SALT LAKE CITY — Shortly after taking office in 2023, Republican state Rep. Katy Hall heard from constituents complaining about how their adult children were required to write diversity, equity and inclusion statements while applying for medical and dental schools and other graduate programs in Utah.

“It doesn’t seem right,” Hall said. “It doesn’t seem like it belongs in an application.”

It took two legislative sessions, but Hall successfully sponsored a new law that not only prohibits the use of such DEI statements but also bars state institutions from relying on specific individual characteristics in employment and education decisions. Additionally, it eliminates central offices dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion.

In Utah and beyond, lawmakers are enjoying growing success in their pushback against DEI programs at public universities, many of which have hired administrators and established departments dedicated to creating more diverse faculties and student bodies. Some schools’ requirement that job and student applicants explain in writing how they’d bring DEI initiatives to their work or schooling has aroused especially strong opposition. Some states have dismantled DEI departments and programs, as well as ended race- and gender-based programs and scholarships.

Many in Utah describe their approach as more measured than that of other states. The law, which goes into effect July 1, includes a carve-out that allows DEI to be discussed in classroom instruction as well as in research and for accreditation purposes.

Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, who signed Hall’s in January, said it “offers a balanced solution” even as it prohibits the type of training sessions he required of his staff in 2021.

The intent of the legislation, Hall said, is to shift higher education away from a focus on identity.

“This is what we felt was a more nuanced way to say: ‘We want diversity, we want equality of opportunity, we want inclusion, but we want diversity of opinion and a diversity of thought and diversity of religion and diversity of everything.’ Not just external, personal identity characteristics,” Hall said.

“We used to be able to have discussions about politics without it coming to a judgment of someone’s moral character,” she added. “My hope is that there will be a little more political neutrality where you can have discussions and feel safe to have those discussions without it being so divisive.”

But the bill passed along party lines, pointed out state Rep. Angela Romero, a Democrat who serves as the House minority leader in Utah. She described what’s happening in her state as part of a broader culture war aimed at painting higher education as elite and out of touch.

“This is a national agenda,” Romero said in an interview. “It’s a machine and it’s been going for a while and it’s picking up momentum.”

Utah’s rollback is among dozens of simultaneous efforts to scale back DEI programs — to varying degrees — in state capitals and on higher education oversight boards in other Republican-led states. In at least 22 states, the legislature has enacted legislation, or public universities have set policies prohibiting or modifying DEI measures at state university systems, according to a running tally in .

Among the earliest passed was in North Dakota asking students and prospective university employees about their commitment to DEI. Florida followed last year with a that does away with diversity statements and DEI offices. Alabama in 2024 enacted a restricting public employees from being forced to agree with so-called divisive concepts, including the idea that “by virtue of an individual’s race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity, or national origin, the individual is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously.”

In South Dakota, the Board of Regents recently enacted a policy that bars employees at its six public universities from putting their preferred gender pronouns or tribal affiliations in email signatures, according to . Most recently, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees last month to shift $2.3 million of DEI spending toward public safety and policing on campus. Then, the entire UNC System Board of Governors to abolish DEI policies in place since 2019 at all 17 of its campuses.

A chilling effect

Many of the efforts to roll back DEI initiatives in states have the same roots as a campaign against critical race theory spearheaded by Seattle documentary filmmaker Christopher Rufo, who in 2020 elevated a once-obscure theory about the pervasiveness of racism in American law and institutions to a household term.

Often, efforts to undo DEI initiatives argue that students — especially white students — are harmed by learning about the history of racism in the United States because it may leave them feeling guilty or ashamed of their identity. Multiple states, including , have adopted near-identical language in anti-DEI legislation that bans instruction that might prompt a person to “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.

In April, polling by found that 77% of Republicans say they believe that “discrimination against white people is as problematic as discrimination against Black Americans.”

Anti-DEI laws have had a chilling effect on higher education wherever they’ve been enacted, said Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Professors, a nonprofit membership association of faculty and other academic professionals.

“The laws are deliberately vague so that professors have to be constantly thinking, ‘If I say this, will I be breaking the law? Will I lose my job or be arrested by the government if I say this in my classroom?’“ Mulvey said. “I mean, that’s where we are in America in 2024. These are the worries faculty have in an authoritarian society, and they have no place in a democracy.”

At the University of Texas, anti-DEI legislation led the system to eliminate 300 positions and to cut diversity training programs at multiple campuses.

The situation is similar in Florida, said Paul Ortiz, a professor of history and a union leader at the University of Florida. He’s leaving the school after 15 years for a position at Cornell University in New York. The fallout from the state’s DEI policies wasn’t the only reason he’s leaving — he got a great job offer — but it contributed to his decision, Ortiz said.

“To pretend that it’s not having an effect on the cultural and intellectual life of the state is the worst thing of all,” Ortiz said. “I’m hoping the pendulum is going to swing back.”

