This article by Kendall Tietz was published September 2, 2023 on foxnews.com.

An education watchdog organization surveyed more than 70 public school districts across the U.S. and found discrimination in hiring guidance, interview questions, teacher job postings and evaluation criteria. 

The National Opportunity Project (NOP) sent public information requests to 74 school districts, 69 of which showed discrimination in their hiring practices based on so-called Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts, according to its report reviewed by Fox News Digital. 

“What we learned is that in numerous schools across the country, they are looking to hire teachers to teach children as young as kindergarten age, not based on their qualifications necessarily, or on their educational experience as teachers, but oftentimes because of where they stand politically,” NOP’s President Patrick Hughes told Fox News Digital. “The way that this is characterized throughout the process of looking to hire these folks is through diversity, equity and inclusion, which sound fair and things that people can get behind, but in reality are just a pretext to sort of backdoor in a particular political point of view or a particular social-ideological point of view.”

The NOP serves as a government watchdog at the federal and state level to make sure that government isn’t using its power to infringe upon the rights of American citizens, specifically constitutional rights or rights guaranteed to them by federal or state law, Hughes said. NOP commissioned the report on teacher hiring in K-12 schools across the U.S. because post-COVID, parents have taken an even more particular interest in their children’s learning.