Evanston and New Trier's Partnership with PEG: A Closer Look

How the Pacific Educational Group (Beyond Diversity) uses copyright protection to enrich themselves at the cost the very cause they purport to advance

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This post is about the Pacific Educational Group (PEG). I’ve written about them before - since 2008, Districts 65 and 202 (ETHS) have invested over a million dollars in their time and resources with PEG and facilitators. Recently, other Districts have begun investing resources into PEG, including New Trier and Niles, among others.

Both ETHS and New Trier have deep ties with PEG, including this year being keynote speakers at their annual conference in November.¹

Regarding New Trier, I FOIA’ed a copy of their contracts and invoices, available below:

• 2019-20 PEG Contract with New Trier

• 2021-22 PEG Contract with New Trier

• 2022-23 PEG Contract with New Trier

Reading through these contracts you can learn a lot about how PEG works, something that is rarely disclosed to the public when school boards sign up with PEG.

PEG is a for-profit company that offers the Beyond Diversity™ and Courageous Conversations™ training. They have some of the most litigious contract terms regarding intellectual property that I’ve ever seen (and I look at a lot of school district contracts!). Even if Districts care a great deal about equity, they’re absolutely crazy to sign this contract.

How PEG Equity Training Works

It’s pretty simple - the District finds a few equity-interested individuals and sends them to get PEG certified. It costs $3000 for the CCAR™ certification in 2019. CCAR™ is “Courageous Conversations™ About Race.” You can get virtually certified or they offer in-person sessions as well.

Once you get someone CCAR™ certified, then you’re closer to being able to engage in systemic equity transformation. The next step is you need to rent all the intellectual property (handouts, etc) from PEG. I say rent because at no point does the District actually own any materials or anything related to the training. PEG calls this their CCAR IP Licensing Fee and it was $6,500 to New Trier in 2022-23.

They forgot to put the ™ next to CCAR here!

In 2021-22, this fee was $5,500 and you can see it reflected in the monies paid by other Districts in Illinois. Evanston Township HS for instance, also paid $5,500 for licensing.

PEG can also offer their own facilitators, in which case, you don’t need to train some of your staff to be CCAR™ certified, you can fly in someone from PEG HQ to run the sessions. Or you can hire a local CCAR™ certified PEG facilitator such as Full Circle Leadership.

But no matter what, you’re going to be paying PEG a licensing fee for the materials used in training. I guess it’s a better long term deal to train someone in-house but even if you got all staff members CCAR™ certified, you’re cutting a check for $6,500 or more to PEG every year to license the Intellectual Property.

What’s in the Contract / Intellectual Property?

In the 2019-2020 contract with New Trier, PEG listed all the different programs that are considered part of their Intellectual Property and it is an absolutely massive list of buzzwords.

B.O.E. ("Board of Education Racial Equity Leadership Development")

Beyond Diversity

Beyond Diversity 2

Beyond Diversity Day 3

Beyond Diversity Online

C.R.E. ("Coaching for Racial Equity")

C.R.I.C. ("Culturally Relevant Instructional Coaching")

CARE ("Collaborative Action Research for Equity")

CCAR ("Courageous Conversations About Race")

Courageous Conversations About Race

Courageous Conversation™

Courageous Corporation

D.E.L.T.A. ("District Equity Leadership Team Advisory")

DEAP ("District Equity Assessment Process")

DELT ("District Equity Leadership Team")

Equity Tearns

Equity Walk

E-Team ("Equity Team")

ETP ("Equity Transformation Plan")

Leadership for Racial Equity and Racial Equity Leadership

LEADS ("Leaders Engaged in Equity Anti-Racism Development")

MORE Courageous Conversations About Race

P.R.E.P. ("Personal Racial Equity Purpose")

PASS ("Partnerships for Academically Successful Students")

PEG Affiliate

PEG Equity Transformation Affiliates

PEG Equity Transformation Specialists

PEGU

Race In My Life Exercise

S.P./E.L.L. ("SP/ELL Equity Leadership Development")

S.T.O.C. ("Staff of Color Equity Leadership Development")

SOAR ("Students Organized Against Racism")

Systemic Equity Transformation Framework

The Colorline Exercise

The Compass (of Courageous Conversation)

The Four Agreements (of Courageous Conversation)

The Independent School Equity Council

The National Summit (for Courageous Conversation)

The PEG Framework is the Systemic Racial Equity Transformation Framework

The Regional Summit (for Courageous Conversation)

The Six Conditions (of Courageous Conversation)

White Talk/Color Commentary

Some of this IP you may be familiar with, such as equity walks, something that got District 65 in trouble with the US Department of Education. Some of these are really quite absurd, such as the “District Equity Leadership Team” or “E-Team” - something that I think many school districts have. Apparently, even using the term without a PEG contract is in violation of their intellectual property?