Students are the real losers, Mulvey said. At the University of Oklahoma, for example, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt’s executive order ending DEI programs in state offices and agencies the National Education for Women’s Leadership program. The program encourages undergraduate women to engage in politics and public policy. Since its founding in 2002, more than 650 students have attended.

Stitt told the that his executive order was about race, not the women’s leadership program, and called the backlash against his policy “political criticism.”

“What we’re seeing now is nobody’s helped when these offices are closed or programs are shut down, no one’s better off,” Mulvey said. “We’re having watered-down discussions and anodyne classes because faculty without tenure are afraid of losing their job if they say the wrong thing or if someone takes it out of context or tapes them and puts it online.”

DEI statements

DEI statements in university hiring have been one of the easiest targets nationwide, in part because there’s less support for them even among more progressive educators who support wider DEI initiatives.

Editorial boards and columnists at outlets as varied as , and the have railed against diversity statements, saying they too often result in “self-censorship and ideological policing” on college campuses. Many elite universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, have DEI statements as a requirement of employment applications. At best, critics argue, they’re boilerplate that echoes what employers want to hear, rendering them useless. At their worst, they serve as ideological litmus tests.

“We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in a statement to in May, confirming the university’s new approach.

But DEI statements have their defenders. Suzanne Penuel, an associate professor who teaches first-year literature and writing at the University of South Carolina Lancaster, said she witnessed how high-quality DEI statements set job candidates apart when she served on the hiring committee for a position teaching American history. Nearly all academic applicants have polished curriculum vitae, impeccable recommendations and pitch-perfect cover letters, she wrote in an op-ed in .

Their DEI statements gave them personality, Penuel said in an interview. It was easier to tell which applicants would take a student-centered approach to their work; one applicant wrote that the textbooks used in the school’s history courses ought to be free, an interpretation that the hiring committee viewed as an inclusive approach to education.

She worries that the assault on already slim DEI initiatives in South Carolina is a continuation of a trend that began with a 2021 legislative requirement that all college students be taught , and a proposed in elementary schools.

“I hope I never see the day when there is this prescribed list of texts from a narrow list of publishers, and only some topics can be discussed,” Penuel said.

In Utah, where Democrats hold just 14 of the 75 seats in the state House of Representatives, Romero fought unsuccessfully to keep the anti-DEI legislation from passing.

Her reasons for opposing the legislation were partly personal. As a first-generation college student at the University of Utah, she took advantage of what was then called the Center for Ethnic Student Affairs, an academic advising that could now be considered a DEI initiative. It was a safe place in a state where the dominant religion and culture often excludes people of color, Romero said.

Because of her association with the center, Romero landed an internship at the state legislature in 1994, leading to a career working in municipal government in Salt Lake City. And now, she serves as president of the .

“Because of that, I’m here now,” Romero said when the bill was up for debate. “What it did is it addressed the disparities. … There’s unintentional consequences when we just try to sweep things and say we’re all the same, because we’re not. There’s still a lot of things that have to change in this country for us all to be on a level playing field.”

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Moved by his cousin’s plight, Juarez designed a tool to help the deaf community — a device that uses a camera to translate sign language into a written and spoken form.

Through the first-ever this Saturday, April 13, Juarez will be one of to present their inventions and research projects that address solutions to critical global issues.

The festival will showcase student innovators from numerous nationwide competitions, including EXPLR’s where more than 2,500 students in grades 6-12 conceived and submitted STEM projects across six categories: Environmental Stewardship, Future Foods, Health & Medicine, Powering the Planet, Tech for Good and Space Innovation.

“All of these kids are so cool and have such incredible projects that it’s going to be bananas,” Kari Byron, co-founder of and director of the festival, told ����Ӱ��.

Byron said the festival idea grew out of a conversation she had with the U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.

Byron, who previously hosted the Obama administration’s , pitched a plan to design a larger version of the former event.

“I looked at him and said ‘What if we built it for you? What if we make it bigger and better than it has ever been before,’” Byron said. “So it’s not a continuation of the White House Science Fair — it’s a completely new festival that’s going to be so much bigger because we want a national conversation about STEM 365 days a year.”

Jenny Buccos, co-founder and chief executive officer of EXPLR, said the festival is a great way for school leaders and decision makers to learn more about “what kids are interested in and what we might not be teaching in schools.”

“How are they learning to make patent pending medical devices? How are they learning about protecting their IP? Where is this happening, and if it’s not in the traditional classroom, how do we bridge that gap,” Buccos told ����Ӱ��.

Students like Juarez, 17, are excited to have the platform to present projects centered around what they are passionate about.

“This opportunity is confirmation that people care about the hearing impaired and deaf…and is a great way for me to continue to educate more people,” Juarez told ����Ӱ��.

Buccos said the public has the opportunity to meet the students and see their inventions through more than 100 and events in Washington, DC.

“If you are in desperate need of inspiration and hope for the future, come to the events…this is the opportunity to meet some of the most brilliant young minds working in the country,” Buccos said.

