A review of cultural competency training programs in various fields, including medical, educational, and business contexts, shows that nearly all scholarly articles have noted there's a lack of evidence that these programs provide any benefit to outcomes or to patients/students/workers. In 2011, a qualitative review of cultural competency programs published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine noted, "There is limited research showing a positive relationship between cultural competency training and improved patient outcomes." Another review of the literature published in BMC Health Services Research in 2014 lamented that even the limited available research that showed "weak[er] evidence for improvements in patient/client outcomes" lacked "methodological rigor" and used an overreliance of self-reporting to define its terms. Our students in Virginia deserve a frame for teacher training that is evidence-based and clearly successful, not something based only on wishful thinking that it will help.

Where the terms are better defined in the literature, they skew toward accepting uncritically definitions provided by the lens of Critical Race Theory, as in a 2020 paper published by Marie-Lyne Grenier in Health Education Journal entitled "Cultural competency and the reproduction of White supremacy in occupational therapy education." In the abstract, Grenier says cultural competency training is designed to deconstruct "ongoing oppressive narratives," and she proposes "a radical shift towards critical and structural frameworks." (emphasis mine). The "oppressive narratives" she identifies include "liberalism," "capitalism," and "multiculturalism." In the body of the paper Grenier even argues that cultural competency itself is a "new and sustaining way of reproducing institutionalised White supremacy" because it centers whites, somehow, and what is needed is a completely new system of education.

"Cultural competency" invites teachers to stereotype, albeit in ways that are ostensibly for the benefit of their students. For instance, they might assume that a black student needs special intercession because they are abstracting her to an "oppressed" member of a racial group rather than an individual student who has several factors working for or against her, including her home life, socioeconomic status, learning style, or interest in a particular subject. A teacher who disagrees with the way cultural competent training boxes in students may find herself accused of "sustaining white supremacy" by advocating for seeing students as multidimensional, unique individuals, rather than avatars for oppressed/oppressor dynamics.

What is worryingly common in most culturally competent literature is an assumption that white people act selfishly in all cases involving race and are incapable of acting with common humanity and decency, as well as an assumption that people of color are helpless to succeed in schools without white people interceding on their behalf. When whites advocate for creating environments where all students are treated equally and fairly and racial discrimination and stereotyping is harshly condemned, cultural and critical race theorists posit that they do so only to portray themselves as "heroes" and to cement their power over minorities, as Grenier says in her paper. Such conspiratorial, racist ways of imagining white students and teachers are to be condemned, for they are based on little more than bigotry and resist contrary, positive theories of interracial relationships in society that may be more successful. Like antisemitic conspiracy theories, CCT (culturally competent training) and CRT, to varying degrees, imagine a homogenized racial group is the central problem in society and is actively holding others back. It has no business in our schools.

If we are to cement cultural competency training for all of our teachers, what will our standards be for defining success? If every teacher goes through these trainings with no positive benefits for students, as most of the literature has only found mild effects historically, will there be accountability for the programs' failure to improve student success? Or will we simply double down on a conspiratorial view that teachers are committed to "white supremacy" and must undergo more training, pulling valuable funds and resources away from directly benefitting students and chasing after consultants who create ineffective training? 

I suggest that a thorough study of the existing literature shows almost no benefit with cultural competency in improving educational outcomes. Instead, these trainings create a zero-sum frame for racial relations that frays attempts from all races of teachers and students to challenge one another to succeed and grow. It has no place in Virginia education and should be outright condemned and eliminated.