Don't Let Fighting DEI Become a Witch Hunt

The fight against bad ideas in education is too important to be waged carelessly

The conservative education watchdog group Defending Education has done important and often brave work exposing ideological overreach in K–12 schools. I’ve cited their reports and findings many times and consider them friends and compatriots, so I don’t say this lightly: they’ve badly misfired with their new report, Consultants in the Classroom: Making Big Money in K-12 Schools. So badly, in fact, that they should withdraw the report and issue a correction and apology.

The report’s central premise is sound—and important. It attempts to pull back the curtain on hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars that school districts have spent on professional development and teacher trainings delivered by outside consultants under the banner of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Defending Ed is right to question the value of such trainings, their ideological bent, and the sheer volume of spending. Parents and taxpayers deserve to know whether these programs are improving student learning or simply enriching a cottage industry of vendors and social justice activists. But the report undermines its own credibility by painting a bullseye squarely—and erroneously—on Amplify Education, Inc., the curriculum and assessment publisher.

Defending Ed filed hundreds of public records requests and found over $123 million spent on “consultants” in 303 “school districts and public entities.” More than half of that total (over $70 million) was spent with Amplify. The report is not comprehensive or intended to be. “There are thousands of school districts throughout the country that have hired hundreds of DEI consultants not listed in this report,” Defending Ed notes. Its findings “should be taken as a small sample of how school districts spend taxpayer dollars.”

That’s all fine and fair, but there’s a problem and it’s a whopper: Amplify is not a DEI consultant at all. It has never conducted a single DEI training nor earned a dollar consulting on diversity, equity and inclusion.

So why is it on the list?

The rationale is that Amplify, like nearly every education company in the country, once posted a corporate statement in support of diversity and inclusion. This came at the height of the George Floyd protests in 2020. Within days of President Trump’s executive order banning certain kinds of DEI training in federally funded programs, Amplify quietly removed that statement from its website, which merely expressed its hope to “make education, and thereby the world, more equitable and accessible.”

That’s it. There were never any Amplify DEI consultants parachuting into classrooms. No bias trainings. No racial affinity groups. No “anti-racist” pedagogy. Just a now deleted and, frankly, anodyne public statement.

This is not a minor oversight on Defending Ed’s part. It’s a category error with serious consequences. Amplify is not in the business of ideological indoctrination; they’re in the business of publishing curriculum—most notably the Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA) program, based on the work of E.D. Hirsch Jr.

I’ve written extensively about Hirsch’s work and consider him the most important thinker in American education of the last half-century. His central insight—that shared knowledge is the key to literacy and that a content-rich curriculum is the best mechanism to advance true educational equity—is, ironically, one of the most powerful rebukes to performative DEI initiatives that prioritize identity talk over academic competence.

To conflate Amplify’s work with DEI snake oil is to get the entire story backward. In state after state—especially red states like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas—CKLA has been adopted as part of science-of-reading reforms that have produced measurable gains in student outcomes, particularly for low-income and minority children. Moreover, the vast majority of school districts cited by Defending Ed aren’t spending lavishly on “equity consultants” at all. They purchased high-quality curriculum with a strong research base and track record of success.

That’s not just defensible—it’s admirable. And it’s working.

One of the ironies here is that Amplify, through its stewardship of Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum, might be the most authentically “equity-driven” force in American education today. Not the equity of lower standards, lost opportunities, and anti-intellectual slogans, but of hard-won literacy and academic competence. Of giving disadvantaged children access to the background knowledge and vocabulary that affluent children seem to acquire by osmosis.

This is precisely the kind of equity that conservatives should embrace. And, in fact, many have. Republican-led states have led the charge in pushing for high-quality instructional materials, requiring evidence-based literacy training for teachers, and setting a higher bar for early reading proficiency. Amplify has become a trusted partner in that work—not because of any ideological leanings, but because its curriculum works and because it was championing the science of reading and knowledge-based curriculum long before these ideas became mainstream.

To include them in a report purporting to expose wasteful spending on ideological training is sloppy at best, and defamatory at worst. At a moment when the political fight over DEI has grown overheated and indiscriminate, such errors only serve to discredit the very real and urgent work of exposing activist overreach in public schools.

Defending Ed’s overreach illustrates the danger of letting ideology override evidence. It’s one thing to critique the growing influence of DEI consultants in schools. It’s quite another to lump together everyone with a passing mention of “equity” in their marketing materials and declare them part of the problem.

Without question, the fight for excellence and transparency in public education needs watchdogs like Defending Education. But it also needs rigor, fairness, and the willingness to admit when a mistake has been made. This report fails that test and should be withdrawn. The error should be acknowledged. And Amplify should be removed from any list of DEI consultants.

The fight against bad ideas in education is too important to be waged carelessly. Conservatives’ credibility depends on getting it right.

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Erika Sanzi, Defending Education’s Director of Outreach, responds: “My team and I stand by this report. We reported on Amplify's public statements about DEI and their promises to integrate it into their services and products. We also reported that they have largely removed these statements from their website. Because they've done remarkable work in literacy in Louisiana and other southern states, it seems like the perfect moment for them to separate themselves by renouncing the public commitments they made to DEI on social media, in their materials and on their website. If they make such a statement, we will gladly add it to the report.”

Author’s note: I worked for the Core Knowledge Foundation from 2007-12 when CKLA was in development and helped negotiate the contract with Amplify, then known as Wireless Generation, to publish and distribute it. I have no current role or financial interest in either.

Photo by Van Tay Media on Unsplash