products look like.
We took three random ‘equity audit’ reports performed for school districts, — two in greater Chicago, one in Bloomington-Normal, — that are fairly different in their sizes, populations, economy. The reports, each 120–150 pages long, promised quantitative and qualitative research, leading to findings and suggestions for the next steps.
The ‘quantitative research’ turned out to be that permanent feature of a bad course project: pages and pages of plots and tables lifted somewhere (in our case, from the state and district websites) with no analysis, however basic. The only processing we could detect was the conversion (sometimes, erroneous, — the bars didn’t match the tables) of the short time series into the page-filling bar charts. A simple but effective bloatware technique.
The data cited in the reports were collected — mandated by the state and federal regulations, — by all public school districts in the state. The data are useful, if rarely granular enough: researchers are relying on them to figure out what is going on in the schools, in Illinois and beyond.
But processing the data, even at the most basic level, is work, and that is not happening in the ‘equity audits.’ The reports just dump back to the districts what the districts generated themselves, in essence selling to them their own unprocessed, uninterpreted data. Around 40% of the reports acreage is dedicated to this useless exercise.
The numbers are dry matter, — let’s look at the qualitative research the ‘equity audits’ contain — the outcomes of the focus groups of students, staff and parents the company conducted. These focus groups were asked to discuss somewhat vague questions on how welcoming or not the schools are, or how accepted or not the students, or parents feel. No actionable knowledge emerged (or could emerge, — the lack of questions that could identify the causes of the inequity of outcomes between the different groups of population seemed almost intentional) from these interviews. The students might praise some teachers, or complain about others. The staff might extol some welcoming messaging, or lament its absence. What actually impacts the educational process is not discussed at all.
To the defense of the Systemic Educational Equity team we should acknowledge that focus groups are a notoriously difficult (at least if you want to understand the reality on the ground) sociological tool. Perhaps they mastered it, but this is hard to deduce from the outcomes. Methodology is also a mystery: there is almost no account of the mechanics of the focus groups. There is no indication of how the focus groups were assembled and screened, how the interviews were structured and mediated, and how the published excerpts — the key research outcome of the process — were selected. The standard apparatus of scientific inquiry is entirely missing from the focus group reports. This sad circumstance prevents us from judging whether ineptitude or intent were the root cause of the vacuity of the outcomes of qualitative research in the ‘equity reports’.
The bad course project report vibe did not end at the ‘quantitative and qualitative research’ sections. One pattern that struck us as we were reading them was how remarkably alike the reports from the very different school districts were.
To check the hunch, we ran on these documents a text matching software (you can use it to find hidden quotes from Moby Dick in Infinite Jest, — or plagiarism in your students coursework). The process returned hundreds of copied phrases, many of which were common to all three reports we considered.
Some self-plagiarism, let’s admit it, is understandable: some boilerplate language is always forced by the genre, having little to do with the core (your end user agreements for OnlyFans.com and Bible.is look pretty much the same). Still: even if Systemic Educational Equity assumed nobody would read the theoretical introductions to their ‘equity audit’ reports (all complete with the obligatory cartoon showing persons of different height watching a show from behind a fence), should they copy every sloppy truism? should these introductions be saturated with sentences like “have we examined everything all with an equity lens?”
But who cares about the theoretical foundations; it is the finding and recommendations that we are looking for, correct? Well, self-plagiarism was especially glaring and galling in the findings and recommendations sections. The findings were virtually identical across the districts we surveyed: a copy-paste galore. The recommendations too, were easily interchangeable.
A naive observer suspecting mere laziness here would be wrong. There is method in’t. Report after report, the company was telling the districts that a self-fulfilling systemic failure will stay with them no matter what they undertake. To quote the (identical) recommendation from all three reports we surveyed: “Equity work and development is never-ending. There is no destination to it.”
Dear parents, we are sorry, but nothing can be done. The struggle should continue indefinitely. Just don’t ask when 100% literacy will be achieved, we are busy on the never-ending march to no destination. (Meanwhile Systemic Educational Equity, ‘a full service consulting firm,’ offers follow up audits, professional development, and reports, reports, reports, paid for by your school district in convenient quarterly installments.)
We hope the picture is clear by now. The so-called ‘equity audits’ offered by Systemic Educational Equity, are fraudulent wares sold by an unscrupulous merchant to buyers who should have known better. The price is pretty steep, by the way: the audits — which in all seriousness, one person can produce over a couple of weeks, with focus groups and all, — are around $40 thousand each. This money is enough to hire, say, a dyslexia specialist for a year, changing the life trajectories of a dozen disadvantaged kids.
Yet this waste of public funds is not what makes us really mad. It is the travesty of faking the work of racial and economic justice, while poisoning the well of goodwill the people have towards that absolutely necessary effort. Who would trust the school district the next time when they tell us that a study of inequity is needed? Who will believe them?
We can easily see how tempting it might be to some to describe the Systemic Educational Equity work as Critical Race Theory ran amok. This would be a misconception. (Although, we suspect, the company would love to see this description triggering a predictable all-consuming fight between ideological factions, distracting us forever from their business practices.)
Owners of Systemic Educational Equity are not ideological fanatics. They are market opportunists. They are the manifestation of that unstoppable urge to squeeze some dollars out of the system, morals be damned. The company operators are fearless creators of jobs not needed. Responding to the societal desire to address a social ill, they cooked up a simulacrum of a remedy and went on a sales campaign. They are entrepreneurs who realized that faking the language of racial justice and producing empty charts is enough to fool school boards and make pretty good money in the process. They are playing by the rules (the company founder copyrighted their groundbreaking “Five Strands of Systemic Equity”, so that no one else can sell reports produced using their pioneering Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V technology to school districts), and are getting rich fast, with a seven-digit revenue over the past year. If there is a business success story, that’s it.
But the Illinois school districts are not Chambers of Commerce. They should care about education more than about market innovations in shady schemes. As with all snake oil merchants, it is up to the responsible government agencies not to fall for the grift. Just as FDA keeps fake cures off the market, it’s up to the school boards to stop Systemic Educational Equity (or their competitors, which, we are sure, are lurking out there) from fleecing us and subverting our desire for justice.
School districts should learn from the mistakes of others, not repeat them. They should stop hiring Systemic Educational Equity, LLC, right here, right now.
School boards, don’t be the last in the chain of victims to the scam about to implode. Be the first one to say firmly: no, thank you. Whatever your findings are, we do have a destination: to make sure that our kids are taught and taught well.