(LifeSiteNews) –– The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) directed more than $100 million toward left-wing Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI); “Restorative Justice”; and “Social Emotional Learning” programs during Joe Biden’s presidency, parental rights watchdog group Parents Defending Education (PDE) has found.
The group’s website details the 102 distinct grants, which went to 946 K-12 schools across 36 different states, all of which went to promoting left-wing ideas about race, justice, and sexuality.
“More often than not, when schools mention ‘improving school climate,’ they mean replacing exclusionary discipline with restorative practices and social emotional learning,” the report explains. “Exclusionary discipline removes the disruptor from the classroom, allowing the rest of the class to continue learning. Restorative practices, on the other hand, often disrupts class time for more students, as both the offender(s) and victim(s) in an incident are brought together to discuss what happened and ‘repair harm.’”
“Social emotional learning (SEL) is more insidious than it may sound,” it continues. “While SEL was originally intended to teach children skills like self-awareness, self-management, and goal setting, the definitional shift to ‘Transformative SEL’ prioritizes equity and ‘the collective’ – it has become another avenue to bring DEI into the classroom.”
Examples include a $2 million grant to the Minnesota Department of Education to “create safe learning environments where practices of anti-racism and anti-oppression are embedded” (terms that in modern left-wing parlance do not merely denote teaching racial equality, but pushing narratives that America and her institutions are systemically racist); almost $1.8 million to Penn State for “equity in violence prevention for communities historically underserved, marginalized, adversely affected by inequality, and disproportionately impacted by crime, violence, and victimization (People of Color (POC), women, people with disabilities, and LGBTQIA+ community)”; and $1 million for materials in Jurupa Valley Unified School District “on LGBTQIA+ issues aligned with SB 857 [a bill creating an ‘LGBTQ+ advisory task force’], mental/behavioral health, substance use prevention and/or conflict mediation.”
“There is clearly a divide between those who believe these programs are critical to education and those who believe fundamentals like English, math, science, and history are paramount when it comes to helping students succeed and contribute to the world around them,” PDE Vice President Caroline Moore told The College Fix.
The indoctrination of children with left-wing ideology on race, sexuality, and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools, from libraries to athletic and restroom policy to drag events to classroom materials to even socially “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas, regardless of their treatment of or rapport with gender-confused students.
More than 30 states have introduced legislation eliminating DEI programs from education, as part of a broader push against so-called “woke ideology” spearheaded by Republicans such as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Conservatives have long argued that DEI and other forms of identity politics stoke rather than cure division, and focus education toward left-wing political indoctrination at the expense of traditional learning.
In May 2024, insiders from the University of California-Los Angeles’ (UCLA’s) prestigious David Geffen School of Medicine warned that the school’s diversity fixation had led to a crisis in which more than half of students in various cohorts admitted since 2020 fail standardized tests for basic medical knowledge of subjects ranging from emergency medicine and family medicine to internal medicine and pediatrics.
The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project is currently conducting a thorough review of federal executive-branch spending, and recently cut $881 million worth of contracts at the U.S. Department of Education, including 29 DEI training grants.