The Equity Epidemic Is Hurting America’s Students

D iversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies have become embedded in American education despite President Trump’s efforts to eliminate them and some schools’ attempts to rebrand them. A 2025 investigation found that nearly 24,000 schools in 46 states and the District of Columbia were implementing DEI through policies, strategic plans, or practices, affecting more than 14.6 million students.

Equity in education has come to mean something very different from equal opportunity. Rather than giving every student the same opportunity to succeed based on merit and hard work, equity increasingly focuses on producing equal outcomes, even when doing so means changing grading, discipline, curriculum, and academic expectations.

Consider equity-based grading, which can include giving students partial credit for work they never submit, eliminating penalties for late assignments, allowing repeated test retakes, and eliminating D’s and F’s from the grading scale. Teachers themselves have raised serious concerns about those practices. A 2025 Fordham Institute study found that 81 percent of teachers considered giving partial credit for assignments never turned in harmful, while only 8 percent considered the practice helpful. Students also understand how these practices undermine their education.

Take Josh, a high school student at a supposedly “good” school whose name has been changed to protect his anonymity. He said: “I had a science class where we had unlimited test retakes due to equity. I had a math class with equity grading. I had a history class where you could redo any paper for full credit.”

“Across the board,” he said, “most of the classes have unlimited late work acceptance because it’s seen as unfair to hold students accountable to deadlines because, suppose, a student is from a low-income family and they have a hard time getting home, they shouldn’t have to do any work.”

He observed that because of equity policies and ideology, “All classes have been dumbed down.” Indeed, he said that “equity policies translate to dumbed-down classrooms” and those dumbed-down classrooms “translate to telling students that’s it’s okay to never show up on time, never complete work on time, never put effort into assignments, do not respect authority and the people around them.”

All these equity-based accommodations are meant to ensure that students do not “suffer the consequences of not performing well,” but which in the end, he warns, “reward laziness.”

There is nothing wrong with giving struggling students more help. But helping a student reach a high standard is fundamentally different from changing the standard so that more students appear to succeed.

That distinction matters because grades and diplomas should tell students and parents whether students have learned the proper material. When administrators make it harder to fail, weaken consequences, or reduce academic rigor in pursuit of more equal outcomes, schools can make their numbers look more equitable without making their students better educated. Making it easier to get an A, while eliminating D’s and F’s, can raise students’ grade point averages, but those higher GPA’s can give the false impression of achievement and mask deficiencies in knowledge and learning. This explains the phenomenon of high school graduates with 4.0 GPA’s needing remedial instruction in college.

Graduation rates can also give families an incomplete picture. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu touted a record graduation rate of 81.3 percent for the city’s public schools in 2025, up from 59 percent in 2006. State tests tell a less encouraging story. As Neetu Arnold reported in City Journal, only about 40 percent of Boston’s tenth graders met state expectations in reading and math in 2025, down from 2019 in both subjects. In 2026, that figure fell to 33 percent in each subject.

Signs suggest communities can reconsider policies designed to ensure equal outcomes. In Northern California, school board member Jean Pagnone questioned her district’s equity policy, and in early 2025, she got her board to repeal it. Districts can replace these policies with an equality-of-opportunity approach focused on individual achievement, merit, and high expectations.

Here is the question for schools: Are your grading systems, curriculum, staff training, and other programs helping students master reading, writing, math, and the other knowledge they will need later in life? Or are they primarily improving the district’s statistics, changing demographic outcomes, and promoting a particular ideology? The answer isn’t to make every demographic group produce identical results, but to ensure that every student leaves school more knowledgeable and capable than when they entered.

Grades and diplomas should tell a student and his family that the student can read, write, and do the math expected of them as they advance from one grade level to another and when they graduate from high school. If a district wants more students to get higher grades and obtain their diplomas, it should help students do the real work necessary to earn them.