At a time when many companies and organizations are walking back their commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), with some even closing their DEI offices and/or cutting back on DEI personnel, the Biden Administration’s has doubled down. Biden’s Department of Education (DOE) funneled more than $1 billion in DEI grants over four years to approximately 300 K-12 school districts in at least 42 states, impacting nearly 6,800,000 students.

The grassroots organization, Parents Defending Education (PDE), exposed in December the data it collected after an investigation and analysis of DOE grant funding, which PDE charges has solidified “far-left ideologies in education.”

PDE’s president and founder, Nicole Neily, told the Washington Examiner: “To say that the Biden Administration spent money on DEI programs like drunken sailors is an insult to sailors.” She added that, as a result of the DOE’s fiscal irresponsibility, “the American people are now dealing with the after-effects of out-of-control inflation — and to add insult to injury, these programs completely failed to improve student outcomes ... Any federal bureaucrat who approved these grants should be frog-marched out of the Department on Day One” [of the new Trump Administration].”

PDE released its report, titled GrantED, which highlights the following DOE expenditures:

• $490 million in grant money for “DEI or race-based recruiting, training, and hiring practices.”
• More than $343 million spent on “DEI programming and trainings, discipline including restorative practices, and youth activism.”
• In excess of $169 million allocated for “DEI-based mental health/Social Emotional Learning (SEL) programs,” including mental health training programs.

GrantEd includes breakdowns of specific spending examples. In Montgomery County, NC, district schools received $21,508,841 “for a program called Teacher and Principal Effectiveness Acceleration in Montgomery (TEAM).” This program consists of monthly teacher instruction “designed to build teachers’ and school leaders’ ability to support diverse students through equitable instructional and disciplinary practices to increase student achievement and decrease incidences of inequitable disciplinary practices.”

Montgomery County’s “Diversity and Inclusion Plan” established race-based Teacher Affinity Groups (TAG) for “Black and Hispanic teachers who meet monthly to discuss mutual concerns and provide support for one another.” For many, this program sounds more divisive than “inclusive,” to use a favorite buzzword of the Left.

In another example, the Ypsilante, MI, Community Schools received grant funding totaling $15,524,948 from the Biden DOE “for its SEEK: Supporting Educator Excellence & Knowledge program,” which in sum is intended to “reduce equity gaps through effectiveness-based Human Capital Management System,” and “assess educator effectiveness using validated tools to ensure objectivity.” Another goal was to “boost equity and raise student achievement.”

The Regents of the University of California, U.C. San Diego, received funding of $4 million for a program called “The LISTEN (Listen and Inquiring with Students Through Engagement Networks) LAB, another effort guaranteed to create animus and division. This program “uses Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) strategies to tackle the question of how to best increase student engagement.

“Taking CASEL’s (the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning) ‘transformative SEL’ seriously, the LISTEN LAB aims to directly engage high school youth from low-income, racial minoritized groups in YPAR to study and innovate on increasing school engagement.” In other words, the program teaches students how to participate in far-left activism. Grantnet adds that YPAR “is often found in K-12 ethnic studies curriculums as a culminating unit where students apply information learned throughout the course in the form of community activism....”

In Missouri, the curators of the University of Missouri St. Louis campus were awarded $306,289 in DOE grants to provide 64 mental health services interns at 13 “high needs schools to provide Trauma-Informed, Antiracist Social-Emotional Learning (TIAR-SEL) to address the mental health needs of 5,617 students in the RGSD (Riverview Gardens School District).” The RGSD is a St. Louis area district with a high concentration of minority students.

GrantEd reports that an August 2024 Welcome Back Letter to RGSD parents and district personnel discloses that the program is to receive an “$800,000 grant each year for the next 3 years” to “provide counseling interns who will provide therapeutic services to scholars who fall in an at-risk category (substance abuse, SIT [Student Intervention Team], LGBTQIA+, and traumatic community events).”

DOGE to shake up?

An article covering the PDE’s GrantEd report in the Tampa Free Press predicted that with the incoming Trump Administration, “the debate over federal education funding and the future of DEI programs is likely to intensify.” The PDE report has already caught the attention of the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, who posted some of the data on X.

As President Trump indicated during his election campaign, his aim is to dismantle “woke” curricula in the education system, including DEI and CRT (Critical Race Theory), and other divisive initiatives that take the place of core academics. And as The Epoch Times recently reminded readers, “the fate of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) itself hangs in the balance—though dismantling it would require an act of Congress.”

Regardless of whether or not the DOE remains active, it will almost certainly be scaled back, as Trump has repeatedly indicated his desire to send the responsibility for education back to the states. The Epoch Times wrote that under President Trump, the DOE is likely to “cut redundant administrative costs, emphasize academic improvement, promote universal school choice nationwide, and empower state and local education administrators to provide better leadership.”

Many parents are looking forward to the new administration to make serious reform happen.

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