“Everybody says kids are the future,” said Buccos, “but these kids are literally solving problems now.”

To check out the National STEM Festival this Saturday, the public must to secure their spot.

Quality of schools in the region, which encompasses Boise, could be a factor, according to a from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation that identifies the nation’s best and worst metro areas for educational effectiveness. 

“Literally, you see the houses springing up like mushrooms,” said Terry Ryan, CEO of Bluum, a nonprofit supporting charter and district schools in the area. 

The region is among those where schools made above-average academic progress prior to COVID-19, the report shows. With the pandemic now accelerating toward suburbs and smaller metro areas — and often away from high-priced coastal cities — the authors say families and business leaders looking to relocate should factor in school quality when deciding where to settle down.

Michael Petrilli, president of the Institute, cautioned that there’s no guarantee the pandemic hasn’t stalled progress in areas where student performance once trended upward. Some experts, for example, have called recent “staggering.” But he said the message to districts and charter schools that were effective before the pandemic is to stay the course, and those that are ineffective “cannot just go back to normal.”

“I would assume that school districts and charter schools that were doing well by kids before the pandemic are probably largely the same ones doing well by them during the pandemic,” he said.

Using the — a national database of student performance — and graduation data from the U.S. Department of Education, the Fordham-Chamber project focuses on 100 large and mid-sized metro areas. The top locales include Miami, which recently received back-to-back from the state; Memphis, where Black, Hispanic and low-income students have shown above-average academic growth; and the Atlanta region, which ranks fourth in the study.

Atlanta has been ranked among the best places to start a new business, attracting tech leaders like . Collaboration among districts across the metro area is one reason why students were making progress before the pandemic and are “well-positioned to return to growth,” said Kenneth Zeff, executive director of Learn4Life, a nonprofit working to improve education outcomes across the metro Atlanta area. “Substantial inequities still exist, but the gap in several key indicators has been slowly eroding.”

Smaller metro areas, such as Jackson, Mississippi, and Brownsville, Texas, also emerged as places where schools performed better than expected based on demographics.

Those on the lower end of the spectrum include the Salt Lake City area, Las Vegas and Tulsa. Average achievement in math and English language arts has improved over the past six to 10 years in the Las Vegas metro area — essentially the Clark County School District — but schools still perform below average nationally, according to the report. 

Eighty percent of the population

The researchers focused on the nation’s metro areas because that’s where 80 percent of the U.S. population lives and where economic activity and labor market trends tend to have the most impact. Issues such as school choice and racial segregation also affect multiple districts. 

In addition to identifying areas with above- and below-average academic growth, the researchers factored in progress among Black, Hispanic and disadvantaged students, a region’s improvement over the past six to 10 years, and high school graduation rates. They combined these indicators into a measure they call “student learning accelerating metros” — or SLAM. The report includes interactive features so users can isolate results for specific indicators, subject areas or demographic groups.

The authors stressed that while achievement scores might seem to be an obvious indicator of high-quality schools, achievement alone often reflects students’ family backgrounds instead of a school’s effectiveness.

That’s why “Best Places to Live” lists should provide families a more comprehensive view of school quality instead of relying on standardized test scores, the authors wrote.

The SLAM rankings show that a metro area in which students have high achievement scores overall might not perform as well on the other measures. 

In North Carolina, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools, in the state’s Research Triangle region, has among the highest ACT scores in the state, but also large in achievement between Black and white students. 

That hasn’t stopped the region from attracting Google, Apple and Nike, which are in the area.

And the Raleigh area ranks fourth in raw achievement scores, but falls to 48th in the report when the other indicators are considered. On the other hand, the McAllen, Texas, area — which includes the Sharyland, Edinburg and Hidalgo school districts — ranks 41st in raw achievement, but third based on the report’s SLAM measure.

Brenda Berg, president and CEO of BEST NC, a nonprofit organization of business leaders in North Carolina, praised the report for providing relevant data for her state, where countywide districts include both urban centers and higher-performing suburbs. 

She said in an email that she’s “most concerned” about Wake County, which includes Raleigh, and is “most eager” to see where the Guilford and Charlotte-Mecklenburg districts go in the years to come.Those two districts, she said “have some really interesting promising practices emerging” around literacy and teacher recruitment in high-needs schools.

The authors note that while charter growth and district reform efforts have often focused on the cities at the heart of a metro area, the “suburbs are where many of the kids — and much of the action — are at, and they often explain a metro’s grade.”

Looking at broad trends across metro areas, however, can hide “meaningful variation” from one district to the next, said Alex Spurrier, associate partner at Bellwether Education Partners. In October, the think tank released a report showing how a lack of affordable housing in some of the nation’s most sought-after districts limits educational opportunity. 

“Even if families decide to move to a metro area with higher-performing public schools,” Spurrier said, “their access to specific public school systems may be limited based on where they can afford housing,” Spurrier said.