Posted on May 6, 2015

School Districts Spending Millions on ‘White Privilege’ Training for Employees

Steve Gunn, EAG News, May 6, 2015

The Pacific Educational Group (PEG) espouses a lot of controversial and stereotypical concepts regarding minority students in K-12 schools.

For instance, the organization teaches that black kids are less likely to respond to fundamental ideas like working hard to achieve success, or being on time for school or work, because those ideas are supposedly foreign to African-American culture.

PEG is literally selling notions like that to American public schools, and the schools are buying them, at a cost of millions of tax dollars every year.

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EAGnews recently obtained a partial list of American school districts that contract with San Francisco-based PEG for educational consulting services. Most of those services come in the form of workshops for teachers and other staff members.

Forty-two districts on that list responded to an EAGnews request for information about how much they have paid PEG over the past five years.

The total amount was $3.9 million between 2010 and 2015, with some districts spending a lot more than others.

The biggest spender on the list was Pittsburgh Public Schools, which paid PEG a whopping $586,300 over a four-year period.

The district’s initial investment was $231,000 in the 2010-11 school year. It spent $96,100 the following year, then $183,200 in 2012-13 and $76,000 in 2013-14.

Then there’s the Osseo, Minnesota school district, which has paid PEG $533,800 over the past three years.

It started with a $100,000 payment in the 2012-13 school year, followed by $225,000 in 2013-14 and $208,800 in 2014-15.

The other top PEG spenders on the list are Baltimore County Public Schools ($427,000), Lawrence Public Schools in Kansas ($362,750), Talbot County Public Schools in Maryland ($259,100) and the Bellevue School District in Washington ($237,100, including $153,600 in 2014-15).

What are the educators in these districts learning in exchange for all of that money?

The PEG message is centered on the concept of “white privilege” and the detrimental impact it supposedly has on minority students.

On a basic level, PEG teaches that minority students don’t do as well as white students on the average because traditional American education is structured around white cultural norms, which are frequently difficult for minority students to grasp.

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According to PEG, white culture is based on “white individualism” or “white traits” like “rugged individualism,” “adherence to rigid time schedules,” “plan(ning) for the future,” and the idea that “hard work is the key to success.”

Minority students shouldn’t be expected to subscribe to those values because they are foreign to their culture, according to PEG.

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