Former Teacher Who Blew the Whistle on DEI Says the Ideological Takeover Has Only Gotten Worse
A former New Jersey teacher who resigned in 2021 over DEI ideology in schools warns the problem has grown systemic — reaching from teachers' colleges into K-12 classrooms nationwide.
In 2014, students at Dana Stangel-Plowe's New Jersey high school lined up and stepped forward or backward based on their identities. That "privilege walk" exercise, she now says, was the opening move in a systematic ideological transformation of American schools. Five years after she resigned publicly to sound the alarm, she argues the problem has only deepened.
Stangel-Plowe taught English at Dwight-Englewood School, an independent institution in New Jersey, for seven years before her 2021 departure made headlines. She witnessed faculty trainings on privilege, the hiring of a diversity, equity and inclusion officer whose stated goal was to "transform" the school, and traditional authors branded "dead white males" and purged from core curriculum.
"I now understand that the problem wasn't isolated to my school, but instead, it is systemic," Stangel-Plowe wrote in a March 15 op-ed published by the New York Post.
The ideological framework she identified draws from post-Marxist, postcolonial and critical scholarship rooted in the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Paulo Freire and Edward Said. It divides society into rigid identity categories of oppressor and oppressed, with concepts like systemic oppression treated as beyond debate.
At Dwight-Englewood, faculty were told that systemic oppression could no longer be questioned. Colleagues spoke openly about "deprogramming" and "de-radicalizing" students who pushed back. Thursday assemblies featured outside activist speakers and identity-focused sessions designed to "rewire group identity."
"What we are witnessing is a fundamental remaking of the role of the educator," Stangel-Plowe wrote. "I have seen how many well-intentioned educators, in addition to some parents, embrace moderate forms of the ideology when it is packaged as 'equity.' This language sounds like it increases fairness and reduces bias, but it masks the underlying political drivers that shut down alternative viewpoints and, in its most extreme forms, calls for the dismantling of America and its institutions."
The pipeline begins long before a teacher walks into a classroom. As Stangel-Plowe detailed in a February 2026 white paper published by the North American Values Institute, the ideology moves from teachers' colleges and unions directly into K-12 classrooms, reinforced at every step by state accreditation rules, licensure requirements, school boards and curricula.
Organized activists from the Democratic Socialists of America and other political groups are brazenly working their way into the classroom through political and labor union organizing, school district partnerships and curricula that often fixate on Israel, omitting key historical facts and competing perspectives in favor of their biased political narrative, according to Stangel-Plowe.
The DSA, which describes itself as the largest socialist organization in the United States, released a resolution committing to "running candidates in school board races" to "fight right wing and neoliberal attacks." A December 2023 analysis by Parents Defending Education found DSA ties in school boards and teachers unions across at least 15 states.
The organizing is concrete and local. In Oakland, California, DSA celebrated the swearing-in of the Oakland Unified School District's school board president. In 2022, the group endorsed several members of the Oakland Education Association, the district's teachers union. In 2021, the Chicago Teachers Union's vice president appeared on a DSA-led panel discussing "corporate attacks and neoliberal policymaking."
The ideology reaches middle schoolers, too. In February 2026, documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that Oswego District 308 in Illinois divided middle school students by racial background during "Student Support Time" — without notifying parents.
Training materials from a previous district partnership asked participants to "read 'How Privileged Am I' and rank themselves on how privileged they are," with instructions to "generate a privilege list related to P-12 settings for the student and adult educator group assigned to your team by listing ways students and adults may experience systems of advantages or rights that are available to them solely based on their social identities."
Erika Sanzi, senior director of communications at Defending Education, called it what it is. "Calling it a racial affinity group is just a nicer way of saying racial segregation," she said. "These equity assemblies that divide up students by their skin color are without justification, not to mention illegal."
The National Education Association's "Leaders for Just Schools" training program covers oppression, white privilege, microaggressions, biases and racial dialogue. Participants are asked to "identify their privilege" and recall the first time they interacted with someone different from themselves, according to training materials exposed by the Washington Examiner in March 2026.
The program runs through Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" and stages its own "Privilege Walk," where facilitators read statements and participants step forward or backward. Example prompts include: "If you're in a position of power that has traditionally been held by people with dominant identity and social location markers, take one step forward" and "If your primary ethnic identity is 'American,' take one step forward." The training defines oppression as "the one-way systemic mistreatment of a defined group of people, with that mistreatment reinforced and supported by society where one group systematically enjoys privileges while the other group or groups systematically experience disadvantage."
Teachers who dissent have gone to court. In 2020, employees Brooke Henderson and Jennifer Lumley sued the Springfield R-12 School District in Missouri for violating their First Amendment rights during a "Fall District-Wide Equity Training." A PowerPoint warned staff: "Be Professional — Or be Asked to Leave with No Credit."
The district required employees to complete online training modules that forced them to select answers they disagreed with. One trainer told Lumley that black people cannot be racist; when she pushed back, the trainer instructed her to reflect on herself more. The 8th Circuit's majority ultimately ruled that evidence shows "how the school district forced the plaintiffs to accept the school district's views under threat of punishment."
Stangel-Plowe, now chief program officer at NAVI, led the February 2026 white paper that maps the problem and lays out a detailed action program for reversing it. Ben Austin, executive director of Education Civil Rights Now and a former Clinton White House staffer, described the report as diagnosing "an insidious and metastasizing problem infecting American schools."
No school — private, public, rural, suburban, urban — has been spared, Stangel-Plowe argues. Students are censoring themselves. Many are demoralized. And the educator's fundamental role is being reshaped — from teacher to ideological gatekeeper.
The girl who stepped forward or backward in a New Jersey gym in 2014 is grown now. The framework that sorted her by identity has since spread into curricula, unions, school boards and training programs across the country. What happens next depends on whether parents and policymakers act before another generation of children steps into line.