Diverse DEI Implementation: Examining the Effectiveness of New Jersey’s 2021 Diversity and Inclusion Law

Abstract

Education has the power to change lives. Academic research proves that incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) into educational instruction can benefit students’ academic and social attitudinal outcomes, which in turn can also improve long-term life outcomes like happiness and health. But the content of American K-12 public school education, particularly with regards to the incorporation of DEI topics into the curriculum, has a long, contested, and politically divided history. In spite of this, New Jersey has spearheaded the movement toward incorporating DEI into public school education through legislation, regulation, and curriculum guidance. In 2021, the New Jersey legislature established the Diversity and Inclusion Law, which mandates the incorporation of instruction on diversity and inclusion in the curriculum. Due to the Law’s unprecedented breadth, it is distinct from the state’s earlier education laws and raft of regulations and guidelines focused on DEI topics, endowing it with immense potential to surpass the achievements of all previous efforts, and bring about significant and fundamental changes for New Jersey’s diverse student population. Due to the immense promise the Law holds, my interest lies in understanding whether the Law has achieved any intended impact and if so, to what extent it has benefited students’ academic learning and socio-emotional well-being. As such, this thesis investigates the effectiveness of the Law, in terms of compliance, level of implementation, and ultimately the positive impact on students. Given the shortcomings of other DEI-related laws in New Jersey, the Law’s broad and vague stipulations, and the lack of enforcement mechanisms and specific measurement tools, I hypothesized that the Law would be ineffective on all three fronts. To assess the validity of my hypotheses, I conducted a qualitative survey and then employed content analysis to quantify my findings. My survey results demonstrate that while the Law is well-intentioned and ambitious, it has indeed proven to be ineffective to date. Since its enactment in 2021, the Law has so far led to marginal changes in overall compliance, new uptake, forms of compliance, and degrees of compliance, made only by a few schools in a small number of school districts in New Jersey. Furthermore, few superintendents have an accurate and confident understanding of whether the incorporation of diversity and inclusion in instruction has positively impacted students’ academic outcomes and socio-emotional well-being. While it is important to note that only few non-compliant respondent school districts may have been influenced by political disagreement with the Law, the large majority of respondent superintendents firmly believe in the Law’s importance and in making efforts to incorporate diversity and inclusion into instruction. Moreover, most of the poor implementation efforts so far appear to stem from both a lack of support from the Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) and a lack of a comprehensive understanding of the Law’s requirements, meaning there are clear and tangible ways to improve the quantity and quality of school districts’ implementation of the Law. Thus, supported by insights collected from further exploratory surveys, I recommend that the NJDOE create a single bipartisan Diversity and Inclusion Commission to help school districts streamline the implementation of all instruction on DEI, oversee the enforcement of the Law, fund professional development and learning opportunities for all staff, emphasize the social attitudinal and academic benefits of DEI incorporation into instruction to convince all superintendents of its importance, and promote research into measurement tools to better assess the impact that DEI in instruction has on an array of short- and long-term outcomes.