They called us racists for telling the truth. Turns out, the truth aged just fine.
When we launched Defending Education in March 2021, it wasn’t because we wanted a fight. It was because we could see public education turning into a playground for activists and ideologues who wanted to tinker with children’s minds and treat them differently based on their immutable traits.
Flush with COVID cash, districts invited even more race hustlers into schools to train staff and students to “dismantle whiteness” and become “antiracist.” Step one on the path to antiracism? Discriminate on the basis of race, of course.
One of the earliest and most egregious catalysts for the creation of Defending Education warning signs came from Evanston/Skokie School District 65, just outside Chicago. In October 2020, Superintendent Devon Horton announced that he would give “students from marginalized groups first priority for seats for in-person learning” and all others would be taught remotely. He said that “we have to make sure students who have been oppressed will be given the first opportunities,” and this is “about equity for Black and brown students, for special education students, for our LGBTQ students.”
DES MOINES SCHOOL BOARD SUES FIRM FOR ‘FAILING TO PROPERLY VET’ DETAINED SUPERINTENDENT
Under this plan, the most accelerated students could return if they checked the right demographic boxes. Struggling students who happened to be white, Asian, or heterosexual would stay home. It was unlawful, negligent, and blatantly discriminatory — not to mention categorically insane.
And we said so, loudly.
Our objections were met with the usual slurs: racist, white supremacist, bigot. It was an ironic line of attack on our founder, Nicki Neily, whose paternal grandparents met in a Japanese internment camp. But the name-calling never mattered. The truth and the law did.
Now, fast forward to 2025. Devon Horton has been indicted on 17 federal charges, including wire fraud, embezzlement, and tax fraud. Prosecutors allege he and three associates took kickbacks from companies they secretly owned that landed contracts with District 65 and Chicago Public Schools. The same man who moralized about “oppression” and “equity” was allegedly running a corruption scheme that defrauded taxpayers.
And he’s not alone. In Des Moines, another self-styled “equity champion,” Superintendent Ian Roberts, just resigned in disgrace. Roberts lied on his I-9, falsified his résumé, registered to vote illegally in Maryland, and was detained by ICE on an active deportation order after abandoning his district-issued car with a loaded handgun and $3,000 in cash.
The all-female school board has admitted it knew Roberts had lied on his résumé before hiring him, but alas, he was just too captivating for them to care. Now, he’s gone, leaving behind a humiliated district in the national spotlight and a community demanding answers.
Horton and Roberts both weaponized race to silence dissent and used “equity” as a shield for their own corruption. Meanwhile, the people who hired them clapped along like brainless seals because that’s what a good “ally” does.
Horton’s indictment is the ending many of us expected. School officials who proudly promote racial discrimination in hiring and school reopening are morally compromised. Their falls from grace are inevitable.
EX-IOWA SUPERINTENDENT FEDERALLY CHARGED AFTER ICE ARREST
It’s the same grift that made Black Lives Matter founders millionaires while cities burned and police were vilified. It’s the same cottage industry of “diversity consultants” and “equity officers” raking in public dollars to divide students by race, lecture parents about privilege, and shame teachers for their “whiteness.”
These aren’t isolated scandals. They’re part of a well-documented pattern, and it’s a certainty that more dominoes will fall. For those who stood up against identity-based discrimination in K-12 schools from the beginning, this moment is vindication. And for the countless moral cowards, it’s a warning: When you let ideology run your schools, corruption stops being a bug in the system. It becomes the system.
Erika Sanzi is Senior Director of Communications at Defending Education
