More than 15,000 youth, educators, scholars, and community members gathered in Philadelphia for the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting. On its second day, an article published in the Washington Examiner criticized this year’s conference theme, “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.” Its author advocated for the 108-year-old organization to be defunded. This is a terrible, yet useful example of the myriad ways many conservatives are making politically harmful, exaggerated claims about what schools, companies, and organizations are doing to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Conference attendees were mostly university-based faculty members and graduate students. Scholars who work at research organizations, think tanks, K-12 school district offices, and other educational organizations also were there. Those who work at public institutions, as the article noted, often use taxpayer funds to help finance their conference participation. Some are able to spend grant dollars from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, and other public funding agencies when they present findings from their research at the AERA conference. They should no longer be permitted to do so, the author argued. In addition, he called for the defunding of the Association’s partnerships with the NSF and other federal agencies.
Essentially, the critique was that the Association has become too woke, far left, and insufficiently focused on seemingly more significant educational problems. AERA has more than 25,000 dues-paying members. Any claims of DEI extremism or ideological lopsidedness aren’t based on a survey of them. There was no chorus of disgruntled attendees walking around the Philadelphia Convention Center loudly complaining that the conference or the larger association was frustratingly extremist and alienating for scholars whose research doesn’t focus on race-related topics.
Full disclosure: I was the 2020-21 AERA president and I’ve served six years in elected governance leadership roles for the Association. I’ve also been a dues-paying member, volunteer, conference proposal reviewer, and annual meeting presenter over the past two decades. In addition, I’ve served as associate editor of one of AERA’s top peer-reviewed journals. The article’s author, a well-known conservative, wasn’t at this year’s four-day annual meeting. It’s therefore unclear on what evidence his presumptions about what occurred there are based. I was there every day, from beginning to end. I witnessed firsthand the presentation of studies that represented an inclusive range of research methods, analytical frameworks, and political viewpoints.
This year’s conference was the first to explicitly name racism in its theme. The overwhelming majority of papers, panels, posters, and roundtables weren’t about the theme. Instead, they were focused on an expansive array of topics related to schools, postsecondary institutions, and other contexts in which teaching and learning occur. This is the case every year. The president selects an annual meeting theme, articulates a vision for it, and organizes a series of keynotes and invited sessions around it. But members who submit proposals for presentation aren’t penalized if their research studies are unrelated to the president’s theme.
Hundreds of sessions this year included scholarship on COVID-19 era learning loss, absenteeism, artificial intelligence, cellphones and social media, school choice, college costs, and free speech in higher education – these are all topics the Examiner article writer suggested should’ve been addressed at the AERA annual meeting. They were. Science-based reading was also on his list. One session was titled, “Decades of Reading Research: Challenging the Science of Reading.” Also presented was, “The Science of Teaching Reading,” a two-part session that spanned three hours. There were many more sessions on reading throughout the conference, few of which centered on racism. Entering “reading” into the online searchable conference schedule returns 316 results. Nearly 200 results for “math.”
As is the case every year, scholars came from all across America and 59 countries. They wouldn’t have were there space for only one kind of work or a narrow determination of what counts as valuable research. It’s also worth noting that AERA is more than its four-day annual meeting. The Association exists 361 additional days each year (plus one during leap years).
Its seven peer-reviewed journals annually receive thousands of submissions and publish hundreds of studies; each journal is highly ranked. In addition to advancing knowledge, improving practice, and informing educational policymaking, these articles are important in tenure and promotion processes – presenting at the AERA annual meeting is, too. Hence, defunding the Association would be harmful to people’s careers, including both liberal and conservative professors whose research has nothing to do with race.
In at least four ways, the published critique of this year’s AERA annual meeting is emblematic of the larger politicized attacks on DEI across professional contexts. First, people are recklessly criticizing something they haven’t experienced. Writing a scathing review of a book that one hasn’t read based on its title would be both intellectually lazy and dishonest. Likewise, calling for the defunding of something based on its theme is dangerously mendacious and unreasonable. I suspect that few policymakers who’ve passed legislation that led to the elimination of DEI initiatives in K-12 schools, higher education institutions, and public agencies have actually observed or participated in the programs they defunded.
Second, because DEI or racism is in the title of something, it’s presumably divisive and partisan. Furthermore, there’s an erroneous belief that any focus on these topics occurs at the exclusion of others. Again, racism was dealt with at the conference, but the overwhelming majority of what was presented across 2,712 sessions focused on other topics, often with no explicit consideration of racist systems, structures, laws, policies, histories, behaviors, and mindsets. Even though attendees weren’t surveyed about their political parties and perspectives, its highly likely that thousands of presenters and participants were conservatives. They didn’t storm out in protest or otherwise publicly declare feeling collectively excluded.
Third, DEI opponents typically deem more important just about anything and everything else that occurs in educational institutions. In schools, English, math, social studies, science, and other subjects are irrefutably important. In business, executives and shareholders usually place the highest value on profits, innovation, competition, and sustainability. In both domains, what’s always been important can remain focal and live alongside DEI. In other words, one doesn’t require forfeiture in exchange for the other. At the AERA annual meeting, the presidential theme productively co-existed with hundreds of other perennial and contemporary education topics.
Finally, people who attack emphases on racial justice too often fail to specify how racism and racial inequities are to be fixed. On most metrics of educational progress and wellbeing, there are quantifiably persistent and pervasive gaps between students of color and their white counterparts. Racist incidents occur in far too many K-12 schools and higher education institutions. Government agencies repeatedly fall short in correcting racial inequities.
Our nation’s problem with racism is as old as the United States itself. Why, then, is it so seemingly unacceptable to bring a focus on one of our country’s most enduring and consequential educational problems to America’s biggest gathering of researchers? Like other vexing issues, ignoring this one won’t make it go away. In fact, doing so will sustain and exacerbate racial inequities in schools, colleges, and universities. The same is likely to occur in other domains in which DEI and racial justice efforts are being destructively dismantled. AERA shouldn’t be defunded. In fact, its members need considerably more public funds to conduct, present, and publish their high-quality research.
As associations across professions become demographically more diverse and inclusive of DEI-related topics, there will be additional pushback from conservatives as well as from members who are committed to keeping those organizations the same as they’ve always been. Their leaders must step up to ensure that what’s being taught and learned at conferences and elsewhere equips members with the knowledge and tools required for success in a diverse twenty-first century democracy.