So what happens when you end the contract with PEG? You’re essentially not allowed to talk about equity anymore. In fact, you are required to track down any handouts that your facilitators may have and also destroy those. And then you have to have an officer certify that you’ve done it.

4.3. Client’s Post-Termination Obligations. Upon termination of this Agreement pursuant to Section 4, Client shall be promptly: (a) remit payment to PEG for all Fees for Services rendered prior to the effective date of termination; (b) reimburse PEG for reimbursable expenses incurred prior to the notice of termination; (c) return or destroy, at its election, all PEG IP, including all PEG IP in the custody, possession or control of any Practitioner or Facilitator (as such terms are used in the Statement of Work), (d) instruct all Practitioners and Facilitators that they must immediately cease using all PEG IP and other PEG materials, and (e) have an officer of Client certify in writing to PEG its compliance with the obligations set forth in the foregoing clauses (c) and (d).

I’m not a lawyer but I’ve read a lot of contracts in the course of my career, many of these contracts require purchasing copyrighted data. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. Here’s an example: suppose you buy stock quote data - you usually sign a licensing agreement that says something like: the data belongs to the seller and I do not have a right to re-sell it. Sometimes they might have specific data storage and retention requirements but I’ve never seen anything obligating destruction with certification, including retrieving documents from parties not signatory to the contract. What happens if a facilitator quits and leaves town - does the District have to go track them down and get the handouts from their house?

Or consider school districts, they buy copyrighted stuff all the time, such as textbooks. There is no company out there selling textbooks to schools that require the school to destroy the textbooks if they don’t have an active contract with say, Scholastic.

This is absolutely nuts!

It’s even more nuts because all the equity vendors are out there saying that systemic racism is a huge problem and I agree! The problem is that they’re saying “systemic racism is a huge problem and we have all this stuff which can help solve the problem. However, if you don’t pay us money for perpetuity, we might sue you if you even leave up a poster from a training session!”²

From an ethics standpoint, these organizations should be structured as non-profits with looser intellectual property, like every other trade group on Earth. If you think you have the solution to major public issue - such as structural racism - then its absolutely unethical to not show your hand.

In this case, doing otherwise is simply profiteering off inequality.

Public Work for Private Gain

This is something I have written about considerably that is bad and probably illegal in some sense: public resources being used for private gain. I wrote about this in the contact of Dr. Horton using District equipment to create videos for his consultancy’s Youtube Channel. The MIRACLES program, which Dr. Horton appears to have taken with him to Georgia as his own private IP, is another example. And here we are again, consider the local teachers and administrators giving talks and creating materials for PEG in their November Conference:

• Our Equity Journey Continues... - Superintendent Campbell (ETHS) and Pat Savage-Williams (ETHS/New Trier)

• Invisibility to Visibility: Model Minority Healing - Principal and Teacher from District 214 and District 219 (Niles)

• Playback Theater & Race-based Microaggressions - Director of Equity and five Fine Arts Teachers in District 219 (Niles)

• Trauma-Informed Mindfulness in the Classroom - Teacher at Niles Township High School District and PEG Facilitator

• Resisting an Equity Sprinkle in Public Schools - Three teachers from CPS

These presentations might be good, but who knows because they are unavailable to the public unless you you pay to go to the Courageous Conversations™ conference. Their work, paid for with public money (using public school children) is intellectual property owned by PEG. This is a problem. It’s one thing to hire an outside firm with public money to help them grow but it’s another to use the public resources to specifically create things for a private for-profit company.

I’m not against presentations or conferences, all professionals should be making presentations like this, as part of the job. In education, I’ve even presented at one: STEMTech (way back in 2011). Most of these conferences are run by non-profit trade groups. For example, STEMTech is run by a non-profit, the League for Innovation in the Community Colleges. Virtually every industry has some kind of trade group that publishes research and has a conference. All of them exist as non-profits for specifically the reasons mentioned above.

Even if you step back and look at this through an “equity lens” - how do you justify this kind of public-private relationship? A pro-equity view should insist that content which furthers the goals of equity (such as esoteric PEG handouts) be made available to anyone who wishes to see. A pro-equity view should insist that anyone can become a facilitator, not just those who have $3,000. A pro-equity view should insist that PEG operate as a non-profit, which seeks to serve the betterment of mankind, not just Glenn Singleton and his shareholders.

1. According to District 202 / ETHS in order to view the presentation, made my public officials, i will have to attend the PEG conference. I will be submitting a FOIA the day after the presentation and am willing to sue in order to get these records. It is absolutely absurd to me that documents are being made about the District’s children that are property of a private company.

2. I’ve seen the “Courageous Compass” for instance, hung up on the wall of a D65 office.