The Orange Unified School District’s newly-hired “Chief Communications and Strategy Officer,” in her previous position at a large Inland Empire school district, was in charge of implementing a radical “equity” program based on Critical Race Theory and dubious theories like “implicit bias.”
Jacqueline Perez was hired in November 2025 on a unanimous vote of the progressive-controlled OUSD Board of Education, with a total compensation package of $266,153 (which includes a $3,500 doctoral stipend). Perez came from the Riverside Unified School District, where she was Assistant Superintendent for Equity, Access & Community Engagement.
In 2024, a teacher union-led recall campaign flipped the Orange Unified School District Board of education from a conservative majority to total progressive control. Many voters feared the new majority would take the district in a more liberal direction.
It would appear those fears are justified.
In the wake of the George Floyd riots of 2020, the Riverside Unified School District leadership fully embraced the radical, BLM-driven zeitgeist of that time. Perez, as the district’s DEI chief, spearheaded a program to turn district teachers and staff into “Equity Champions.” At the RUSD Board of Education’s September 15, 2020 meeting, Perez enthusiastically presented her Equity Champions program. It is clear from her presentation that the program was premised on the assumption that the RUSD was riddled with systemic oppression and marginalization, and that district teachers and staff themselves harbored secret racial biases that needed to be rooted out using various Critical Race Theory-based methodologies.
An excited Perez described to Board members the three-level re-education process she hoped would transform district employees into “Equity Champions.”
“What you see here is the first of three levels of professional learning that we will be providing to all of our staff. So managers, certificated and classified,” said Perez.
The work would begin with inculcating RUSD teachers and staff with right attitudes, educating them in victim ideology and raising their consciousness about their internal bigotries. This initial “Learning” Phase involved:
- Instructing teachers and employees in “becoming racially and ethnically conscious”
- “Rooting out implicit bias”
- Giving them a crash course in the “History of LGBTQ+”
- The “Impact of Micro-Aggressions”
- Indoctrinating them in the discredited concept of “Implicit Bias”
“I want to just pause here so that you can look, take a look at the titles of the courses so they span from how to talk about race, rooting out implicit bias, the impact of microaggressions, really understanding race and ethnicity,” Perez told Board members.
“This is the first chunk of modules that staff can begin their own journey on becoming equity champions in the RUSD,” Perez opined cheerfully.
The “implicit bias” training about which Perez enthuses is problematic, at best. The tool upon which it relies is unreliable. It fails to meet the basic standard to qualify as an acceptable psychological assessment tool. Even Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji, creators of the implicit association test that implicit bias training relies upon, admit it does not predict biased behavior in a laboratory setting, let alone in the real world.
As Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald has noted, “The psychometric problems associated with the race IAT make it “problematic to use to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination,” according to an article co-written by Greenwald, Banajii and a third author in 2015.
By the end of this phase, RUSD would better understand their own oppression as well as the heretofore unknown racial biases lurking in their hearts. They would then be ready for the next two phases which – as can be seen by Perez’s presentation slide – relied heavily on Critical Race Theory ideology.
Phase 2 was called “Growing,” and constituted a deeper indoctrinating dive into neo-Marxist Critical Theory, including:
- “Exploring the Permanence of Racism through Critical Race Theory”
- “Exploring Whiteness as Property through Critical Race Theory”
- “Finding the Parallels Between Micro-Aggressions and Implicit Bias”
- “Micro-Aggressions in Action”
Once RUSD employees had ingested these race-based ways of thinking, they moved on to the final phase, “Advancing Social Justice.” The re-education process continued by taking RUSD teachers and staff on a journey through neo-Marxist and racialist concepts like: “Culturally Relevant Pedagogy As A Lens for Equity.” Culturally relevant pedagogy is Critical Theory jargon for inculcating a racially-based consciousness into students.“Exploring Issues of Privilege and Entitlement”“Our Role in Confronting and Overcoming Systemic Oppression”“Exploring Interest Convergence through Critical Race Theory”“Exploring the Critique of Liberalism through Critical Race Theory.”“Cultivating Cultural Competency” (again, jargon for rejecting color-blindness and instead seeing students as members of racial and ethnic groups.
Once through Phase 3, RYUSD teachers and staff would presumably have been turned into social justice warriors, ideologically equipped and motivated to indoctrinate their students and police each other’s “implicit biases.”
“Now we’re really developing ourselves as [equity] champions and really wrapping our arms around what it means to be an equity champion at our school site,” Perez enthused.
“We are implementing the equity policies,” said Perez. “The policies have been created now and now it’s the work of putting them into the system.”
Perez also told the Board that “diverse hiring practices” – i.e. using racial preferences in hiring decisions – was an integral part of her Equity program.
“We’re going to continue with our personnel department’s diverse hiring practices that will be reflective in that way to make sure that our hiring is reflective of our community here in Riverside.
“And really getting deeper into our anti-racism efforts across the system and across the district and in our schools by implementing our goals and actions. That is absolutely where we will see the difference,”
“Anti-racism” is an ideology popularized by academic and polemicist Ibram X. Kendi. According to the tenets of anti-racism, racial discrimination is perfectly acceptable as long as it is against members of racial and ethnic groups perceived to have “power.”
“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” writes Kendi in his seminal book “How To Be An Anti-Racist – the popular Bible of the anti-racism movement.
It was unmistakable from Perez’ presentation that her Equity Champions program was truly a top-down process.
“Our equity task force will play a large role in these and really engaging in the discussion across the system around race, diversity and inclusion,” Perez explained.
What is clear to any reasonable person is Perez’s “Equity Champions” program was designed to impose a uniform mode of thinking and set of beliefs on RUSD teachers and staff, and then create a mechanism for policing whether the re-education effort has taken hold. The “equity audits” Perez talks about are exercises in thought policing.
It’s ironic Perez’s “Equity Champions” program of imposing uniformity of thought is conducted in the name of diversity.
The 2024 recall campaign in OUSD was premised in part on the claim the three conservative trustees being targeted were “extremists” who were out of step with the mainstream of OUSD parents and voters.
California Courier covered that campaign extensively in articles here and here.
Perez’s hiring into senior district leadership raises the question of who is really out of step with OUSD voters. The race-based identitarian ideology that infuses the “Equity Champions” program crafted by Perez at RUSDS is highly unpopular with voters.
It’s highly unlikely OUSD Board of Education members were unaware of Perez’s work in imposing this ideology on RUSD employees and schools. Her work title alone is a tip-off, and a cursory Internet search turns up the Equity Champions program.
Yet OUSD Board Chair Kris Erickson gushed about Perez at the board meeting where she was hired.
