The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has renamed its longstanding curriculum, Teaching Tolerance, to Learning for Justice in its ongoing far-left indoctrination of schoolchildren through a variety of educational vehicles. The SPLC’s influence in education is comprehensive, with woke themes embedded in subjects ranging from math to English Language Arts (ELA) to physical education.

On May 12, the pro-parent organization, Defending Education, posted the results of an in-depth investigation of the SPLC’s Learning for Justice Curriculum in K-12 classrooms. The scope of this destructive, divisive, Marxist/Communist instruction on impressionable schoolchildren is, for many parents, chilling indeed.

It’s common knowledge that “social justice” propaganda has been in schools for years and stems from many sources. But Defending Education’s report shows just how far-reaching the SPLC curriculum is and how many different ways its content is promoted and used “by state agencies, education institutions, teachers unions, professional associations, consultants, and education focused companies.”

Founded in 1971, ostensibly to fight for civil rights primarily in the South, the SPLC by the 1980s had become, as the parents’ rights group, Alliance Defending Freedom, described it, “a fear-mongering, money-raising machine, resulting in the resignation of its entire legal department in 1985.”

In the decades since, the SPLC has shown itself to have grown even more corrupt and ideologically extreme, which makes it worth considering whether the teachers’ unions (NEA and AFT), and certain other educational entities have been influenced by the SPLC to become more radical themselves, or have merely partnered with it as a far-left ally to help destroy traditional education. Defending Education’s research shows, for example, that the 2020 National Sex Education Standards (NSES) “were ‘further informed by . . . the [SPLC’s] Social Justice Standards.’”

The NSES document lists “Jey Ehrenhalt, MEd, School Programs Coordinator, Teaching Tolerance (A Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center)” as a contributor and reviewer of the NSES standards, which are designed to start with children in “early elementary” grades and continue through high school. The document states that “sex education should avoid cisnormative, heteronormative approaches” or, in other words, should exclusively teach the LGBT ideology, as well as contraception, abortion, “language inclusivity,” intersectionality, etc.

About Learning for Justice

In addition to its Marxist advocacy and monitoring of conservative Christian organizations, which it labels “hate groups” (e.g. Defending Education; the Alliance Defending Freedom), the SPLC’s Learning for Justice (LFJ) programs are intended to “advance anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and other far-left ideologies into school curriculums and lessons.”

The LFJ curriculum offers a range of lessons and supplementary materials “for school districts and teachers to incorporate into their teaching methods and to use in the classroom.” For example, one resource titled “Why Talk About Whiteness?” claims that “the normalization of whiteness and the impenetrable ways it protects itself are cornerstones of the way institutions function in the United States.” It holds that “recognizing white privilege is a necessary but insufficient means for confronting racism and increasing opportunities for people of color. In fact, acknowledging white privilege but taking no initiative to own it or address it can be harmful and counterproductive.”

This propaganda is beaten into the heads of schoolchildren again and again throughout the school day. Defending Education points out that the “true scope” of LFJ’s impact on the public education system is difficult to gauge, as social justice standards are not only woven into curricula but are incorporated into lesson plans, assignments, and special projects of individual teachers. A key example is the destructive social and emotional learning (SEL), which is embedded in most school curricula and conditions children to accept the progressive ideologies en masse. (See Education Reporter, September 2023.)

The end game in all this is to call students to “collective action” in order to combat the alleged wrongs they are told have infected America throughout its history.

‘Learning for Justice’ on Fox News

A recent Fox News program exposed the SPLC’s Learning for Justice curriculum in a surprisingly comprehensive and revealing way. The program, called “Outnumbered,” featured five Fox News personalities discussing various aspects of the curriculum and showing pictures of its key features as provided to Fox by Defending Education.

Legal analyst and on-air personality, Emily Compagno, led the segment by showing a visual of the curriculum’s “Anchor Standards and Domains,” and recited for the audience the four groups of standards depicted on the screen: “Identity, Diversity, Justice, and Action.”

Compagno read examples of the standards as follows: “Students will recognize unfairness on the individual level (e.g., biased speech) and injustice at the institutional or systemic level (e.g. discrimination)”; and, “Students will plan and carry out collective action against bias and injustice in the world....” She then named Alaska and Rhode Island as examples of state boards of education that have recommended their school districts adopt the standards, and she mentioned lessons and programs such as “Second Step,” that integrate and/or are based on the SPLC curriculum.

Another visual showed that as many as 150 school districts in 43 states have integrated LFJ standards and materials in K-12 classrooms across the country.

Compagno expressed shock at what she called “not only the breadth of infiltration but the depth of infiltration, curated for every age group, and really, the [LFJ] indoctrination.... This is a full-force playbook on what is, frankly, communism,” she said.

Fox co-host Todd Piro agreed, observing that this type of programming is enabling the election of Democrat Socialists like Zohran Mamdani, “that we would never have thought possible even 10 years ago ... or, in the big picture, Americans hating America.”

Piro believes it is the ability of the SPLC’s curriculum, and programs like it, “to get granular, to get into the minds [of children] at an early age and allow this stuff to fester.” He asked rhetorically, “instead of schools teaching kids the basics — math and English — and raising test scores that are plummeting, what are we seeing? We’re seeing the next generation of protesters who hate ICE, who are going after our brave men and women in uniform, who are doing things to subvert America.”

Visibly moved by the revelations, Piro vowed to research what is in his children’s school, and urged all parents to do the same, and if they find it, to “start a movement to get it removed....” “This cannot happen,” he concluded, “or we lose our country.”

The panel agreed that American institutions across the board have allowed themselves to be “blindly fed” the LFJ standards and programs without delving in, exploring, or double checking their content or validity. Panelist Kayleigh McEnany referred to the irony that children are learning about racism and injustice from a group that is “giving money to the very extremist groups” they claim to be fighting. “Everyone should have a problem with that,” she asserted.

McEnany also criticized the fact that concepts such as anti-racism, white supremacy, white privilege, gender ideology, queer theory, and more are being taught to kindergarteners. She seemed aghast that in some schools, even children in pre-K are being introduced to these concepts, when they “can’t even write their own names.” Calling out the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets, she emphasized the need for them to present “real facts” and, in general, to practice “real journalism,” particularly with regard to the SPLC.

The segment ended with the “Outnumbered” panel pointing to the inability of U.S. schoolchildren to master basic skills, and showed the audience a video clip of Education Secretary Linda McMahon stressing: “The most important thing we can do is make sure our children can read and do math. When you have only 30 percent or less of 8th graders and 4th graders that can read at proficient levels, we are failing our students and we need to change that.”

Compagno noted that while dismal test scores prove how woefully lacking students are in reading and math, “we see how they are spending their time learning to be part of the activist collective when they can’t even add.”

Fortunately, conservative organizations like Defending Education and the Alliance Defending Freedom, along with the Trump Administration, are working hard to rectify that, and curtailing the SPLC’s influence on education will help.

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