Cracked Foundations: Lindsay Unified School District (CA)

Investigations


Foundation: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Grants Total: $2,000,000

US News and World Report Test Score Proficiency:


The Lindsay Unified School District (CA) entered into a $2 million grant agreement for a partnership between Transcend, Inc, and Summit Public Schools. The partnership, titled the California Consortium for the Development and Dissemination of Personalized Learning (C2D2), is a “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) funded collaboration.”

As part of the programming, the partnership places “equity at the forefront” so that a “diverse leadership team and an inclusive process” can leverage “all stakeholder voices.” A 2018 document detailing the partnership’s “site level conditions” states that for “purposes of clarity and alignment, this document uses the definitions of equity, inclusion, and diversity articulated by the Racial Equity Tools Glossary.” The glossary includes such terms as “anti-black,” “critical race theory,” “racial capitalism,” “whiteness,” and “white privilege.”

The consortium partner Transcend states on its website that it “iterated with various experts in the personalized learning and equity spaces” while creating “equitably personalized learning for all students.” From its “Mission and Beliefs” page, Transcend shares that it must “reimagine ‘schooling'” by ending the “inequitable, industrial model of education that reproduces oppression.”

Transcend’s “Ten Leaps for Equitable, 21st-Century Learning” includes a “Whole-Child Focus” and “Social Consciousness & Action” which creates a mindset needed for taking “anti-oppressive actions that disrupt and dismantle racism.”

Date: 2017

Grant amount: $1,000,000

Date: 2018

Grant amount: $1,000,000