Written by Nathaniel Mannor
When people talk about equity, they preach about how everyone should get what they need to succeed and lambasting equality as standing in the way of change. Now California has a superintendent of equity as part of the Department of Education to help minority students with education (blaming white people for their problems and teaching students of color to view themselves as victims). There’s just one problem. He lives in Pennsylvania.
Daniel Lee, the new equity superintendent, lives in Philadelphia and serves as the New Jersey Psychological Association’s executive board president. He also works as a life coach and self-help author and has no experience in California or schooling. His most recent voting record shows that he voted in Philadelphia and still owns his home there. So how did Lee get this job? Through his longtime friend and State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond.
Thurmond and Lee met as social workers in Philadelphia and attended Lee’s wedding. The former described Lee as “somebody that I wanted to hire for a long time but he lived out of state. The pandemic opened the door for me to hire someone who is top of his class.” He also shrugged off charges of nepotism, saying, “The fact that we have known each other for 30 years … if he’s doing great quality work, what difference does it make how long we’ve known each other?” Thurmond has cited that the pandemic allowed him to hire Lee as Lee could remotely work for his position. Thurmond is already under scrutiny as Superintendent of Public Instruction with people accusing him of a toxic work environment and a number of senior officials departing.
But not everyone is on board. Carl Pinkston, director of the Black Parallel School Board in Sacramento, criticized Thurmond for hiring someone from out of state and not posting the job for others to apply. “Irrespective of who it is, to have someone from out of state who is not familiar with California’s dynamics and politics and challenges come in and attempt to do this work only furthers the fundamental problem, which is that the California Department of Education fails to adequately monitor schools for inequities and push for enforcement.” Spokesperson for the California Taxpayers Association David Kline said that taxpayers of California should be angered as we expect state workers to live in the state, ” The taxpayers here would expect that the people working for the government are also living in the community so they experience the effects of the laws and policies they are enacting”.
The most outrageous part of the story is that our tax dollars pay for Lee’s yearly salary of 161,400 to $179,832. Thurmond as an elected official gets a salary of $182,189. If it were Republicans governing California, we would make sure that our officials are not only qualified but live right here in the Golden State.
